School all day, pickles, stew, baked beans, and fall leaves

LONG WEEKEND!

I love long weekends. Wish every weekend was long 🙂

Today I had to work on my GIS course for hours. I’m so close to the end. One more exercise, then a quiz (which I’ll write at least twice for practice), then an assignment, and then the final exam. The end of September is the deadline for the course, but I’d like to write that final while Jeff is away for a week, mid-month, when it is super quiet and still in the house (I’m very easily distracted!)

I hate that I’m losing my long weekend to school work, but I do enjoy what I’m learning and hope I can use it for profit some day. I’ll never take another course in the summer though. Ever. Don’t let me. Promise?

Jeff dove into pickle making first thing this morning. I helped where I could, in between working on my course. He made some long spear pickles – about 10 jars! I don’t even eat pickles, so good thing he loves them.

By then he was really on a roll, and loving his new big pressure cooker, so while I went to power nap, and rest my eyes from the computer screens, he canned big jars of stew!
[ Somehow my power nap that was supposed to be 15 minutes, lasted 2 hours. 😉 ]

Preparing your own food is really contagious or something, because I just started soaking some navy beans for a baked bean recipe I’m going to try tomorrow. The only baked beans I’ve ever had came out of a can from the store. We’re really branching out!!

We’re hoping our little produce stand in town will have tomatoes soon so we can can up some salsa, spaghetti sauce, maybe some taco sauce and pizza sauce. We’re starting to get big tomatoes in our garden, now that is September, but not enough for big canning projects.

Ahhhh September, the sun sets early, and the nights are cool.

I love this time of year for so many reasons – great weather, not too hot, far fewer insects – but I hate all the spiders that come out on the deck. There is one tarantula sized spider living on one of my cherry tomato pots so I can’t pick tomatoes until he is evicted.

The leaves on the trees are looking rough this week. One maple tree on the way to town starts turning red at the beginning of August every year. So shocking! The rest of the leaves around got so beat up during the winds from Hurricane Irene’s remnants they all looks brittle, shredded, and some are slightly changing in colour.

This time of the year is when the fog is really thick in the morning here in our valley. It hovers over the water and tops out higher than our altitude. I think I’ve come to really like the fog. It is calming and peaceful. Except that it covers my car in dew and renders the side mirrors useless. I usually have to keep the wipers on for a couple kilometres in the morning to keep the dew/fog/condensation off the windshield.