Jammed — only one man would dare give me the raspberry

Well, actually, it was my man’s mom, but let’s not split hairs.

So I’ve always been led to believe that canning was an extremely difficult task. Growing up I heard stories from classmates’ moms describing days and days of preparation, hard labor and the final push to preserve hundreds of jars of fruits, vegetables, jams, jellies, and……whatever. Well, if you’re going to do it all in one fell swoop and save all that work for just one time, I suppose it would be a giant pain in the ass to do canning.

But I know better now.

The key is to do small batches of canning. Take a few things that you would like to do today, and set aside three hours for working on this task. Yes, it is helpful that California has a year-round growing cycle, so it makes it easier to pick and choose the items and the timing for the canning process, but still—the idea of planning out your time wisely, not a bad one.

So this is what we did in our 3 hours of processing last night:

Step one. Unpack and wash the jars, lids, and screwtops. Sterilize by boiling in water separately. Keeping the jars warm after sterilizing also helps prevent temperature shock when you place the hot fruit in the jars.

Step two. Pick your pleasure. We were make jams last night. Peaches, nectarines and ripe raspberries! Wash and chop into small bits.

Step three. Read the damn recipe. Pectin is generally naturally derived from citrus fruits, and each little container you buy tells you exactly how to prepare the fruit and how much product to use for good gelling.

Step four. Fill the jars. Top with lid. Fasten screwtop. Process (i.e. boil) for 10 minutes.

Voila! DONE. Let set and enjoy.

Raspberry Chocolate Almond Spread

Nom-nom-nom-nom-nom-nom-nom-nom-nom-nom-nom-nom-nom-nom-nom-nom-nom-nom-nom.

I Git it

I am recently reinvigorated to work hard on the life I want to lead. My title of “Queen of the Geeks” has been slipping further away than I would like, but the idea and probable opportunity to be in Mexico for 3 weeks in December plus some real but horrible little annoyances have reminded me why I want to be out of the corporate world. I really DO want to work for myself.

 

So I am recommitting to Project Norbert. He’s my practice guide while I learn skills I need as a programmer. He was built as an expansion on a coding example for writing your own class in Ruby. I was working my way through Chris Pine’s tutorial and loved the idea of a pet dragon to play with virtually. G and I came up with the idea to model my exercise in writing my Dragon program after Bandai’s Tamagotchi. In having a direction to go and an example program to semi-emulate, I could make real world decisions on how my program would act. It would also help focus my next steps in learning on how to keep improving the interactivity of my Dragon. Things I would need Norbert to do next would stimulate ideas of new things to learn. One thing was leaning GitHub and version control, as well as learning to trust in others’ good intentions. So I’ve published Norbert online. To the public. For anyone to see. Here’s hoping his example and my skills gain traction and a clutch of code friends populate repos next to him.

So here we are—at Phase 2 of operation Liberate Modo. Let’s hope all goes well and in December you’ll be hearing from me from Mexico!

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