back to school and back to work

J has gone back to work with the new school year - a year padded up with extra days in case of snow. That means two things - I am going through sweetheart withdrawal right now, and I have a lot more time on my hands. I have been good and tried to focus my energies on getting myself back into gear. I am going back to the goal of at least one thousand words a day on the novel. Right now my word count on the rewrite of the novel is a couple hundred words shy of ten thousand, so I think I get to claim to be making some progress with it. J and I have been in the back yard examining the apple trees some, and I think they are going to follow the example of the black raspberry brambles and produce a lot this year. I have already talked to a few people about borrowing crock pots so I can make lots of apple butter. That seems to be what J likes best of the things I can make out of the apples, and we both tend to use it the most. I will can some apples to make pie out of later, but I think we will focus mostly on making apple butter, and I'll save the scraps to make apple cider vinegar if the batches i have in the works hiding in the back of my cabinets turn out well. It takes several months to make apple cider vinegar, but since I have the ingredients and space on hand, and I know we will use it, why not? J has made the proposition that I go back to using loaf pans with the bread I have been making instead of doing it french bread style. He said it was because the bread rises well enough that it falls a little bit and ends up being very short, wide bread. I will try that the next time I make bread. First we need to get through the bread I have made up. I am in a mood to cook a lot right now, but I need to be good and wait until we have eaten the food we have made up already. Maybe I will go after some of the canned apricots we have on hand and turn them into jam. That might quell the craving to cook something, right?