canning apples, and a pig in my yard!

I have not been writing a whole lot in the last little while because the apple trees in my backyard, and the apples they have produced, demand attention. I have been canning apples with all my might. This year, I have mostly been making apple butter and apple cider - it makes more sense to can the stuff we use more frequently. I figured out a quick cheat for making cider. All the recipes I've found online talk about making applesauce and then straining it seventeen billion times! That gets rather tedious. i decided to try making applesauce, then watering it down significantly and boiling it to get the apple flavor all throughout. I then add the sugar and spices and can it. It works pretty well, and it still tastes just as good to me. Everything I have been looking at suggests a nasty winter for our area - both berry brambles and apple trees producing really well, lots of fog in the morning in august, and my old, arthritic knee grousing frequently - more so than usual. So I am imagining myself curled up a lot this winter with a mug of hot apple cider while the wood stove crackles away, giving the house a slight hint of wood smoke aroma. I am being naughty in not keeping up a good writing schedule right now. Part of it is that I have been called in to substitute teach a lot in August. (Strange to be called in that early in the school year!) Part of it also stems from being afraid that I won't be able to keep up the pace and quality of what I have been writing. I am getting too perfectionistic and intimidating myself out of writing. I need to stop it - to slap myself on the wrist and allow myself to write whatever I write, then go back and fix it if it needs fixing, and if it doesn't, enjoy what I have been able to create. It amazes me how many times I have to remind myself not to get so caught up in writing perfectly that I am afraid to write. All I can do is keep on going back to that when I get writer's block. In other random occurrences, I went to take my dog out in the yard to do his business, and found a black pig walking around in the front yard! The postman was coming by at that time, and I asked him if he knew who she belonged to, and he said that she lived down the road. I tried driving down to the house he indicated, but no one answered the door. Since she was hanging around, and i had apple cores from working on canning apples, I gave her some to munch on, and after she finished those, she went on her merry way. That's not something you get to do every day!