Growing Hope

I wanted a nice tidy place to keep my canning notes so that I could have info on each batch. At one point in time I would have given each batch a code number(like 220912CAR01 would be the first batch of Carrots I canned on Sept12th 2022) and use that number to find the right row in an excel document...  That was not very good because I didn't really have a nice way to access it or store photos. As I was playing with label templates and talking about not really knowing how I wanted to do this, Hugslut suggested starting a new blog and using QR codes on the labels to go to the post for each batch.  That sounded like an amazing idea so I got to work on the Growing Hope Pantry Blog  and designing labels. After a few iterations I settled on a design that had a large enough QR code, clear basic info, and an appealing look to them. A bit of a paper jam on the first page wasted half a page of labels and some bad math wasted another 1/2  page, but the jars now have labels pointing to blog p

  It’s still very windy outside but… The power is still on.  We’re still alive and well.  The map shows the worst is past.  We are very lucky it basically missed us. 

Happy Autumn folks! So um....  I found out yesterday at lunch that a hurricane is headed this way... and the weather network is telling us to hurry up and get prepared before it hits Thursday evening because it's gonna be strong enough to throw loose stuff around your yard and the power might go out so make sure you've got emergency supplies! So of course that means yesterday afternoon I ran around cleaning up the scrap wood into the shed and undoing the garden cardboard. I also got out the instruction manuals for the generator and the GenerLink(which is the device that connects the generator to the house). There's gas and oil in the generator, and it's strong enough to run the fridge, and water pump/filter, plus charge some electronics like our phones so we won't be at a lack of info as long as there's cell signal. See the pale green where the cardboard had just barely started to work it's magic? Hugslut was working and warning her work she might disappear

So I knew when I ordered my desk that some assembly would be required, of course. I also knew that it would fit through my office door so after dinner Monday night we started unpacking the boxes in the living room where there was more floorspace for assembly. Step 1: Unboxed and lil circle connectors added to appropriate pieces. - Complete at 8:03pm Hugslut and I plugged away at this and by the end I didn't know if it was late or if I was just physically tired from hauling the pieces around and hand screwing them together.(I did NOT trust a power driver to not just make a mess of things.) Step 31: Slide drawers into place. - Complete at 12:38am There was no way we had the strength to wrangle thing thing into my office after building it for 4 and a half hours so, at this point we called it a night. While dinner was cooking Tuesday we got to the work of moving the desk from the living room to my office... which was not as easy as I had planned. I forgot to account for the strange con

I kept hoping to be done with the canning so I could have a nice lil before and after for you but... well, here's what happened. We were out running some errands on the Saturday the 10th, and on the way home I spotted someone bagging up deer apples! I was already planning on getting some deer carrots but the apples got me excited. We popped over to the bank to get some cash and by the time we got home we had three bags of food. Tape measure for scale. Now they're called deer apples and deer carrots because they're "2nds" from the farm. the stores wont take them because they're too large, or too small, or bruised, or in the case of some of the carrots, forked or broken in half. The hunters around here use these bags of food to lure deer which makes for an easy shot so they're less likely to injure the deer and more likely for it to just die quickly.  Although I applaud their ingenuity.... I'd rather sort through and put-up/preserve some food for humans.

So not much happened this week beyond trying to get back into the groove of things after that mess of a weekend. I did a bunch of laundry washing all the blankets we had used as packing padding and have been sitting on the closet floor ever since. They're all clean and tidily folded in baskets now.  One morning as I was eating breakfast I looked up and saw this gunge. Now to me, that's a sign of trouble. Putting on my gloves and such, I unplugged and opened the air exchanger......  This is........ not ideal. I did some googling and found out how it works, what it's for, and how to clean it. The air exchanger is redundant for us right now since we have the windows open all the time, but what it does in the winter is allow you to keep all the windows closed but still get fresh air in.  It's a Heat Recovery Ventilation system so the cold air coming in goes through corrugations in the core (the white bit) while the warm air from the house is leaving through different corrug