October 5th IDC Update (and other stuff)

Plant: Rose bush that my mom dug up. I don’t think it makes hips, but I don’t care! My wedding bouquet flowers came from it and it’s beautiful and I love it and that’s good enough. :)

Harvest: tomatoes, peppers, eggs

Preserve: 10 jars of Candy Apple Jelly and 15 jars of Apple-Poblano Jelly

Waste Not: Used juice jugs (from the apple juice I used to make jelly) for food storage.

Want Not/Prep/Store:
* As of today, we’re on Day 10 of the Pick Up After Yourself Plan (I totally made that up …) to keep the “public” areas of the house clean. It’s working FABULOUSLY! The house looks better than it has since we moved in – at least in those areas. Once we make it a month keeping that area clean, we’ll expand it to another room.
* The weather turned cool for about a minute, so I dug through the boxes of kid clothes. Turns out H has skipped right over a size and is into 4T’s already (3T pants are all too short).
* Sorted through all the kid shoes and picked out the right sizes. Now I need to do something with the giant pile of wrong sizes. :P
* Hauled the too-big, broken desk to the landfill after we determined that there wasn’t much fit to repurpose. Also took 2 broken stereos, but the workers at the landfill seemed interested in them. I hope they took them home and got them working again! Anyway, getting that stuff out of the house made room for the future shelves for my expanded pantry.
* The (2 YEAR OLD) refrigerator died yesterday and we don’t have the money to fix it (plus I don't WANT to fix it - again; I hate that damn refrigerator), so we’re doing a crash course in living without refrigeration. Not the most fun I’ve ever had; this would be far easier if we lived someplace where it actually got COLD this time of year. :P
* Got my copy of Kathy Harrison’s book Just in Case. It is THOROUGH! I’m looking forward to working through it step by step.

Community Food System:
* Told everybody I could about the killer apple juice sale (75 cents/half-gallon). Did NOT tell them that I’m making their holiday presents from it. :D
* Spent a lovely afternoon making jelly with my mom.

Eat the Food:
* Made more muffin mix and bought some overripe bananas for muffin-making.
* Refrigerator died yesterday, so we’re eating up leftovers as quickly as possible.