Catching up

I think this has probably been our busiest summer ever.  I know it seems that all I talk about is how busy I am.  I only do it because it's true. *rolls eyes*  To me, the perfect life is completely dull and involves rarely leaving the house, lots of time with Chipmunk, and tons of gardening.  *sighs wistfully*   So yeah, busy is how my summer has been: travelling, two markets each week (a total of four days per week for markets, including prep time and all), and what seems like never-ending running from one place to the other.  I'm not even a soccer mom, so how did I end up running all the time?

Little Sis and I did have a great second vacation at a homeschoolers retreat.  She hung out with kids and made tons of new friends. Me?  Well, there was this deck, and several rocking chairs, and my heinie made good friends with those chairs.  I met some great people, also, but mostly I just sat.  It was nice.

I am now down to one market per week, and hoping to get caught up on some things.  (stop laughing)

My garden has been a disappointment this year.  I did have a lot of cherry tomatoes, ground cherries, currant tomatoes, mexican sour gherkin cukes, and tomatillos, but the canning and paste tomatoes were a flop.  The plants did produce a few tomatoes, which were immediately pecked, bitten, gouged, gnawed, or otherwise adulterated by villains unknown.

The lack of canning has not been heartbreaking for me. I confess:  I do not enjoy canning.  I do, however, enjoy the fruits of canning (ha, punny), and those will be sorely missed this winter.  I hope to scavenge enough tomatoes to do at least a few more batches of salsa.   I sampled some amazing roasted tomato and roasted tomatillo salsa at the retreat, and I'm anxious to try my hand at that.

I'll post some pics of new varieties of garden goodness later on.  Right now, I'm too tired to re-size those pics and wait for them to load.  Our internet is spotty lately, and it's just frustrating to do anything online.  I'm typing this while offline, and hope to upload it without having to wait an hour.

In weather news:  it's getting cold here.  I fully expect our first frost in the next week or so, which I am sure is unusually early.  I need to go back through my posts and get an idea of when the first frost usually hits;  I think it's October.

We had our first fire in the wood burning insert over a week ago.  It was in the low 40's and damp, and Eöl, who usually boasts a body temp of "inferno", was cold.   My body temp registers somewhere around "undead", so I am always cold, and I was happy to have the living room toasty warm.  Probably not much of a newsflash, but it's nice to search the archives here and compare the weather from  year to year.

So..that's my update, for those of you wondering if I'd been eaten by a rabid groundhog.  Or for me, when I look back and wonder why I didn't post more over the summer.