Hooray! Andy and I are spending the weekend in fancy-pants Boston!
(We have a house-sitter, so please don't get any funny ideas. Not like we have anything worth stealing, but, like, don't try to break into my house and scare the sitter or anything.)
My best friend lives there, and I've tried to visit every year. This is the first time Andy has gone with me, so I'm excited to go visit (and it was one of my goals, so that doesn't hurt!). I've always loved Boston, and even wanted to go to grad school there slash move there forever, so it will be cool to pretend for a few days that that dream worked out, right?
Posting will be light (read: probably nonexistent) while we're gone, so you'll have to comfort yourself by reading me entire archives or something. You should. I do it once in a while, because I have a terrible memory and I often am like, "Oh, right! I did write that!"
Do you love Boston too? What is your favorite, shouldn't-miss thing for me to check out while I'm there?
Friday, September 30, 2011
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Canning!
I'm spending my evening making grape jelly. Again.
When my parents moved a few years ago, they bought a house that has a pear tree, a fig stand (I'm going with stand because I don't know what it's really called; it's not a tree though), and four grape arbors. The people who had lived in the house made their own wine, and had a whole room set up for it in the basement, with a stomping tub (it was one of those blue kiddy wading pools, no joke), strainers, big five-gallon carboys to ferment the juice, and even a corking machine. It was quite the set-up.
My parents are not interested in learning to make their own wine. (They are also not interested in raising chickens, even though part of the shed on their property was converted to a chicken coop and even though I offered to buy the chickens and take any extra eggs off their hands. Selfish.) They have a friend who makes wine, so every year he has come over to collect a bunch of bushels of grapes, which he returns several months later as bottles of wine. This is as invested in the wine-making process as my folks want to get. The grapes they grow are not ideal for snacking - the nearest guess lately is that they're Catawba grapes - so we decided to make jelly out of some of them!
Yesterday I went over and we picked a laundry basket full of grapes. It had rained all afternoon, so we took advantage of a dry few minutes to get as much picked as we could. Unfortunately, most of the grapes grew above my head and the vines and leaves were still full of water from the rain, so I was thoroughly damp even BEFORE it started to rain again. Which it did. A lot. But we were over half done, so we just kept going and finished picking clean the entire arbor.
Once the grapes were picked, we had to rinse and de-stem them. This took approximately forever and resulted in very pruny fingers and gunk under every single one of my fingernails. Then we took the de-stemmed grapes and smashed them with a potato masher. We smashed them in colanders set into big bowls, and every once in a while we'd empty the bowl into a container with the rest of the juice. With enthusiastic smashing, we got two full gallons of juice. We also dumped the smashed skins and innards into cheesecloth and hung the cheesecloth over the bowls, to rest overnight, so we'll get some extra juice that way.
Today, we'll start cooking the juice with pectin and sugar until it starts to set. Then we'll funnel it into jars and can them in boiling water. Apparently if you try to make a giant batch of jelly it can refuse to set properly, so we'll be making a bunch of smaller batches instead. We expect to get somewhere between one and two dozen pints of jelly made tonight. (And we only cleared one arbor, so we could do this a few more times. None of us are particularly keen on grape jelly, but we don't know what the hell else to do with these grapes.)
This was a really long post about making grape jelly. Sorry about that. More exciting stuff next time.
Hey! I have an exciting idea! If you want a jar of grape jelly, leave a comment. I'll pick one at random and one of you lucky four readers is getting a jar. (Nikki, you're getting some for Christmas anyway, so you can comment but you're disqualified from the winning.)
 |
| From grapes. Grapes that look like this. |
My parents are not interested in learning to make their own wine. (They are also not interested in raising chickens, even though part of the shed on their property was converted to a chicken coop and even though I offered to buy the chickens and take any extra eggs off their hands. Selfish.) They have a friend who makes wine, so every year he has come over to collect a bunch of bushels of grapes, which he returns several months later as bottles of wine. This is as invested in the wine-making process as my folks want to get. The grapes they grow are not ideal for snacking - the nearest guess lately is that they're Catawba grapes - so we decided to make jelly out of some of them!
Yesterday I went over and we picked a laundry basket full of grapes. It had rained all afternoon, so we took advantage of a dry few minutes to get as much picked as we could. Unfortunately, most of the grapes grew above my head and the vines and leaves were still full of water from the rain, so I was thoroughly damp even BEFORE it started to rain again. Which it did. A lot. But we were over half done, so we just kept going and finished picking clean the entire arbor.
Once the grapes were picked, we had to rinse and de-stem them. This took approximately forever and resulted in very pruny fingers and gunk under every single one of my fingernails. Then we took the de-stemmed grapes and smashed them with a potato masher. We smashed them in colanders set into big bowls, and every once in a while we'd empty the bowl into a container with the rest of the juice. With enthusiastic smashing, we got two full gallons of juice. We also dumped the smashed skins and innards into cheesecloth and hung the cheesecloth over the bowls, to rest overnight, so we'll get some extra juice that way.
Today, we'll start cooking the juice with pectin and sugar until it starts to set. Then we'll funnel it into jars and can them in boiling water. Apparently if you try to make a giant batch of jelly it can refuse to set properly, so we'll be making a bunch of smaller batches instead. We expect to get somewhere between one and two dozen pints of jelly made tonight. (And we only cleared one arbor, so we could do this a few more times. None of us are particularly keen on grape jelly, but we don't know what the hell else to do with these grapes.)
This was a really long post about making grape jelly. Sorry about that. More exciting stuff next time.
Hey! I have an exciting idea! If you want a jar of grape jelly, leave a comment. I'll pick one at random and one of you lucky four readers is getting a jar. (Nikki, you're getting some for Christmas anyway, so you can comment but you're disqualified from the winning.)
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Fostering: we're getting closer!
Last night was the last of our ten foster classes! Hooray!
We have already had two home visits and have our final one scheduled for about two weeks from now, which will give us time to do all the little last-minute stuff, like put a smoke detector downstairs and return a borrowed kerosene heater to my parents (we can't have it in the house). And before we left class last night, Andy took a minute to explain to our caseworker exactly what our fireplace is and asked if we really needed a certificate of non-use (since we still don't know what that is) if it isn't actually any more capable of burning things than a candle is. She said we don't, so I'm really relieved that I don't have to have the fire department come inspect what is essentially a wooden box.
Our worker told us that we're the only ones in her group of our class (so about ten people) who have all of our stuff in order. She was still waiting on the results of our physicals, so I called the doctor's office today to get the forms faxed, since I don't trust that they would actually mail them right away. So after our home inspection, she should have everything she needs to complete her part of our homestudy, which will then go to her supervisor for review and final approval, and then we'll be certified!
She also told us last night that she had a group of people who were certified in April and May but that none of them have had a placement yet, so that is a little bit of a relief. We throw a seriously awesome Halloween party every year but were a little scared to schedule it this year, because in our very first information session, the foster dude told us how he'd gotten a placement on his very first day of being certified. I guess it's nice to know we're more likely to have some breathing room.
It's pretty cool to be almost done with the certification process, though.
What questions do you dudes have? Anything you want to know about the process that I haven't said?
We have already had two home visits and have our final one scheduled for about two weeks from now, which will give us time to do all the little last-minute stuff, like put a smoke detector downstairs and return a borrowed kerosene heater to my parents (we can't have it in the house). And before we left class last night, Andy took a minute to explain to our caseworker exactly what our fireplace is and asked if we really needed a certificate of non-use (since we still don't know what that is) if it isn't actually any more capable of burning things than a candle is. She said we don't, so I'm really relieved that I don't have to have the fire department come inspect what is essentially a wooden box.
Our worker told us that we're the only ones in her group of our class (so about ten people) who have all of our stuff in order. She was still waiting on the results of our physicals, so I called the doctor's office today to get the forms faxed, since I don't trust that they would actually mail them right away. So after our home inspection, she should have everything she needs to complete her part of our homestudy, which will then go to her supervisor for review and final approval, and then we'll be certified!
She also told us last night that she had a group of people who were certified in April and May but that none of them have had a placement yet, so that is a little bit of a relief. We throw a seriously awesome Halloween party every year but were a little scared to schedule it this year, because in our very first information session, the foster dude told us how he'd gotten a placement on his very first day of being certified. I guess it's nice to know we're more likely to have some breathing room.
It's pretty cool to be almost done with the certification process, though.
What questions do you dudes have? Anything you want to know about the process that I haven't said?
Monday, September 26, 2011
Scars
Inspired by this awesome post by Lady Smaggle (which reminded me of that scene with the scar description from the 1995 Olsen Twin classic It Takes Two, I'm not ashamed), here's an inventory of my scars, starting from the bottom and working up:
- I have a small white scar on my right ankle that I assume is from nicking myself shaving. I don't heal quickly, so small scrapes sometimes leave permanent scars. I can never tell if a scratch will stay on me forever.
- A shiny, almost-gone-now patch on my right knee from a biking incident when I was 16. I was riding my bike home from karate class with my brother (not kidding) when a guy started backing out of his driveway and almost hit me. I wiped out and shredded my knee pretty nicely. The guy stopped his (red sporty) car, rolled down his window, and asked if I was okay. My "Yeah, totally cool, I don't mind the blood dripping into my sock!" somehow must have sounded sincere instead of the sarcastic I meant, so he drove away, leaving me to bike another mile home with gravel in my knee. That was cool.
- I have a scar on the bottom of my belly button from a piercing that grew out. I got said belly button pierced when I was 16 (the legal age for piercings in New York) with a dude-friend, who got his done too, and who is now covered in tattoos and further piercings. When I switched from the barbell it was pierced with to a CBR, for some reason it started to scar nicely and eventually grew out. Oh, and my mom discovered the piercing at a family party shortly before it grew out, causing a nice two-week grounding right before the scarring. Nice.
- A small thin jagged-looking scar on my right index finger from scraping it on the gas-tank door on my old car when filling up my car in February a few years ago. No idea why that scratch left a scar.
- A puffy, inch-long scar on my right bicep from a freak accident in college. I was visiting friends in Pittsburgh and we were walking to get lunch. We were walking through a vacant lot and a friend was slashing at them with a pocket knife, for some reason. Said knife was new and very sharp but had no grip, and went flying out of my friend's hand and flew threw the air, past three other people, and sliced my arm open. I probably should have gotten a few stitches, but instead we got pizza. It healed sort of open and was red, then pink, and is now the color of the surrounding skin, which is to say very pale. I considered having it treated before my wedding, but decided against it because I like the scar more than I like smearing chemicals on my skin.
- A very thin white scar just above the left corner of my mouth from when I was a kid. It was Halloween, and I was going trick-or-treating as an old woman. I tripped on my very long dress and went face-first into a bookcase, and cut just above my lip. I had to go trick-or-treating with a bandage on my face, which totally ruined the look. Halloween is right before my birthday, though, so my parents let me open a birthday present early. I swear to you I am not making this up: it was two Troll dolls and a fanny pack with special elastic to hold them. I happily wore the fanny pack (but was pissed about the Band-Aid?), and managed to drop one of the Troll dolls in the dark and remember going back out with my dad and a flashlight to search for it.
- Both of my ears have scar tissue from third piercings that I let close up. I was planning to move my orbital piercings that I wore through my bottom two holes up a notch, but I took them out when I was student teaching and never put them back in.
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Awesome Saturday!
So far today:
- Slept in later than I have in three weeks. (I still only made it till nine, which is what happens when you have to get up early every single morning for three weeks.)
- Made pumpkin pancakes and bacon for breakfast.
- Cleaned the kitchen. (This is a good thing, as the kitchen was a mess and now it isn't and that makes me happy.)
- Returned beer bottles (in New York, you pay a 5¢ deposit on beer and soda containers) and did our big quarterly Sam's Club grocery shopping.
- Did the teeniest bit of gardening.
- Discovered that Pancakes can jump our fence when we discovered her two backyards over.
- Made applesauce with our lovely CSA apples. I ended up canning three more pints, with about 3/4 of another in the fridge.
- Had friends drop by and had an impromptu dinner party! They brought over a package of shrimp, so we wrapped some of them in bacon and made the rest into shrimp scampi. It was delicious.
It has been so great to not have anything we NEEDED to get done. We've gotten a lot done anyway, but it still feels restful. In a little while, we're going to use some free movie passes to go see Killer Elite (Jason Statham, Clive Owen, and Robert DeNiro? Yes, please!).
What awesome things have you gotten up to on this delightful Saturday?
- Slept in later than I have in three weeks. (I still only made it till nine, which is what happens when you have to get up early every single morning for three weeks.)
- Made pumpkin pancakes and bacon for breakfast.
- Cleaned the kitchen. (This is a good thing, as the kitchen was a mess and now it isn't and that makes me happy.)
- Returned beer bottles (in New York, you pay a 5¢ deposit on beer and soda containers) and did our big quarterly Sam's Club grocery shopping.
- Did the teeniest bit of gardening.
- Discovered that Pancakes can jump our fence when we discovered her two backyards over.
- Made applesauce with our lovely CSA apples. I ended up canning three more pints, with about 3/4 of another in the fridge.
- Had friends drop by and had an impromptu dinner party! They brought over a package of shrimp, so we wrapped some of them in bacon and made the rest into shrimp scampi. It was delicious.
It has been so great to not have anything we NEEDED to get done. We've gotten a lot done anyway, but it still feels restful. In a little while, we're going to use some free movie passes to go see Killer Elite (Jason Statham, Clive Owen, and Robert DeNiro? Yes, please!).
What awesome things have you gotten up to on this delightful Saturday?
Friday, September 23, 2011
Today in irritating vs. awesome
Irritating: I went to bed really late (got home after midnight), turned off my alarm in my sleep, and woke up ten minutes before I was supposed to leave for work.
Awesome: We were out so late to go to a really awesome concert for free at the same venue where we got married.
Irritating: My coworkers are bizarre human beings who don't understand that some conversations might be better had in a conference room or anywhere other than loudly at the cubicle near mine.
Awesome: Um, I'm now up-to-date on my coworker's daughter's cold?
Irritating: I went back to the doctor's to get my TB test checked, and discovered that the stupid nurse practitioner (who I really didn't like - among other things, she totally pooh-poohed the two issues I wanted to discuss, and she asked me which side the infertility was on, as she assumed foster care = infertile, which fills me with a blinding rage, as she is a fucking medical professional) had put on my form that I was taking an anti-dizziness medication I was prescribed TWO YEARS AGO with NO REFILLS when I was going off a different medication. Even though she asked me at my appointment if I was still taking it, and I pointed out that there hadn't been any refills TWO YEARS AGO, so no, I had been off of it for, oh, about two years.
Awesome: Not so much awesome as just more work, but that is the kick I needed to find a GP closer to where I live now.
Irritating: As a result of not getting enough sleep, my almost-cold is rearing its head and I have a sinus headache.
Awesome: I'm fighting it by watching my first-ever episode of Toddlers and Tiaras and knitting, then we're going to dinner with my sister-in-law, her sister, and her sister's husband!
Have you ever had to break up with a doctor's office? Have you ever seen this trainwreck of a show?
Awesome: We were out so late to go to a really awesome concert for free at the same venue where we got married.
Irritating: My coworkers are bizarre human beings who don't understand that some conversations might be better had in a conference room or anywhere other than loudly at the cubicle near mine.
Awesome: Um, I'm now up-to-date on my coworker's daughter's cold?
Irritating: I went back to the doctor's to get my TB test checked, and discovered that the stupid nurse practitioner (who I really didn't like - among other things, she totally pooh-poohed the two issues I wanted to discuss, and she asked me which side the infertility was on, as she assumed foster care = infertile, which fills me with a blinding rage, as she is a fucking medical professional) had put on my form that I was taking an anti-dizziness medication I was prescribed TWO YEARS AGO with NO REFILLS when I was going off a different medication. Even though she asked me at my appointment if I was still taking it, and I pointed out that there hadn't been any refills TWO YEARS AGO, so no, I had been off of it for, oh, about two years.
Awesome: Not so much awesome as just more work, but that is the kick I needed to find a GP closer to where I live now.
Irritating: As a result of not getting enough sleep, my almost-cold is rearing its head and I have a sinus headache.
Awesome: I'm fighting it by watching my first-ever episode of Toddlers and Tiaras and knitting, then we're going to dinner with my sister-in-law, her sister, and her sister's husband!
Have you ever had to break up with a doctor's office? Have you ever seen this trainwreck of a show?
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Delightful text conversation
So I have a friend who is running in this and I have a brother who was in the Navy and I have a brother-in-law who's in the Air Force. I figured I could combine all these things and have my brother-type-people set her up some sort of training affair, which led to this text exchange:
Me: Hi, Assface!* I have a friend who’s training for a 5k/obstacle course that involves zombies, and I suggested that you could maybe make her a practice boot-camp style course in her yard. Thoughts?
Brother: I don’t know what that means.
Me: You are into fitness, and therefore I want you to set up an obstacle course that mimics boot camp for a friend who is training for a crazy event that involves running 5k, obstacles, and zombies. I don’t know how much more clear I can be.
Brother: a) What? 2) are you under the assumption that boot camp is a giant jungle gym? D) give me more information on zombie 5k and kinds of obstacles.**
Me: A. You're kind of slow today. Must be The Texas*** getting to you. 2. Yes. That's how it looks in "In the Army Now."**** D. Runforyourlives.com, look at the gallery. I'm trying to talk our sister into doing the Maryland one.
*My siblings and I pretty much called each other Assface for three years straight. My mom, obviously, disapproves, which is why we now mostly just call each other "Face" in her presence. It's shorthand.
**The a/2/d setup is from Home Alone, and therefore my brother gets extra points.
***He's on a business trip. Don't murder him, because then who will build the obstacle course?
****1. I know it should be in italics, but I don't think my phone knows how to do that. 2. Pauly Shore's third best movie?*****
*****Son-in-Law and Encino Man, duh.
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