wedding cake rescued

This is how the cake looked after I rescued the bottom layer. Not bad. But it sure was an impressive fall!

home made sausage

I did something yesterday I've wanted to do for years and years. I made homemade sausage. We're having it for dinner tonight, so it is a bit early to comment, but the taste testing went great! Over all I probably found out what NOT to do then what to do. The casings I bought were really too small, and I froze the meat, and had to let it thaw a bit before I could grind it, so the meat was really hard to cut. But, at the end of it all, the sausage tastes absolutely wonderful and, while I doubt it'll be on the weekly menu, I will be doing this again!

My line in the sand is tanning. Was it as horrible a failure as buck tanning? No? then it was a success.

September musings

The wedding was lovely, seminary been going for a couple of weeks, I no longer am a homeschooling mom, seems like I ought to have all the time in the world, right? How do people go to work every day? I just don't get it. I have a terrible time keeping up with everything I'm committed to do and everything I'm trying to do and I can't imagine taking on a full time job on top of all of this. I'm behind on making soaps for the Farmers Market and I haven't even started sewing that dress I was going to make for the wedding. I can't even keep up with my garden. Fall gardens are such a wonderful idea but it is so hard to keep up the umph to do it. In mid summer, when the heat is miserable, I should be thinking ahead to fall, but I rarely do more then poke a few beans seeds into the ground. My big goal for this week is to get some Chinese cabbage planted. If I do that I can say I've done something for a fall garden.

august tally-ho

August garden total-- 177.0 lbs This makes the year to date total 680.3 lbs.

This August we got Peppers (I grow the hot stuff, not sweet peppers), cucumbers (did great!), tomatoes (didn't do great), yard long beans (not hard to grow, but no one really likes them much), apples (got a disease, but I picked them green and processed them for cooking, they taste great, they just looked icky), and finally, green beans.

In spite of the fact that I've been neglecting my garden this last month it still produced pretty well. We'll see how it makes it through the fall.