I Canned Them 'Maters

 Last week, I canned the half-bushel of tomatoes that DH had brought home from his run up north with the borrowed truck.  Did I have room in my schedule to can tomatoes?  No, not really.  But here they were, and they only stay good for so long.

So, after getting two horses worked one morning, I spent the next roughly six hours canning tomatoes all by my lonesome (DH was working in-office that day).  Would it have gone faster if I had had a helper?  Not that much.  Most of the time factor was because each canner load takes 40 (pints) to 45 (quarts) minutes to process after the canner comes to a rolling boil.  With 6 quarts and 14 pints to put up, that meant three canner loads.*

Why did I not do all the tomatoes in quart jars and cut down to two loads instead of three?  Because, with just DH and I here, there's only a few recipes I make that require an entire quart of tomatoes anymore. I would rather take an extra hour-ish to do a second canner load of pints than, throughout the coming year, have multiple times where I have a half-jar of tomatoes that is opened and needs to be incorporated into a meal in the next few days before it goes bad.  

Invested time now saves me from potentially wasting time and food later if I have opened jars of tomatoes that don't get eaten soon enough and have to be thrown out. That would waste the time I spent now canning them, plus half a jar of tomatoes.  Hence many more pints than quarts got canned.

*The rack in my canner can easily fit seven pint jars at a time.  Quart jars, sort of, if they are the narrower kind and not the fat-round type.

Haulin'

After DH picked up his newly assigned small SUV, he immediately put in a request to 'borrow' one of the fleet trucks because, as he stated on his request form he had "all ready made several plans requiring a truck (his previously assigned vehicle) for the coming week."  Thankfully, that request was granted and, while he wasn't 'given' the EV truck back, he did get to 'borrow' a one ton diesel pickup for a week.

We decided that we had to make the most of having a truck during that time period, even if it wasn't exactly all things we'd planned to do right then (if it needed doing in the next 1-3 weeks, we rewrote the schedule to be NOW).

So, on the first day he had the truck, after work DH hauled: 

• a free treadmill he had found on Craigslist over the weekend,
• a load of free oak firewood.

On the second day he hauled home another load of that free oak.

On the third day he hauled, you guessed it, a third load of that firewood.

On the fourth day, he got up early, got his work computer crunching some numbers and running a data analysis (so he was 'working') then headed up to his Mom's house (which is a 3 hour drive), where (after calling in to a work meeting and setting the computer to running another analysis) he loaded up and brought home:

• about 4 dozen 1" x 6" x 8' roughsawn pine boards
• four 1" x 12" x 8' roughsawn pine planks
• about eight 2" x 4" x 8' roughsawn pine boards
• two of our kayaks he'd left up there earlier in the summer (the ill-fated trip that resulted in a totaled blue truck)
• several milk crates holding boxes of cereal, bags of mini-muffins, a few jars of pickles, a jar of peanut butter, a box of elbow macaroni, 2 jugs of tomato juice, 3 cinnamon bundt cakes, 6 ears of corn and a giant head of cabbage that were leftover from the weekly food pantry delivery that his Mom helps distribute locally.  All of which she wanted DH to pass along to our kids and their families rather than throwing it out.
• a half-bushel of canning tomatoes he picked up from a fruit market on his way home.

On the fifth day he had the truck, he hauled a hay wagon with 68 bales of hay on it that I'd purchased from a local farmer.  After we unloaded the hay into the loft of my barn, he hauled the hay wagon back to its home a mile or so away.

On the sixth day (which was Saturday) he had the truck, he hauled three trailerloads and four truckbeds-ful of more free oak firewood.  

On the seventh day he had the truck, he hauled: 

• another free treadmill (I'm thinking there's going to be a treadmill post appearing on this blog in the next few weeks)
• a pallet of horse bedding
• lumber for the final tack room project (a shelf on each of the two 16' long walls, at about 7' high, for storing the horse-related stuff that is seasonal in nature, or just plain extra. )
• Our mower, back to DD1's house to mow their lawn because their mower died again (mower issue previously mentioned here). . . 

Phew!  It was a busy week. And rereading what I just wrote, it brings to mind The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle.  Except nobody turned into a beautiful butterfly at the end.  They were just very, very tired.  And a little bit sore.  And had a bunch of stuff to put away, redistribute, can, cut/split/stack, and build.  Plus, DH had to give back the nice hefty truck and drive the smallish SUV again.

Wouldn't Ya Know. . .

 I told you about getting my Suburban back road-worthy again so that I could haul horse and chicken feed and things like that without having to arrange for DH to take me in his company-issued truck since the blue truck got totaled and I no longer had a truck to drive.  We figured that was a good solution, as I could do most of the farm related truck-type tasks in the Suburban just as I had for years before we bought the blue truck.  And any large/heavy hauling we needed to do we could use DH's work truck for--the Suburban, being rather elderly and having lived most of it's 21 years outside, was retired from trailer towing a few years ago after we were advised by the local auto mechanic that it wasn't a good idea to pull weight attached to the Suburban's rusty frame anymore. I believe the descriptive phrase he used was "Swiss cheese".

We thought we had it all figured out: Suburban to do the light trucky tasks, and the EV truck DH had been assigned to drive as his work issued vehicle for the heavier stuff.  We could get along without the blue truck just fine, and didn't need to rush into purchasing a replacement (that will be a subject of a future post, give me a few months and perhaps I'll get it written).

And then, wouldn't ya know, the day after we picked the Suburban up from the shop where it had gotten it's brake issues repaired, DH got an email from the company vehicle department at work.  It was time to turn the EV truck in and get his next assigned vehicle.

Which isn't an unusual thing.  In the past four years, since DH got the promotion that qualified him to get a company assigned vehicle for personal use, he has had each one for six to nine or ten months and then they call that vehicle back (where it gets sold as company used) and issue him a brand new one.  The EV truck came to him late last fall, so really, we were kind of expecting it to get called back soon.

What we hadn't expected, was the new vehicle to be what it is.  DH has been assigned one car, two medium-largish SUVs, and two trucks of varying size so far.  We figured he would get something in that category again: something we could haul stuff and tow a trailer with.

Uh, yeah.  This time, not so much.  He got another SUV, but this one is the smallest one yet (not counting the car, as you can't really tow anything with a car).  Ironically it is the same model of SUV that both Honorary Son and DD2 have as their daily drivers.  Works great for them who don't live on farms or haul anything other than passengers, groceries, and occasionally a small piece of furniture.  Will not work well at all for hauling anything big/heavy and shape-shifting like 50 pound grain bags--I know this because I have tried and the cargo space is so small you have to load the bags facing one particular direction and stack them because you can't fit two side by side. Grain bags don't necessarily stack well; they have a tendency to slide on each other and also come flopping out at you as soon as the rear (cargo) door is lifted. This size SUV also doesn't have the guts (or the labeling) to haul our 16 foot trailer with anything on it--like, say a pallet of baled horse bedding, or even two dozen bales of horse bedding. . .  We know this, because we've known this make of vehicle for the past seven years.

Well, poop.  Guess we aren't getting along without a real truck afterall.  Although, on occassion, it is possible for DH to borrow a truck from the fleet at work, provided they aren't all busy/assigned elsewhere on the dates he wishes to borrow one.  Which is how he was able to haul home all that free oak last week.  He requested to borrow a pickup for a week.  And we hauled all kinds of stuff with it.  Which made for a busy week indeed.

Free Oak Firewood? Yes, Please!

 Last week was a busy week in many ways.  One of which was DH hauling a truckload of aged oak firewood home after work three days out of five.  Those three days were his scheduled in-office days, and this free firewood just happened to be less than five miles from where DH reports to work.  A good friend of his who lives nearby alerted him about a neighbor who'd had multiple large oak trees cut down about three years ago and recently had come to the conclusion that he (neighbor) wasn't going to use that wood after all.  Now he just wanted it gone.

Now, oak has high BTU value, which makes it very desirable for using to heat our home in the winter.  As an efficient burning wood, it also has a high price if you were to need to buy it.  So of course free oak is something worth our while to go get if it's a reasonable distance away, or, in this case, pretty much on DH's way home from work.

In addition to those three truck-beds-ful, he also spent about 12 hours on Saturday running back and forth with our 16 foot trailer getting the longer and/or larger diameter stuff that wouldn't fit into the bed of the truck.  Unfortunately Saturday was a day of off and on deluge rain and thunderstorms, which meant sometimes he had to stop loading and take shelter for half an hour or so waiting for the rain to pass before continuing to load wood.

Still, he managed to bring home three trailers full plus fill the truck bed each time.  His friend came along to help unload at this little place here, and so when DH took the friend back home shortly before dark they unhooked and left the trailer here and just filled the truck bed for a fourth load.

That's a lotta wood.  The photo above is just the three trailer's worth and two truck-beds-ful.  It doesn't show the truckloads from earlier in the week (or later on Saturday) that were unloaded into a different spot closer to where we stack our split wood for the winter.

The picture below shows the truck loads from earlier in the week.  That was smaller stuff that mostly won't need to be split, just stacked.  Or maybe cut into the correct length and then stacked, as some are branches as thick as your arm but six or eight foot long.

DH estimates it should be almost the entire winter's worth.  We'll see. . . once it's split and stacked and we can see how many rows we get on the base made of pallets he and Toad prepped the weekend before, we'll have a better idea of how many heating months of wood he just got for the cost of fuel in the truck and his time.

Not Cheeseballs: A Grandkid Tale

 See these?  These, despite the orange coloring on the package, and being snack-sized bags, are not cheeseballs.

Apparently, to a five year old, who is on a long car ride with her Papa and Amma and eldest girl cousin, on a quick glance, they give off the impression that they contain cheeseballs.

This is a story from our family vacation to Myrtle Beach last month.  K3 and Faline rode with DH and I to South Carolina.  DD1 had packed a bag of 'road snacks' for the girls, all being things that she had recently gotten from her community's weekly free food giveaway for famlies with small children (these sorts of things have popped up during the summers in many communities around us since covid, no income limits on who can get them). You cannot pick through what is offered each week, you are simply handed a bag for each child that you have.  This week snack-type items the bag contained were apples, small packages of baby carrots, little bags holding 5-6 grape tomatoes each, cheese and prezel dippers (like you'd put in your kid's lunch box), and these bright orange and white crinkly bags of small crispy feeling snacks.

Faline was super excited about this bag of (to her) mystery goodies that DD1 had sent with her with the instructions that she (Faline) couldn't eat any of the items until Papa or Amma said that it was snack time.  So excited that we were only about five miles down the road from this little place here, and thirty minutes since breakfast, when Faline started asking if she could have a snack. 

About two hours into our long drive the first day of vacation, DH and I finally told her she could choose one snack from the bag. Faline handed me one of these packages and asked if I could open it for her.  She called it cheeseballs, and I didn't read the package at all, just opened the top and handed it back to her.

Shortly after, from the backseat, DH and I heard this exclamation:

"THESE ARE NOT CHEESEBALLS!!!" said emphatically with great disgust. 

Followed by "How could Mom do this to me?!?"

Which, coming from a five year old. this statement of seeming betrayal was incredibly hilarious.  

And, when Faline handed me back the package that I'd opened for her, I could see why she was shocked and felt betrayed.  The bag did not contain cheeseballs.  It held buffalo-flavored fava bean crisps. BLECH!  Yeah, if I'd been expecting cheeseballs and popped one of these spicy crispy beans into my mouth, I'd be sorely disappointed too.  Especially if I was a kid who couldn't read the package and was going only by the coloring and the cartoony figure on it..

I confess that out of curiousity, I did pop one into my mouth.  Uh, that's a big NO from me too.  Not the bean part necessarily, but the strong buffalo flavoring on it.  I'm not a fan of buffalo chicken or anything else buffalo, apparently including fava beans.  Cheeseballs would have been a thousand times tastier.

Make My Horse Life Easier Tip #11

Clamps!  Also known as grip clips, depending on the brand.

I love these things.  These are the kind that screw into the wall and grip the handles of things, thus holding them in place so they don't fall over.  I have them in my garage (broom, rake, spade), in my mudroom closet (broom, mop, etc), and in my barn (manure forks, brooms, etc.).  It's the barn application that I'm going to talk about here.

I could, and did for more than a year, just lean my barn cleaning tools against the wall.  That costs zero money to do and keeps things relatively orderly and upright.

Relatively.  

Which, over time, was not satisfying enough in the neatness or efficiency departments for me.  So in 2025 I took the clamps I had on hand that I'd originally bought for using in my garden shed (and hadn't yet because that project is still unfinishined, DH having lost interest and forgotten about completeing the little details once the walls, roof and doors were assembled together) and installed them in the barn.

I did use two different sizes, the large and medium, if I remember right, depending on how thick of a handle particular things had.

manure forks (and in the bottom right you can see the head of the extension duster)

the old broom I use for 'sweeping' up the saturated bedding in the pee spot(s) in stalls

There are still a few things, like the scoop shovel I use for wet bedding, and as a dust pan when sweeping the aisle, that get propped against the wall because their handles are super thick and I don't have a big enough clamp, but most items are hung and held in place with the clamps.

So now instead of everything being two or three tools deep and having to daily shuffle things to get to other things, and quite often having something get knocked over or tripped on, I have neatness and ease:

ah, tools neatly hung

It's so much more efficient, and satisfying, to have all the handles in a single layer and be able to quickly grab just the tool I want rather than shuffling through them all leaned against the wall .  These clips/clamps are another example of those little things that don't cost much at all but make life so much better.

I Know That My Suburban Lives

 Apologies to anyone familiar with the great hymn I Know That My Redeemer Lives who might see me as being flippant and irreverent.  That is not at all my intent here.  I love that hymn, which is why the title above, in my head, becomes a song sung to that tune.

I know that my Suburban lives!

What comfort this sweet sentence gives.

She lives, who once was given up for dead;

she lives and I'll drive her instead!

Allow me an explanation.  This is our 2005 Suburban that was my vehicle for nearly 20 years.  She's rusty.  She's got over 302,000 miles on her (original!!) engine and transmission.  

When we ordered Sweet Madame Blue in 2023, the Suburban went from my daily driver to my winter beater.  And then, in May 2025, her brakes started grinding, and DH didn't have time to replace them.  So she sat for a few months.  Then he decided that maybe he'd take her to the local auto repair shop and have them replace the brakes instead of doing it himself.  But it wasn't a priority, so she sat for another few months.  Then it was time for Sweet Madame Blue to go into hibernation in the garage for the winter, and, rather than do anything about getting those brakes fixed so I could drive the Suburban all winter, he decided it was just easier if I used the blue truck as my winter ride.

At one point, January, I think, he decided that rather than fix those brakes on the Suburban, he would just put her up for sale, as is.  We'd gotten a good twenty years out of her.  She's been from one coast to the other with us: Michigan to Florida, Michigan to South Carolina (multiple times), Michigan to Oregon. Multiple other states, even a few locations in Canada. She'd been through four teenage drivers and a (male) driver (and his buddies) who didn't always make the best decisions, and she had all the dents to show for it.  But yet, every time I (or anyone else) turned the key, she fired right up.  She wasn't ready for the scrap yard yet.  She just needed someone willing to replace the little things as they continued to get worn out over the miles and years. (Which, given recent history, was no longer DH.)

So, she sat at the end of our driveway, a for sale sign in her window, all winter and most of the spring.  Finding out that Craigslist now charges for automobile for sale ads, DH declined to list her online with them.  And, since he doesn't do Facebook, he declined to list her there either.  We're out in the country on a side road; we don't get much traffic other than tractors and our other rural neighbors (who mostly all have four-wheel drive vehicles of their own already).  Which means there wasn't much awareness of or inquiries into our Suburban.  One guy (a rural neighbor) wanted to know if we'd trade her for a dump truck load of gravel (uh, no.  Not unless that guy wanted to also give us some cash with that gravel, which he didn't).  But other than that, no interest at all.  So DH finally brought her back up to the house and parked her in our parking area.

And then, in June, he and the blue truck had an intimate encounter with a deer.  If you've been reading my blog this summer, you know how that turned out.  So, once we'd made our final decision on what to do with the totaled blue truck (you can read that here), I looked at DH and said:

"Why don't we take the Suburban in to get her brakes fixed, and she can be my winter beater again this year and I can also use her this summer and fall for hauling things like bags of grain that I used to get in the blue truck?  That way I don't have to arrange for you to go after work (and before the feed store closes) to get that sort of stuff  with me with your company truck."

Wonder of wonders, he agreed with me.  Probably because for over a month he'd found it rather inconvenient to haul farm related things for me.  A week later (because, if you know my DH, he only moves quickly on his own whims), we dropped her off at the local auto repair shop that we've used for more than a decade for things DH doesn't have the time (or tools in some cases) to fix himself.

And now, she's back on the road again!  I don't feel quite so helpless in terms of hauling things, I don't have to make arrangements with DH to go with me buy 50 pound bags of animal feed.  Because, honestly, that was really cramping my style, not to mention fuc messing up my horse training/barn work schedule.

I know that my Suburban lives! 

What comfort this sweet sentence gives.

She lives, who once was given up for dead;

she lives and I'll drive her instead!