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!

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?

I am reestablishing the fact that I am really not as good about writing in the summertime. There is lots of other stuff to do, and it is so hard to convince myself to write. Another of my creative venues is currently out of reach, but if life goes according to plan, it will be possible again later today. We have been redoing the kitchen enough to yank the ancient double oven and the el cheapo countertop range out, and we should be able to pick up the new full-sized oven today. Our friend got everything ready with the wiring yesterday, and another friend is going to help me pick up the new oven later on today. I am excited about that since baking is one of my favorite creative outlets - you get instant gratification in the form of yumminess! The old oven's broil feature hadn't worked in a while, so I haven't been able to make things like pita bread and bagels. I am plotting to do that soon after the new oven is installed. I think I might even be able to use the full-sized cookie sheets for something other than letting english muffins rise! That is pretty exciting. I think I have been dubbed a good dog trainer now. My brother-in-law inherited a puppy from his girlfriend who can't be more than a couple of months old, and he requested that I take him into my home and house train him. The tiny thing is sitting on my lap as I type, twitching in a way that makes me suspect he is having an exciting dream. This puppy is still getting used to my dog, A. A is an old fellow - at least fifteen years old, maybe more. They will be about the same size when the puppy is full grown, from what I have read. He has been good so far about doing his business outside. I have been taking him out frequently and praising the heck out of him when he is successful. (It is hard to tell when he is peeing because of how short he is! I have to hunch over.) School starts in a couple of weeks for my husband. It is so early because this school system tends to be snow day happy. I think I have given myself permission to be a bum about writing until school starts - this is my summer vacation. I don't know if that is me being too lazy or allowing excuses to keep me from writing. It probably is. I don't think writing today would work very well, though. I do have a stove to go get at some point today, and then I know I will want to play with it. I will write soon, and I will relish it.

Well, I've done something crazy with the novel I have been writing. I set it all aside and decided I needed to rework it. I sat down with J and went back through what we had originally talked about for the plot and story line, and I realized that with my funky memory, I managed to mixed things up and get myself very much on a tangent. So I am doing a literary u-turn now and getting things straight again. I went through and wrote down the main points of the story in an outline format, and I still have the notes from before to help keep me straight too. But now I have about five thousand words written instead of sixty thousand. I feel good about it, though. This will help me keep the story straight better, and if nothing else, when I was writing the flub/first draft, I did succeed in getting to know the characters better. I am trying to get at least a thousand words a day written during the week, so about five thousand words per week. I have been running around and doing errands a lot today, so I have procrastinated the writing. Maybe I am blogging to help motivate myself to write - self-guilt-trip! At any rate, it is coming along, even with a big old u-turn as a part of the process.

almost done with the read-through

I am almost done with the read-through I've been doing of the novel to try to get back in my head where I was heading with things. It has helped a lot - I've been writing a summary as I went along to make sure I don't get lost again, and I have also been writing notes about plot themes and ideas I want to use later. It has been a good time to do it because I have been able to bring the hard copy with me to work when I get called in to sub at the school. The next step will be to take all the notes I've scribbled all over the hard copy and make those changes on the digital copy. Then I think I might actually be ready to go forward with the plot again. That will be both an exhilarating and a frightening experience. It is hard to switch from writer to editor and back again; they are two completely different modes of thought. I have been pursuing some other creative modes, or at least trying to. I have been knitting a lot - trying to make a bunch of stuff to sell at summer fairs and the like. I have also been trying to figure out a sewing pattern for cell phone holsters made out of recycled denim so i can make a bunch of those to sell as well. J succeeded in getting the tiller we inherited working, so now it is just a matter of figuring out where we want to put the garden exactly, and waiting for the rain to stop enough that we can till and prepare the yard to be turned into a garden. I thinned out the cabbage sprouts we have the other day, and most of them seem to be recovering well. J said they are fairly hardy plants, which is good, since I am working with them! I have a long history of not doing well in caring for plants. we shall see, I guess. I am doing a lot of creativity in the kitchen today - cooking up a chicken and dividing its meat among a few dishes to be frozen and served later. I am also making some bread and some english muffins. I will have a lot of dishes to wash today, I think. That is okay. Cooking is fun for me - one of the few times you can still make a big old mess without getting fussed at too much, and when I wash the dishes afterwards, I get to play with bubbles in the sink! It is the small stuff in life that is most enjoyable, right?

I have been plugging away at going over the draft of the novel thus far in a hard copy. I don't know if it is the warmer weather, or that I have gotten to a certain point where I feel the need to review, or a combination of those sorts of things, but going back through what I have so far is helping me get a better picture of where I am going with this project. I think it might be partly that I am trying to get what I have so far in long-term memory better. Whatever it is, I feel like I am actually making some progress now instead of just beating my head against the wall. As far as creativity for the outdoors goes, we have a lot of sprouts starting to come up. They are still in the sun porch, being protected from weather, and also waiting until the garden plot outside is ready. J got the tiller to start yesterday after slaving away at it for several evenings. I am proud of him for getting that figured out. I know I don't have nearly the capacity he does to look at things and how they are supposed to work and be able to figure out how to fix them. So far the sprouts I have coming up are peppers, cabbage, sunflowers, eggplant, and some melons. I think we are going to buy tomatoes that are already started because those are supposed to be really hard to start from seed. I have been knitting some - mostly pot scrubbers with the hope of selling them at different events over the summer. I am thinking about trying to figure out how to make a cell phone holder out of denim that has a loop so it can button onto a belt, belt loop, or purse strap. I am still working that out in my mind. We'll see what I can come up with.

I haven't posted in a while, mostly because it is prime substitute teacher season, and I have been busy. I have gotten some work done despite the subbing, though, since I decided to go with a hard copy of the novel draft - one that I can bring around with me (and bang against my head if necessary)! I have felt more like I know where I am going again after reading through some of it. As of today, I have gotten done reading through about eighty single-spaced pages of it so far, and written notes and ideas on there, as well as writing a summary on notebook paper for me to refer to as I go along, to make sure I don't get the story line too mixed up in my head. It is coming along better; even though I am not adding new stuff to the word count each day, I do feel like I am making progress again. That is reassuring. We are almost to the end of the school year now, so J will be home more before too long. He is still trying to convince the inherited tiller to work; his current suspicion is that it might have too much engine oil in it, and that is why the engine won't start. In the meantime, our seedlings are happily hanging out in small pots in the sun porch. I have a lot of cabbage sprouts, some sunflowers, lots of peppers, and melons and eggplant are also starting to sprout. It is fun to watch them grow and think I had a small part in their growth. Most of what I have been knitting these days is small pot scrubbers. I am hooked on using them instead of sponges because they are machine washable. After washing something like a greasy frying pan, it feels good to just stick it in the washing machine instead of trying to get it decent again with dish soap and running water. I am told that doing it this way doesn't give bacteria nearly the chance to grow, either. I am thinking about trying to sell some at craft fairs and summer events as the season goes on. I have a friend who does other handmade stuff to sell at those sorts of events, and he is willing to sell some stuff for me. I am also thinking about making some sort of cell phone holder out of recycled denim that can be buttoned to a purse strap or a belt loop, but that idea is still very much in the works. we'll see if I can figure it out.