Mama's Advice

My mama made a good point in an e-mail to me this morning:

"You've got to make time for short blog updates (what went on each day) so people get some idea of ALL you do and have to deal with on a daily basis. (Processing gallons of green beans, making tons of pickles, bailing out the kitchen after sink drain disconnects, septic tank backed up, and probably many, many things I don't know about.) If you save it all up for when you have time to write everything out all together, you'll never get to the Herculean task or will have forgotten a lot of it by then. When your blog entries are spaced so far apart, folks out there think, "Ho-hum, nothing must be happening in their lives!'"

So, yes, I did a 6 1/2 hour marathon of pickling the other day - getting 9 pints and 10 quarts of dill pickles put up. Unfortunately, the last quart of pickles split open just as I was lifting it out of the canner! On the up side, it happened at the end and not at the beginning (a coup in itself)!

Sunday night and yesterday I processed green & wax beans and now have 3 months worth of veggies in the freezer for wintertime consumption.

Yesterday, while in the middle of blanching the beans, I went underneath the kitchen sink for something, and THANK GOODNESS I did! The drain pipe had come disconnected, and, had it not been for the fact that the garbage can was almost centered perfectly underneath, there would have been GALLONS of water soaked up by the sheetrocked wall instead of the little bit that had splashed out of the garbage can.

Then, after Tom came home from a TIRING day of moving 2,304 (not that he counted or anything) paving stones to the patio area he's currently working on in town, he fixed the sink. After smashing his head on the bottom of the cabinet while trying to get back up, he wisely decided to take a nice, hot bath. After taking his nice, hot bath and feeling MUCH more content, he came downstairs to talk to me . . . at which point I heard bubbling in the downstairs toilet (NOT good)! "Stop the tub from draining," I hollered to Tom as I ran past him to slam the off button on the washing machine!

Long story short, the septic tank backed up. Again. Fast forward past us taking the lids off the tank last night, doing our "business" outside these past 12+ hours, and my call to the septic guys . . . and they are my new best friends - already having come and gone this morning. The good news is that the drain field is NOT clogged, as we'd feared. The bad news is that they can't figure out why the septic tank is not draining properly. Hmmmm.

Oh, and did I mention that I can barely feel my fingers as I type? It's 55 degrees in the house right now. Fifty-five. That's cold. I have a turtleneck and polarfleece jacket on. And I'm frozen. And I'm drinking coffee. And my nose is numb. But, off I go to take a hot shower . . . in the 55 degree bathroom. Niiiiiiice.