I spent a good part of Saturday morning feeling disgruntled and not wanting to do anything. Fred made a bunch of dorky suggestions of what I could do (“Let’s go get some more chickens! You could go to the mall! You could go to the movies!”), but it turned out that I wanted to sulk around, do nothing for a few hours, and then get my ass in gear.
Sulking and doing nothing is greatly helped by a sweet little litter of fluffy kittens, if you were curious.
After lunch, I finally geared up and made a batch of Caramel-Apple Jam. I think I told y’all that last weekend I’d made a batch of Caramel-Apple Jam with the apple diced in small pieces, and I was intending to make a batch that started with cooked, pureed apple to see which I liked more. (The recipe for the kind using small pieces of apple here, the recipe using pureed apple here.)
It’s actually a lot easier to make the jam with apple puree, because you can core and cut the apples, cook them, then run them through a food mill or Magic Tomato Machine, which takes care of the pureeing and the skins at the same time.
I ended up with 9 half-pints of Caramel-Apple Jam, and I have to say that on the whole, I actually prefer the kind with the tiny diced apple pieces. The kind with the pureed apple was certainly very good, but the texture reminds me a lot of applesauce. The kind with the tiny diced apple pieces tastes sweeter to me (Fred had some explanation for why that was, but I don’t remember what he said) and god knows I like the sweet stuff.
I’d tell you what I did Saturday afternoon, but fuck if I can remember.
Sunday morning I woke up all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and I popped out of bed (after sleeping ’til 7 ’cause I’m a slacker) and put Fred’s laundry in, went to the recycling center and Lowe’s with Fred, came home and vacuumed the downstairs, then went to the Dollar Store to pick up a few things.
Then I put a dozen eggs in the freezer to freeze. How do I do this, you ask? Well, let me tell you! I bought a dozen silicone cupcake liners at Target one day. To freeze eggs, I put the cupcake liners on a cookie sheet, crack one egg into each liner, then put the whole thing in the freezer for a couple of hours until each egg is good and frozen. Then I pop each egg out of its liner, put them in a Ziploc bag, write the date on the outside of the bag, and put the whole bag back in the freezer.
Why do I freeze eggs, you ask? Because chickens tend to lay less in the winter and last year I had to buy several dozen eggs FROM THE STORE, the horror!
I ended up freezing four dozen eggs, and would like to do another six or so to get us through the winter. The girls aren’t putting out quite as many eggs as they were a month ago (14 – 17 a day), and at least two of them have started to moult, so I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before production drops way down.
Once the eggs were in the freezer, I went out to the front porch and carried all the plants that were there across the yard into the garage. I’ve had two big potted impatiens on the front porch since the beginning of summer, and two big potted Mexican Heather plants, and I’d like to see if I can get them to stay alive in the garage ’til next summer, whereupon they can adorn the front porch again. It’s supposed to get pretty cold this week, so I figured now was the time to move them. I also had four house plants to move to the garage – yes, I could move them into the house, but I get annoyed at cleaning up barfed-up plant pieces, so I’d rather have them in the garage. The top floor of the garage – which we were originally going to finish out to use for a cat room, but ended up using for storage – has some windows that catch the light all day long. Hopefully the plants will be happy up there, as long as I remember to water them once a week or so.
The front porch looks kind of empty now. I need to come up with some sort of seasonal decoration for the plant rack next to the door, and maybe the steps.
I took a short break, cuddling the kittens, and then went back into the kitchen. It has absolutely reeked under the kitchen sink for the past little while, and so it was my intention to scrub under there and take care of the smell (I won’t go into specifics, but it involves CATS PEEING IN THE GODDAMN SINK and a crappy sink). I thought at first I’d just use lots of hot water and soap and scrub where the smell is coming from, but it just so ended up that after taking a look at the pipes under the sink, it’s not so very hard to take the pipes under the sink apart and clean them, and soon Fred was walking into the kitchen to get a drink, and found me sitting there with towels and rags all over the place, spraying pieces of pipe and scrubbing the hell out of them. He ended up having to run silicone under the drain (?), and I got all the pipes put back together not QUITE correctly, but Fred realized there was a problem right away and fixed it, so no big deal.
(It still stinks under the sink a little bit, but there’s only so damn much I can do, right?)
I took a break for lunch, spent a little more time with the kittens, and then started up the ol’ KitchenAid mixer. We’ve been feeding the pigs crappy cookies from the dollar store lately, but we were low on those cookies and I had all the ingredients for Piggerdoodles, so I decided to make a double batch of cookies for them.
I threw in a couple of handfuls of romaine lettuce at the end of the mixing to keep the indoor pigs (Fred and I) the hell out of the cookies. Sometimes I toss dried cherry tomatoes in the cookies, sometimes I toss in a handful of collard greens, whatever’s on hand and makes us think “Ewwww!” will work.
That double batch made a ton of cookies, so we’re set on pig cookies for a good long time.
I also did laundry, picked up around the house, spent a little more time with the kittens, checked out Fred’s progress on the big-ass chicken coop (I assume he’ll put up an entry about that later, but let me tell you – that is one BIG-ASS chicken coop. He said, as we were standing inside it, “We could fit two hundred chickens in here if we had to!”
Knowing us, we’ll either need to add on to the chicken coop, or have a second coop by this time next year.
All in all, a pretty good weekend.
The kittens are going to be spayed and neutered tomorrow, poor babies. Last night I got two carriers out and put them in the kitten room. Marion and Lem thought they were the funnest toys ever, kept running in and sniffing them and then racing back out. Delmar and Claudette were uninterested. Hopefully they’ll remain uninterested right until I pick them up and pop them inside tomorrow morning.
Know what’s annoying? Let me TELL you what’s annoying. I go up and visit with the kittens many times a day. I bring them a snack. I pet them. I tell them how pretty they are. I rub their fuzzy little bellies. I gently toss toy mice across the room for them to chase. I lay down and let them crawl all over me. They purr and rub against me, they tell me I’m awesome.
And then. AND THEN. At bedtime, Fred goes upstairs and into the kitten room. I don’t know what he does in there in the few minutes that I’m brushing my teeth and taking out my contacts, but when I go into the room, the kittens could NOT care less about me. They’re chasing the feather-on-a-stick toy, they’re rolling around on their backs play-fighting with Fred, they’re rubbing against him purring and telling him how awesome he is.
They might eventually come over and allow me to pet them for a brief instant before they go back to THE FUN GUY, but they always abandon me for him.
I’m the one who gives them snacks! I’m the one who scoops out their litter boxes!
This is completely unfair.
More pictures at L&H.
Uh oh… that’s Suggie’s bed! He is NOT going to be happy when he sees this…
Previously
2007: No entry.
2006: No entry.
2005: I’m sorry, but “Sell yourself to me” is Interviewer-speak for “I’m too lazy to come up with a real question, so try to answer this stupid-ass question I read on a bad interview webpage somewhere or perhaps even pulled directly from my ass.”
2004: I cannot stand this song. I cannot stand this video. I am filled with extreme hatred every time I happen across either the song or the video.
2003: We went to see Miss Saigon on Sunday.
2002: No entry.
2001: No entry.
2000: The man drove two hours to spend one hour with his grandchild and then drove two hours back. How cool is that?
1999: May I say that the child gets an UNGODLY amount of presents.