7 Quick Takes (Vol 181)

Well here you are again, eagerly anticipating the blather that is about to descend upon you. Just remember your marching orders. When you are done parsing the blatherosity around here be sure to click on the picture above to be whisked, at the speed of words escaping from politicians manically spinning brains, over to Conversion Diary to see what is happening.

Vote for ME! I have the best blather.

1.
These weeks where we have a Monday holiday just mess me up. I have been off by one day all week. This, in my mind, should be Thursday not Friday.

Thank goodness for a calendar. Otherwise I don’t know where I would be.

And sometimes even WITH a calendar I am not sure what is going on.

2.
Remember these?

This is the first year that I ever remember the wild grape vines next to the driveway producing anything other than leaves. May be they have and I just haven’t noticed. But this year…..I noticed.

Wednesday I finally got around to harvesting as many as I could reach. That required getting the medium height step ladder (6 foot) and my garden sheers and being very careful when I was reaching as far up as I could go. HHBL will tell you that sometimes I will get an idea in my head to do something or move something and I just have to do it….even if there isn’t anyone else home to help or spot. But I was careful.

And in the end I was able to harvest close to three POUNDS of teeny, tiny wild grapes.

And yesterday those wild grapes were turned into the most amazing grape jelly. I have to admit that I am not really a fan of grape jelly. But this stuff isn’t ANYTHING like what you are going to get at the store. The final yield ended up to be about 5 1/2 pints of ambrosia. I did have a bit of a problem at first because, after canning it was obvious that the jelly hadn’t set up as well as I thought, even though I had done the whole “jelly on the frozen plate” trick (whatever that is called). So I had to unseal all of the jars, reboil, and then add another packet of liquid pectin. The second time around everything went much better. Although I may have overdone the second helping of pectin a bit. But it is better to have firmer jelly than runny jelly.

That’s my story and I am sticking to it!

I will tell you that I did not take a single picture because it is a very, very messy process. And I actually decided to wear latex gloves for the first part of the process because I didn’t really want to explain why I had purple hands.

3.
Because I don’t have anything ELSE to do around here….I am attempting to teach myself how to do stranded colorwork knitting. I do not like it when I cannot master a knitting task immediately.

And therefore I am frustrated. Really, this cannot be all that hard. Other people do it for the love of Pete!

YouTube is helpful to be sure. But it really is just a matter of practice. And more practice. And then more practice after that.

I will not let this get the better of me….I will not let this get the better of me…..I will not let this get the better of me.

4.
Oh yes, and just to add more to the already full plate, I am working on my Photoshop Elements skills. And that just makes my head hurt.

For a long time I thought that what I really needed was the “Big” Photoshop. You know, the one that costs almost as much as a mortgage payment. The program that if you DON’T have it you aren’t a “real photographer”. I viewed Photoshop Elements as the poor country cousin. But I have come to revise my thoughts on PSE. It really does just about everything that I need as far as photo editing is concerned. And there are more and more “PSE Actions” arriving every day. Can I tell you how much I love pre-set actions for photo editing. Why reinvent the wheel when someone else has so kindly developed different photo editing workflows that achieve what I want.

I am no fool.

All this to say that I am working daily to hone my skills.

But it is MUCH more difficult to learn new skills when you have a less than new brain.

5.
As I have mentioned before somewhere (I cannot locate the darn blog post) I journal. Journaling has occasionally saved my very sanity. But in the past several years I have slacked off a bit. I had been journaling on the computer and then printing it out and pasting it into the journal that I keep on my desk. I needed a change up last year so I went back to hand writing my journal entries. And I just sort of ground to a halt. I would journal sporadically but not every day. And because I have these perfectionist tendencies I would get all upset if I made a mistake in what I was writing.

And I hate that.

So I am back to my week long running journal on the computer and I am much happier. It is easier to go back and add things if I need to and I am a much faster typists that I am a writer by hand.

6.
Downton Abbey Season 3 starts January 6, 2013.

I am not sure how I am going to be able to make it that long without my Dowager Duchess fix. But just to help all of us along…….

7.
Once a month, from September to May, I go to breakfast with a group of old friends. We meet at Bob Evans. We have the same waitress, Roseanne. Often times we order the same thing from month to month. We share prayer requests. We catch up on life.

I have known all these women for a long time. And I love them beyond measure. We have walked through some very tough times together. And we have shared many joys. I always miss the three summer meetings that we don’t have. It isn’t like I don’t see or communicate with them during that time, I do. It just isn’t the same.

But today………

We are back at Bob Evans for breakfast and prayer requests.

HURRAH!!!