Slow Blink

Slow blink is what Chris used to call the funny look Max would get on his face right before he passed out cold. His eyelids would go doooooooown and then uuuuuuuuuuup and then dooooooooown. zzzzzzzz

I have slow blink.

But for a darn good reason! After I stayed up too late doing salsa, I got up at 8am. I managed to find Max a ride to his football game so I wouldn't have to lose five hours going -- only to get to watch none of it because of the need to keep the minions alive. We got him dressed and he headed off to his game where he . . . didn't play at all. But he was expecting that this time and since he gets to play every play of the whole game during the grey games, he didn't care.

While he was gone I attacked the second half of that bushel of tomatoes. It took two hours to get everything ready but I finally had tomato soup cooking. Then I sat down and read six pages in the Book of Mormon. I'm trying to do the Book of Mormon challenge and get the whole thing read again before the end of the year. In order to pull that off at this point, I need to pretty much read six pages a day. Oy. So anyway, I did. Then I looked up cherry tree pruning on the Penn State extension website. It was alarming what they wanted me to do to my poor defenseless toddler cherry trees, but I could see the purpose, so I headed out to the yard and pruned the cherry trees, the American Holly tree (so the neighbor can drive into his own driveway without paint damage), the huge magnolia bush, and the lilac tree. I discovered that there are carpenter ants living in the lilac tree and making a somewhat successful attempt at killing it. oh dear to that. I trimmed our solitary hedge for what is probably the first time this summer. But it looks great now. I pulled a bunch of weeds.

And then the twins were sick of keeping me company outside so they went back inside. That put an end to my yardwork. About this time Max came home so I offered to pay him and his friend to take all the limbs and go put them in a pile by the compost. They happily did so and I happily paid up.

Then I spent another two hours smooshing all those cooked veggies first through my collander and then through a fine-screen seive. The end result was great though. I got 19 pints of fantastic tomato soup. I added some half and half to the leftovers and Milo, Ben, and I pigged out on that for dinner.

Around this point it was 7:30 and I had to decide what to do with the time left to me. I picked jam because if I didn't, I'd have to admit I let a billion pounds of strawberries go bad. Luckily Max agreed to help me by smooshing the strawberries. Strawberry jam is REALLY easy to make, even if you do keep messing with the recipe by adding some orange juice concentrate and some blackberries and some raspberries (came out great). I used up every last canning lid including some vintage ones that Jill found in an (unopened) box in her basement. They worked fine.

So there! Now our church clothes are laid out on the ironing board and I just heard the last jam jar pop so it's off to bed for me. Tomorrow is church, a swim team kick-off meeting, and some paying work. Oh yeah, and more work on the living room. I did actually make great progress on that today, too. But it needed a LOT of work.