There is an incredible bliss to having coffee and big homemade bagels with homemade grape jelly on the patio while it's pouring rain in sheets all around me. It drums on the glass roof and I have two of the heaters on low. It's twelve degrees and not meant to go any higher today and so denim overalls, a pink t-shirt and a fuzzy pink cardigan are comfortable and warm, though it makes me look like a highschooler from the eighties. I was a highschooler in the eighties so I don't mind so much.
I may have to make another bagel though. This jelly is so good. I made it last fall when it turns out we got some decent grapes, though not enough to make wine with so I harvested what I could and got four good-sized jars of jelly. The first one never set and we used it up but I just opened the next after ten months and it's perfectly set and delicious.
I love to can. I do old-fashioned style in a big stock pot in small batches and I make everything from pickles to jams to tomato sauce to preserved vegetables to applesauce.
Lochlan agrees. He's just poured us each a second coffee to sip for our final hour out here before the chores start. It's Monday after all. The incredible amount of rain means no running with the Devil this morning. I haven't run enough, I think but at the same time my body is far happier if I don't anymore. Ruth goes back to work today. Henry doesn't work again until the weekend. A lot of businesses are opening today and yet I plan to help the boys clean the house, maybe do some baking and then tackle my mending pile while I watch Win The Wilderness on Netflix.
It's very good. I wonder how I would do in a challenge like that? Not like I'll ever find out. I have stupid things I love too much to give up like the heated floors in the stables and really fast wi-fi thanks to Lochlan and my stand mixer for when I do bake (I have a very weak elbow on one side that has never fully recovered) and I really love the motorized retractable glass windows across the kitchen wall that I don't really talk about because then people will think I'm spoiled.
(I am spoiled, though but also self-aware so I hope it counts for something. In my defense while you spent your teens and twenties living at home borrowing mom's car and shopping I was singing for my supper and it wasn't much, let me tell you.)
It's very good. I wonder how I would do in a challenge like that? Not like I'll ever find out. I have stupid things I love too much to give up like the heated floors in the stables and really fast wi-fi thanks to Lochlan and my stand mixer for when I do bake (I have a very weak elbow on one side that has never fully recovered) and I really love the motorized retractable glass windows across the kitchen wall that I don't really talk about because then people will think I'm spoiled.
(I am spoiled, though but also self-aware so I hope it counts for something. In my defense while you spent your teens and twenties living at home borrowing mom's car and shopping I was singing for my supper and it wasn't much, let me tell you.)
I don't think I could give that wall up to regularly get visits from grizzlies. We do get visits from black bears, does this count? It's my little luxury-Alaska, I guess. Our bears are used to people though and not nearly as terrifying as grizzlies. On the show they say it's the other way around. Huh.
Hoping to finish the mending today though. Lochlan's getting low on flannel shirts. He wears the elbows out so fast because he doesn't roll up his sleeves all year around like some of the others. I darn some of the least damaged and patch the most. It suits him.
(Also a fun fact: I embroider the initials of each boy on the sleeve cuff of their flannel shirts or I can't tell who owns what. We don't do our own laundry separately in the collective. We do whatever needs to be done.)