What I've Been Up To

Okay, so I was shocked when I saw the date of my last post.  Not that I have a bazillion readers checking daily, hungry for the latest and greatest of The Nilla Life (it's not that exciting...).  But I thought it had only been a week.  Not 11 days.

I say it a lot, but I don't know where the time goes.  It's kind of getting annoying, if you want to know the truth of it.  My "things to do list" never gets crossed off all the way (a true tragedy in the Nilla Life) -- and instead I'm adding to them!  Yes, I'm probably whining.  But seriously.  Where is the time!?!

We are smack dab in the middle of buying the house.  We had our home inspection and the biggest concern there is the wiring.  Which we already knew and had planned to fix.  The inspector said it is a sound house based on his inspection.  There are cosmetic things to do -- like repainting almost everywhere.  But those don't affect the stability of the house.  We are going to remodel basically the whole upstairs (and eventually finish the basement), so there will be a lot of work to do before we even move in.  But we'll get there.  And hopefully by next summer, we'll be enjoying apples, pears, peaches, plums, and grapes (yep, we found more fruit!!) from our very own yard :).  I'm pretty excited about that.

Speaking of fruit...  This brings us to one of the things that has been taking up a lot of my time.  So last Friday, one of the gals I serve with in Primary has a plum tree in her yard.  She had a ton of plums and wasn't getting to them fast enough.  So she offered some to me and another lady during our presidency meeting.  So I grabbed about 1/3 of a grocery bag full and proceeded to make plum jam on Saturday night.  I found a recipe that didn't require pectin, but since I had tripled it... Well, it took longer to boil down.  But here's a picture of one of the jars.  It only made 2.5 pints and since Jeremy goes through jam fast, I didn't bother to can them -- just screwed on a lid and put them in the fridge.

I've already tried it on a pb&j last week and it is tasty.  Probably mostly because I made it, and there's just something enjoyable about enjoying something you made...

Well, then Buck from the funeral home had a ton of plums and sent a huge box with my mom to me.  Approximately 17 pounds worth.  And so Jeremy and I spent Monday and Tuesday nights chopping up and freezing plums.  I ended up with 44 cups -- all in my freezer (it's a scary place in there right now...  I had to rearrange stuff for about 5 minutes to get the door to close...).  Then Buck sent home  a huge grocery bag full of green beans for me too.  Phew!  So last night, Jeremy and I rinsed and snapped them.  And today I par-boiled and froze them.  I don't have a pressure cooker to do pressure canning, and apparently that's the safer way to go with veggies.  So I just froze them.  I ended up with about 20 cups of those frozen.  And yesterday they had 6 ounce containers of raspberries for $1.00 each.  I stocked up on 10!  I ate one with Lea at her house when we did breakfast yesterday.  Kept 3 more in the fridge (but rinsed them).  Froze the other 6 in 3 2-cup baggies.  For future raspberry coffee cakes :).  Which will be featured at our next Friday breakfast in two weeks...  So here's the frozen abundance:

I'm hoping next weekend I'll be feeling ambitious and I will make a ton more plum jam and can it (we have plenty of storage under our bed ;)!) and maybe also the pepper jelly.  Because after the Temple today, I went out back at my mom's and harvested everything.  Because today was the return of the rain.  And being that it is the end of September, I'm pretty sure we are done with our hot sunny days.  I got quite a harvest though, considering how little work I did!  And I plan to make the jalapeno pepper jelly as well as some home-made rotel with the tomatoes and the remaining peppers.

So yeah...  That has consumed a lot of my time.  And will consume more.  And now, it's time for date night :).  We're going to snuggle up and watch a movie while sipping a smoothie :).  Oh...  Did I mention we got a tv for free?  It's an old-style heavy one.  But it was free and since we don't watch tv all that much...  Well, I'm content with it.  However, it's ginormous and dwarfs the living room.  Haha...  That's what happens when you live in less than 500 square feet!  But not for much longer!  Yay!!

Oh...  And here's a stupid Nilla moment for you...  Tuesday night, Jeremy was taking out the trash after I'd been home for about 2 hours.  On his way back in he showed me I had left my keys in the door.  For two hours.  We live on a rather busy road (literally right on the road) in a sketch part of town.  We count it a miracle that my keys were still in the door.  As in my car key (still the only one we have) and my house key.  Ummm... I freaked out a little and lost it a little.  How does one do something so careless?  Ugh.  But like I said... A miracle.

So here's our monstrosity.  And our snuggly pictures :).  I'm off for more snuggling!

He tolerates all my picture posing so well... ;).  Haha....  Faces like this are the reason he has to pose a few more times :).  But isn't he a cutie?

P.S... He's on graves next month. Gag me now.