Sneaking out September's back door...

October signals the real end of the season for me. Mostly. In my head, anyway. lol

  Last year in November I was still canning...turkey broth and stuff anyway.  And pumpkin. And the music plays on...

  It's been a chaotic couple of days around here.  My wonderful son (who loves his mommy soooo much he's willing to do things he hates)  fixed my broken kitchen sink sprayer. That is plumbing work people, and we all know that if you aren't getting 30 dollars an hour to do it, EVERYONE hates that work.  lol  Anyway he got it fixed with relative ease and minimal swearing and I am so grateful because it was driving me crazy. The hose wouldn't retract into the sink base and stay there. It was all flippity floppedy googlybongled.

  The other major thing he did was build me some new shelving in the pantry in this room. This is my main pantry and there was a lot of wasted space in here.  It has some built in shelves, that are great--big and deep--but dark and go from floor to ceiling and made it hard to know what was in there. Lots of jars of stuff I thought I was out of hiding away in the recesses of those shelves.  So, he did this. 

  The bottom picture shows all those gallon jars that have dried goods in them. Vegetables, fruits, rice, flours, beans...you know.  To get here, I had to take almost everything out of this pantry and stack it in the floor of the office here. And there were boxes that needed sorting (Xmas paper, junk, old electronics stuff...lordy). It was a mess  Here's what kind of a mess it was...

...and this was after tossing some stuff.  Sigh...  At any rate it's mostly done now.  And the pantry (which has not only those floor to ceiling shelves, but also a wire shelving unit like they use in restaurants, with 3 big shelves on the wall of this closet opposite the new shelves)  is SO much more user friendly now, not to mention that I don't have boxes of canned foods sitting willy nilly around the place. And there's still a little more room in there...YAY!!!!

  We've been harvesting sweet potatoes this past week as well. I think we will get therm finished up today, maybe. There still about 5-6 feet of the original big bed and the box to dig. It's been a pretty good crop this year, thank goodness.

  It's a beautiful Sunday morning. The Irishman is taking the dogs to the reservoir where they can run and run and sniff out exotic things and have a ball. He can only take one at a time, and little Caylee doesn't go at all (she's a homebody, like me lol), and he just brought back Bella, and took Molly. So Bella is outside howling and crying because she wants to go EVERY TIME. lol  I'm in here stalling, and listening to my new Janis Ian cd turned up loud. 

  I've been drying more fruit since Friday...I got some persimmons and they are drying too--what a pain those things are. I came upon a foolproof (ahem!) lazy way to circumvent just having a pureed blob of stuff so I can dry them. I slice the crown off and them kinda smash them into a flower shaped mess with the big seeds still in them. So--to eat them will be chewing around the seeds, but that okay. You have to do that to eat them fresh too.  And btw...the seeds this year is shaped like a spoon (or shovel as some call it). That is supposed to mean a cold winter is on the way. Honestly, the seeds have different shapes depending on the weather prediction. 

  And--the Irishman came home from hiking yesterday with 2 pawpaws.  I haven't seen or eaten one in years...I wish we could get more of those...like the persimmons, there used to be a lot of those trees around these parts, and now you're hard pressed to find any...


  Okay. I do have a few things to do today if I am gong to make it in time to go to a matinee and then to a speaker meeting tonight where my friend and her husband are speaking.

  Have a blessed Sunday, everyone.  


Namaste