Home Canning

Most people don't can fruit anymore. For the most part people had jobs, and coming home to a hot waterbath canner in the evening was not their idea of fun. Now people don't have jobs, and they're thinking cheap. The cost breakdown may be comparable to store bought cans of food, but the taste test is the proof of the pudding. OTOH, gleaning is free. Look around in your neighborhood to see if an elderly person or some lucky duck who still has a job has a tree that's overproducing, and ask them if you can pick fruit. Perhaps they'd be willing to let you have fruit in exchange for some of the jars of preserves or jam that you make. My experience has been that most people don't want to pick up more apples from the ground to mow the grass than they have to, so they'll give you the go-ahead. Be Careful of the Buds! When you pick apples you have to be very careful not to break the stubs off the branch where the apple attaches. That is where next year's fruit will come on, and if you don't twist the stem off gently, you will ruin next year's crop and make yourself persona non grata.

All that said, really canning is very satisfying and not so very difficult. Living out here in the woods with a store that closes early and has high prices has taught me how to make things from scratch. It's not hard, it's not intimidating, and with great websites like allrecipes.com out there you can check reviews to see if recipes are worth making, rather than buying a stack of cookbooks and not knowing what modifications are necessary. And modifications are always necessary! ;) A really great site for home processing is pickyourown.org, with pictures and step by step instructions for newbies or for those that haven't done it in a few years. One thing to keep in mind is that jams, butters, and chutneys make great gifts. It's fun to have guests over that rave over the product of your effort, and then off-handedly say, oh, here, have a jar! Watch their eyes light up! :)

And now I need to get back to that box of pears... Should I make pear butter with the whole thing, or can some??? Hmmmmm.

digging through the drawers

Can anyone explain to me why men dig through their neatly folded (by me) drawers for the sweatshirt they want like a dog after a groundhog?

If you see any of my family with a fabulously wrinkled t-shirt on? That's them, not me. It was laundered, folded, and placed gently in the drawer. Then they started pawing. Too many clothes? Maybe. Flylady says you should only have 7 outfits, but Flylady is not a boy in mud country.

On the Cheap

Ok, so in my last post I talked about some of the ways I save money. A lot of people do really well with coupons, but that hasn't worked for me. If you buy name brands or buy premade foods, that can work out really well for you, though, and I highly encourage it. If companies are going to give you free money, you go for it. Even Costco has coupon books now, and I have used those here and there.

Now that so many people are unemployed, we have time to learn to do some of the things our mothers or grandmothers knew, like making our own pectin using green apples, rather than paying $3 or more on a package. Here's a great website teaching just that. You would be absolutely amazed what you can do and make with a little ingenuity and an inquiring mind that asks how things work. We are so conditioned here in the US to buy everything premade and packaged, when there are so many things that we could just make out of nothing. For instance, I was checking into starting my own seeds, and found all these ads for seed starter kits and mini indoor greenhouse systems with special waterflow watsymajigs... and then I found a site from the UK advocating using newsprint to make little pots you could put directly in the garden, and layers of damp newspaper underneath the starting tray. Tada! FREE. Not 'New Low Special Offer' but free!

For a short time (very short) there was a UK interior design show on HGTV that I don't even remember the name of. One of the things they showed was how to make textured paint by using dirt from the garden (yard, here in the US). That's right. Not sanitized bags of sand at Home Depot, but good old clean dirt that you've sieved to take out the big chunks. (Unless you want big chunks.) It was like a little light bulb went off in my head! I started looking at everything I had taken for granted buying, and started asking how it was made and if I could do that. When you think that way, it's really surprising how consumer-oriented we are as a people. Look how many people pay twenty bucks for a bag of rice or seed corn to heat in the microwave for a heating pad when they could easily make it for themselves. It's just a matter of learning how to make do. Like our grandmothers did. We need to stop feeling sorry for ourselves for what we can't have, and start empowering ourselves to save our money for the things that are really important to us.

Pour Some Sugar On Me...

Not really, I just like freaking the kids out with Def Leppard! I am going to complain about sugar prices though... So fruit is starting to come on, and it's canning season, and I ran out of sugar mid-batch. I ran to the local store and a 10 pound sack of sugar was almost $7. Is this another one of those 'sin tax' things no one told me about? (Yes, we have those in WA state, pop and candy are taxed now) I was mad as heck, because frankly one of the most irritating things about living in a small town is the prices at the local grocery store being soooo much higher than they are down in the city. I usually take 2 big shopping trips a month, then buy small things or impulse items locally to try and budget my money. With 2 kids and their friends, our grocery bill can easily become astronomical, and my layoff a year ago makes getting by tougher and tougher... So when I'm trying to be frugal by putting up my own fruit for winter and I'm hit by a price increase at the market on staples, I get upset (and whiny). We don't buy a lot of premade junk food, I cook from scratch, I watch the sales fliers, I try really hard to plan ahead and my grocery bill is still astronomical. People say 'Use Coupons' and for me that is such a joke, as we don't buy any of that stuff. Especially since my food allergies condition became significantly worse.

Anyway, back to sugar: Then I started snooping around online, and lo and behold, there are issues! What issues? Well, apparently in 2009 the price of sugar doubled because the crazy weather the world is having affected the crops. My local store owner probably bought some of his sugar supply while the prices were so high. The fact is that we need to look around and think about why things are happening, instead of just what local thing happened and how mad we are about it.

A lot of times we see international tragedies on the news (or not, depending on whether the national news is still repeating something endlessly and pointlessly, like whether Angelina and Brad had another baby) and we don't think about how we are affected by things happening across the world. We are. The rise in sugar prices caused by crop failures is a small example. We have been encouraged to 'buy locally and think globally'. Oftentimes we stress the first part, but not the second. That thought pattern is obvious in the simple fact that we don't hear of many international happenings unless #1 American citizens are directly affected or #2 we look online at international news. How many times have you watched the news only to see a horrific tragedy wrapped up with the words 'And out of the 140 victims, 3 Americans died'. Like American lives are more valuable....

So I'll stop whining about the price of sugar in favor of thinking about the livelihoods and farms lost in the terrible international floods of the last year. Kind of puts it all in perspective.

No One's Perfect, Not Even You

I'm a little sad today... just heard about a couple I know separating. The really sad thing is that this marriage is barely past the honeymoon stage, and the even sadder thing is that there are kids involved who have already been through one divorce. Seems that we're all surrounded by broken homes today. I remember when I was a kid and I was the only one in my class with a single parent. When my son started school 12 years ago, he was one of the only kids whose parents were still married. Times have changed so much.

Sometimes it even reaches a level of craziness when teenagers start dating, then their parents start dating each other and the former dates become some blend of stepkids... oooo there's a strange world!

The thing that gets me is how many times I see people basically marry the same person over and over again, making the same mistakes time and again. Why not stay with the first one and cut out all the work of finding someone else only to have them turn out to have the same problems? No one's perfect, so you're not going to find the perfect man out there. Especially on the rebound.

Which leads to the second part of this. I don't care how bad your spouse was, you made some mistakes too. Own it. Until you do, you're going to make the same mistakes you 'didn't' make over and over and you're going to continue to be miserable and make everyone around you miserable and then people are going to start avoiding you because you're delusional and bitter. No one's perfect, remember? Not even you, so quit pretending. The only one you're fooling is yourself.

For the most part the thing I'm seeing is that everyone's more worried about hopping in the sack than they are in making sure that they can get along for the 23 hours a day that they're not having sex...keep in mind that if you don't get along and don't have the same principles and worldview, sooner or later you're not going to be having sex anyway. Kisses don't make it all better, talking your problems through respectfully does. Even though you all live in the same house now you still have to be as nice to each other as you were before... maybe nicer. And remember, just because you feel right doesn't mean you are right. Sometimes there is no solution to an argument, so you have to learn to agree to disagree. Be NICE. Remember, there's no I in team, and that's what a good marriage needs: Teamwork... dang... now I know I've been watching too much ESPN. I'm speaking in 'coach'...
 

Good Sjogren's Info

I've found a few good resources for information about Sjogrens, one is Sjogren's World, which offers great support for fellow sufferers. Another great place is the website for the Sjogren's Syndrome Foundation. They have published some books that I have already found to be so informative and helpful in coping with this problem.

If you have a loved one with the problem, or suspect you may have it, check these sources out to see what you can do.

Arrogance in a Lab Coat

I went to my local doctor a couple of weeks ago to catch him up on my findings from Dr. Ranheim, and because I was hurting really bad perhaps talk to him about pain management. I have had carpal tunnel issues ever since my teen years. By the time I would get done with a 13 hour day at the cherry shed I wouldn't be able to move my hands or hold a spoon, but neither could anyone else, I thought. Over the years I got 'used to' having repetitive stress injuries. I was absolutely enthralled with my medical transcription course, but by the end of my 2 year course I had to use my left hand for the mouse, and knew that I could never do it for a living. I still suffer intense pain in my neck, shoulder, elbow, and right hand when I type too much, and immediately if I have to use a mouse with my right hand. There's a point to this whining! Don't lose patience...

So here I am in the doctor's office, having paid him $100 (oops, got the bill later, the insurance will pay the majority of over $300!) to catch up on the other doctors I'm spending money on. He had an intern in to train, so the baby doctor got to watch the show too... which consisted of 'my' doctor's complete humiliation of me. I went in and told him that in going to a different allergist and having complete blood tests I'd found that I need more doctors than an environmental allergist. I need a recommendation for a rheumatologist from him, and right now more immediately I really needed some muscle relaxants for the spasms in my neck and shoulder, I had overdone and hurt myself and couldn't sleep at night.

He looked at me like I was a drug-seeking addict, and immediately objected that he didn't think I have RA.

When I described my pain to him he proceeded to tell me that if I had RA, which he didn't think I did, I wouldn't have muscle pain, just pain in my joints, because pain in my muscles would mean that I have fibromyalgia. (which is not what my research told me) I looked him right in the eye at this point, since he was standing so close that we were face to face (For once I was liking sitting up on that table, it put me at eye level!), and told him 'You diagnosed me with fibro 5 years ago, remember?' He harrumphed and told me he wanted an xray. I said fine.

Twenty minutes or more later he came back in the room telling me that I have severe, um, moderately severe arthritic changes to my neck, but he wanted to see lab work. I signed papers to get them sent over, and thankfully he went ahead and prescribed the muscle relaxants. I slept that night.

Two weeks later I got a call from the office telling me that 'Doctor looked at my paperwork and said I can see a rheumatologist now'.  Oh thank you, Doctor... And can someone tell me why people who work in doctor's offices habitually drop 'The' when speaking of 'the doctor'. It's like their doctor is the only one. Like God. Hmmmm.... maybe I'm onto something here....

What I don't understand is why a problem has to be either/or with doctors, as if you can't have carpal tunnel and an elbow problem or pinched nerve from the neck at the same time. It's like they try to catch you in a wrong answer, rather than figure out why your wrist hurts but the wrong fingers are numb... to be honest, the intern explained to me the anatomy of the problem with my elbow better than my GP, who I swear won't be my GP anymore. Someone tell me how you find a doctor that listens and is competent?