Burning Down the House

The Queen and I taught ourselves to can today... WATCH OUT OAK HARBOR!

Where to begin...let's see...

The day started innocently enough with us running around like fiends all over the city looking for our ingredients. These included 30 lbs of peaches, 10 lbs of cucumber, and 5 lbs of blueberries. In the middle of blanching our peaches (we're doing both brandied and regular peaches), the phone rang and I was offered a job I have been angling for. Hurrah! After several minutes of running around screeching and scaring the cats out of their winter fur we realized the pots were ready and the peaches needed to be pulled out of the juice.

Started a second batch of jam... and realized we had only 1/3 the amount of pectin necessary! I ran to get more, leaving the Queen to cope with finishiing up that first batch of blueberry lime jam alone... I came back and in the middle of doing another batch we BLEW A FUSE ON THE STOVE! We were BOILING WATER. That's it. Does that tell you how OLD my stove is?

Of course, what's funnier is that we didn't realize what the freaking loud POP was (scared us both into shrieking and the cats disappeared for about an hour). We looked high and low at every bottle in sight, thinking that one may have exploded... noooo, it was the stove. We didn't realize it until we had been standing there staring at the pot of blueberries for 20 minutes and going "what is TAKING so long for this to BOIL?!"

So after running around waving our hands in the air and muttering "FUSE" and "what?!" and "OH MY GOODNESS!!!!!" we finally figured out how to flip it back. The fuse, that is.

And by the way... the Queen herself is being awarded the next Queenie for single-handedly removing several layers of skin from 2 fingers on the same hand within about 2 hours! She also wrenched her hip and got a couple steam burns over the course of the day. It is the QUEENIE award, but I told her she had no choice but to give it to herself... :-)

Tomorrow we're finishing the peaches and doing some pickles... Beware apartment! Beware cats! BEWARE OAK HARBOR!

Oh, there is other good news. Husband is coming home earlier than we had planned. Hurrah!