I'm blind!!!!

Why are some onions so much more painful to chop than others? Half of my right eye is still glued shut from tear goop and I'm afraid to touch it to clear anything up because I was chopping the hottest jalepenos I've ever owned this evening.

I picked up my last bushel of tomatoes this afternoon. At first I thought that the Amish farmer I'd bought the tomatoes from had kind of stiffed me. I didn't really hold it against him because, well, it's the middle of September and I kind of figured he'd given me every "canning grade" tomato he had left. He'd been so sweet about carrying the tomatoes to my truck (this is a farmer's market. I could have been parked blocks away. I wasn't. I was illegally parked in the pastor's parking space just a few feet away but that's another story.) that I didn't begrudge him the quarter bushel I thought was missing. When I went to start dividing up the two boxes of tomatoes into "salsa" and "soup" I realized that the box I thought said "1/2 bushel" really said "1 1/9 bushel" and the smaller box was the 1/2 bushel. In actual fact, he'd given me a little MORE than a bushel of tomatoes. So here we are at 11pm and half of them are simmering in the horrifically full 12 qt pot. I'm hoping I'm done by 1 am. I actually scalded the tomatoes around 5 pm, but then the youngin's all started clammoring to be fed. Max's friend was over, so put the scalded tomatoes in the sink and made angel hair pasta with meat sauce. That went over well. After that, Max and Brian headed over to Brian's house for a bit and I went back to working on the salsa. I had borrowed green peppers from Jill because the ones I'd bought for the salsa appear to have been eaten. But just as I was building up steam again, I realized that we were out of "goodnights" and we really needed some of those.

(Related to that, I was talking to Jill's husband just a bit later as I was getting the boys ready to go out the door and I said that I was going to the store for "Goodnight." He said, "I have one of those you can borrow." Now, you have to understand, Doug makes little jokes ALL the time. I thought he was doing his typical play on words thing and I laughed, then said we'd stop by in a bit to borrow some gardening tools. Well, when I *did* stop by for the gardening tools I find out that he was completely serious! I was talking to Jill and telling her that I was happy that they finally have "store brand" Goodnights because they're, of course, much cheaper. Turns out her younger daughter is still using them. So I really could have borrowed a night diaper from them, LOL.)

So anyway, I packed up the boys, swung by Brian's house to get Max, brokered a sleepover for NEXT Friday, headed out to the grocery store, bought more green peppers, drove to Jill's house, borrowed garden tools, headed home and spent two more hours putting together the stuff for salsa.

After all that? I think it has too much chili powder. I'm bummed :( That's a lot of salsa for too much chili powder. Lesson learned -- when making big, big pot of salsa, add spices slowly, taste often. Oh well, it's edible. It'll be great with beans.