I feel like I need to be treading very lightly these days -- leaving a soft footprint on the earth and all that ecologically-minded stuff, and, more importantly, avoiding any more accidents or breakages that end up costing me money or causing pain and suffering. Here's how things stand this week:
Replaced: 21-year-old garbage disposal
Recovering: Sadie (from her urinary tract infection)
Bruised: The instep and ankle of my left foot (tripped on tomato support at the Food Bank Farm -- don't ask)
Broken: The ancillary speaker of my Proton stereo clock radio
Awaiting repair or replacement: Dripping kitchen faucet
Acting up: Both toilets are occasionally running
At this rate, I could end up with a home equity loan to cover all these plumbing repairs. In the meantime, I'll flush less frequently and try to pick up my feet when I walk.
Staying indoors yesterday to freeze more tomatoes would have been just too boring and a waste of a beautiful autumn day. Blue sky, crisp air and nice light made for good photo ops. ShadowbrookShutterbug and I drove up Rte. 202 from South Hadley, took lots of pix in Granby, and then cut over to Rte. 116 to see the goats, pigs, sheep and chickens at the Hampshire College Farm Center. On the way to Hampshire, I was yammering something about how, given my choice of squirmy creatures to photograph, I preferred critters to kids. Now I'm not so sure about that. At least you can suggest to kids that they hold still or do that [whatever they just did] again. Critters don't pay a bit of attention to anything you say. But you don't have to ask their parents for permission to take their pix, and you can post the pix online without anyone thinking you're a weirdo. My Granby and Amherst pix are up on Flickr, along with a few artsy-fartsy ones that I took in the center of Florence.
With the Labor Day weekend added in, my week of vacation actually totalled up to 10 days off. It was great to have that much time to lounge around, but the overly-responsible compulsive in me feels like I need to account for how I spent my time and to have something to show for it all. It was a mixed bag and the weather wasn't entirely cooperative. When the weather sucked, like when Ernesto blew through, I froze tomatoes and managed to get entirely caught up on donor database stuff for the abortion fund. (Don't tell anyone, but I had gotten three months behind on entering donations and doing address updates.) When it was nice (3 days, I think), I went to the pool, listened to my mp3 player, read parts of two books of secret and eccentric things to see in London in preparation for the upcoming trip, swam some occasional laps and worked on my tan. Also, on the rare afternoons that there was some blue sky and nice light around 5 p.m., I grabbed the camera, jumped into the MINI, and drove around the Happy Valley taking pictures. One exception to the blue sky/nice light thing was a mid-day pre-Ernesto mission to the laundromat in the Florence Mini Mall combined with a walk around the block avec camera while the towels were drying. The product of all of this pointing and shooting is now up on Flickr. Oh, yeah -- I broke the garbage disposal and Sadie got another UTI and has to be on antibiotics. (That's a picture of Sadie above when she was just a wee thing. The day after Labor Day is the anniversary of when I got her in 2002.)
I have an idea for a photo shoot project with a pal or two. This involves parking our butts on a bench somewhere in downtown Noho and taking pictures of the town scene as it passes by. No date has been set yet. Let me know if you want in.
I'm going back to my tried and true method of putting up tomatoes. In my search for a method that both minimized time/effort and maximized product quality, I first tried blanching, peeling, and halving the lovely Romas that I picked at the Food Bank Farm. I put the peeled halves into quart-size plastic freezer boxes, squishing them down as I packed in each layer. This is a pretty good method except that all of that peeling took forever and was a real drag. I'm sure the product, however, will be mighty fine.
The next method I tried was one that came highly recommended by Farmer Michael of the Food Bank Farm. This involved cutting the tomatoes in half length-wise, placing them cut side up in a glass baking dish, putting a blob of crushed garlic and a leaf of basil on top of each one and drizzling the whole red army with olive oil. No peeling!!! The pans (I did two of them) then went into a 220 degree oven for twelve hours, in my case from 8 p.m. to a little before 8 a.m. The final product is a little strange. The pan on the top rack looked good -- the Romas still have some red tomato juiciness to them, although the basil leaves got toasted. The bottom pan, however, looks like a tray of dessicated cockroaches. I transferred all of the flat blobs to a cookie sheet and froze them individually, then packed them into baggies for their return to the freezer. The jury is still out on the taste and consistency. I think the juicier ones will be good to pop into sandwiches, and I'll try putting the cockroaches into soups or stews this winter.
Tomorrow's batch will be done in the old fashioned way. I plan to halve them (still haven't decided if I'll blanch and peel first), put them in a big enamel pot and simmer them for a while. This will make the house reek of tomato-ness, like when my mother was in Major Canning Mode when I was a kid. The sauce will then be cooled and poured into plastic freezer boxes. I'll just keep picking, saucing and freezing until the freezer is full or I run out of containers. There's going to be a lot of minestrone in my future.
I'm a little frustrated with Blogger. They're gradually rolling out a beta of the blog management program (the "dashboard" where you write your posts, configure your template, etc.). Since Blogger is part of Google, they are integrating it with all their other Google products and one username/password will work for all. I use lots of Google products, and I keep my fingers crossed that my measly number of shares of Google stock will soar in price. I really like the way you can one-click from Gmail to your custom Google homepage to Google calendar to Google spreadsheets. And I use Froogle and Picasa all the time. I've drunk the Google kool-aid. So, when I logged into Blogger one day last week and the invitation to migrate to the beta was sitting there, I clicked. So far I like the new dashboard -- publishing is instantaneous now and you don't have to wait while some icon goes round and round telling you that you're 25% published, 67% published, blah blah blah. But something is screwy with the feed for my blog now. My new posts don't show up as new in Bloglines under the old feed. I seem to have a new feed, and I guess that means that my 4 or 5 loyal readers will have to update their blogrolls in order to get notification of new posts. I've changed the "Sub with Bloglines" button on the bottom of the right panel on this page so that it points to the new feed. Or you can use the "Sub with Bloglines" icon you may have on your browser toolbar. Blogger support has not responded to my e-mail asking for assistance. I guess this is what you get for trying to be an early adopter. Yeeeesh.
