I haven't posted since.. OMG, April? Can that be right?

Well, school was taking up a lot of my time, but I haven't had that excuse over the summer.

I ended the school year with a 3.96, not too shabby if I do say so, myself. I'm about to throw myself back into the fray of academia here in about a month, back to my last 2 quarters of community college before I start working on that Midwife thing. This next quarter is going to be scary, or it might not be. I don't know. So far, my schedule is:

Anatomy/Physiology
Microbiology
Nutrition

However, I think that I might do some re-evaluating and end up taking some easy elective credits this quarter, and leave the others for Spring. I haven't made up my mind yet. I have time, as the quarter doesn't start until September 25th.

So, I've been squeezing the most out of summer. I have so many pictures to prove it, if I could just get them off John's hard drive! (One of the by-products of summer, my computer broke - of course - and we had to transfer all the important stuff before they sent it off to be fixed and give me a new hard drive. Unfortunately, two repair trips and a month later the damn thing is still not working correctly, so I'm going to have to take it back AGAIN and scare the buhjeezus out of some poor guy in the "Fire Dog" section of Circuit City.)

I will be (cross your fingers) doing a large summer update post on the state of the Oppelaar household and the crafting I managed to get done in the lazy hazy days of sunshine, as soon as I can get my photos back.

For now, let me tell you about some other stuff.

I'm turning 30 in 2 weeks. Now, this is something I've actually been looking forward to for a while now, but it's getting really close and I kind of want the last couple years of my 20's back. The early part of my 20's was a pretty rough time, but I learned a great deal about who I wanted to be and realized that I was no where even close to that woman. So, I thought about the things I wanted to change in my life, and I slowly set about doing them. I learned how to love myself, even with the flaws I didn't like but couldn't change, and I learned to be more the person I really hoped I could become. I went through some pretty tough relationships, I learned a few hard lessons about friendship, and money, and self reliance, and asking for help. In the last few years, I know I've been through the most traumatic things I've ever experienced, and I'm still here, still fighting for serenity and looking forward to the spots in my life where things are not so chaotic.

A few days ago, I was thinking about where I always wanted to be at 30 and what I thought my life would be like. There is more that I want to be doing to help others, there is more I want to be doing to leave a smaller footprint. I want to craft more, work less, love more, laugh more, worry less, travel more, and be much more active and less willing to accept status quo as the norm.

I want to cook more. I want to learn to can - something I'm actually tackling as I type this. I want to grow all my own vegetables and pick berries from my backyard and shake the huge apple tree that is growing behind my house and pick up all the apples and make more apple butter and applesauce and apple pies. I want to be more gentle, more forgiving, better with money, and more aware of the world around me. I want the town I live in to be better for my presence, and the lives of the people I love to be better for me being in them. I feel like these were things I was working towards in the last few years, and then the time and energy I've diverted to devote to my marriage just kind of left all my other efforts flagging.

So, I decided that I would stop making excuses and just do some stuff. I decided to tackle canning. We have an orchard across the street, I think in my last post I showed it covered in snow. Well, right now, it's full of apples that are falling to the ground, and really, I just can't stand to watch all that go to waste.

I picked close to 4 bags full, figured that would be more than enough, and then ran them back home. HOLY CRAP! I picked so many, I had no idea. They filled an 18 gallon Rubbermaid tub! Right about then, my lovely friend Jilly showed up and I told her I was forcing apples upon her. We dug through my cabinets and found the Apple Peeler Corer Slicer and set it up with a minimum of "Um, WTF does this do?" Dude! Those things are awesome! This one was gifted to me years ago, and it's never been out of of its box since the last owners put it away. I don't know how I did anything with apples without this little device. It's ridiculously fast, and it's fun to use. Pretty soon I had a huge pot full of apples ready to cook down, and I still had 2 sinks full of them, soaking in cold water in all their appley glory. Jill took the bag I foisted on her and headed home for dinner while I ran back and forth between the living room and kitchen, looking up recipes for apple pie filling and apple butter.

I found a recipe for Maple Vanilla Apple Pie, and it sounded heavenly, so I decided to make it. Except the recipe's proportions are SERIOUSLY out of whack, and if I were to make it excactly like it said, I'd be totally screwed. So I played with it and found a variation that seemed to taste really good, even though it was a bit soupy. I was so excited about the recipe, in fact, that I decided to break out my big ol' special cookbook and use my Great Gramma Lona's pie crust recipe, and actually try making one of those lattice top pies that I've always thought would be too hard.

Well, I made the pie dough, and it was perfect. I rolled it out, and it rolled out perfectly. I made the lattice work, and the basketweave design turned out almost perfect, and so pretty! I was so proud that I went ahead a took a picture:



Unfortunately, John had been having a really horrible day at work that he kind of brought home with him, and what could have been a really really good night and a really really good pie turned into a shitty night and kind of an asteroid type thing that resembled the pie I put in the oven, originally.



After that, the mood was just kind of done. No one wanted to hang out, the pie was inedible, and I felt kind of crushed. I just wanted to go to bed and stop talking about why the day had been shit. But I still had to clean the kitchen because if I didn't there would be fruit flies everywhere the next day, so I did that. And then I put all the food away. And put the dishes away. I finally laid down to sleep around 1, exhausted and discouraged.

I decided that Wednesday was going to be different. It started out great, the apple butter had been cooking down all night and it smelled delicious! Chase called and asked me to come to breakfast, his treat. I had delicious food and good company. I went and got a tasty coffee.

Then I went to 3 different stores and couldn't find jar lifting tongs for canning, or a funnel. Seriously. A fucking funnel. Someone stepped on my foot in Target and when I pointed it out to her, she told me she hadn't stepped on my foot and rolled her eyes at me. Then her kid ran over my toe with their cart. The store was full and crazy and every line took forever, and I started feeling a bit panicky so I just gave up on finding the shit I needed and decided to soldier through canning without all that stuff.

I came home and decided to breathe and can, and after reading several dozen tutorials I felt reasonably assured that this actually would be fairly easy.

Well, it wasn't as easy as I thought. And I thought my jars didn't seal. (I found out this morning that they did!) And after all that stirring and worrying and fussing with it, the apple butter only made 3 jars!



That was a lot of hassle and worry for only 3 jars. So, I had all the rest of the apples, I decided to just get on it and get them all cut up and used! Here is the setup I revised after figuring out a much better place to do it than yesterday. (Yesterday, I set up by the stove on my rickety shelf, and it made a giant mess. This was much easier.)





All the ones that were too soft to use on the corer, I peeled and cut by hand, and mixed up another batch of the apple pie filling I made yesterday. I tweaked it a bit and wrote down the recipe this time so that I could re-create it if need be.

I threw all the sliced/peeled/cored apples into a giant pot and made applesauce. I had to add sugar, because the apples across the street are all a bit tart, but I added brown sugar and hint of cinnamon, and the applesauce came out great. I decided to try my luck canning again, and use the rest for another batch of apple butter. While I was waiting for the jars to sterilize, I went outside in the rain, laid down the cardboard from John's bike box over the area I staked out for my garden, and then walked back and forth from the compost pile with the shovel, adding composted grass clippings to the cardboard one shovelfull at a time. Come spring, that is going to be a nicely mulched area (in theory) and I was waiting for a day when it wasn't so hot to get it done. I came back inside to find the dogs had dragged the trash all over the goddamn house and torn a roll of paper towels to shreds. I got that mess taken care of right around time for the jars to be sterilized, and I commenced to canning once more.

So here is the finished product with the applesauce:



So, after all that work, this is what my kitchen looked like. (And this is even cleaning as I went!!!)







I sat down and watched Arrested Development and ate some of the burned pie (which was delicious, BTW.)

So, after all that canning, final reckoning at 1 a.m. today is as follows:

out of 18 gallons of apples, I got:

1 plastic grocery sack of apples that went to Jillybean
3 pint jars and 8 small jam jars of apple butter, canned and (hopefully) sealed
2 pint jars unsealed and in the fridge of apple butter
1 badly burnt lattice crusted apple pie
4 rubbermaid containers with apple maple vanilla pie filling
4 pint jars and 3 small jam jars of applesauce

last canning finished at 1 a.m.

Stephanie: 1
Apples: 0

This took much too long to type. I have more to say but no more patience to say it.

I'll update again later, and it'll be soon, I promise.