Housekeeping

I forgot to mention in my post yesterday that we stopped at a few fruit stands on the way back from Keremeos and found canning tomatoes for 39 cents a pound! We bought two boxes of them, which totalled over 50 pounds in weight!

In the evening, R and I started a production line - he washed the tomatoes and removed the woody stem and I quartered them and chopped them up in the food processor and poured them into quart jars. We froze 22 quarts of tomatoes in glass jars which will be (a) preferable to plastic bags and (b) better than the shop-bought tomatoes in cans with the dubious plastic lining, and will be used for pasta sauce and soup through the winter.

Both my chest freezer and the freezer above my fridge are now almost full, which is quite an accomplishment for me!

My other accomplishment this week has been to get my windows and walls cleaned. These jobs were on the "to do" list for last Spring (you know, Spring cleaning is called that for a reason) but somehow I never got around to it (so that's where the kids learned Procrastination).

Anyway, the work is done. Here's how. I ventured bravely into my teenaged son's room to check for evidence of midnight snacks. I found lots of ... well ... we could call them science experiments, because there was plant and animal life growing in various corners of his room. Among the plastic containers and ziploc bags, I found jam jars - six or seven of them actually - and it didn't take the deduction skills of Sherlock Holmes to realise he'd been raiding my cold store room and eating my jam by the jarful! Now that's a fair amount of work there - to say I was pissed off is an understatement - so I decided he'd have to pay me back with sweat equity.

He wasn't happy about it (good!) but he had to help me clean the fingerprints off all the walls in the house, wash the outside of all the windows and clean the insides with a vinegar solution and microfibre cloths. Our windows are the sliding kind, two outer and two inner panes in aluminum frames, and the space between accumulates dead bugs and webs so they had to be vacuumed out as well. Thankfully the panes lift out fairly easily for cleaning on both sides, but it's not a job I do very often! Hopefully they'll stay clean for long enough to look presentable for my in-laws' visit in October!!