Round-up

It's been a while, but here's what I'm up to...
Reading - The Twenty-Seventh City by Jonathan Franzen. I think I wrote about reading The Corrections a while ago and mentioning that it took me a while to get into it. This one had me from the very beginning and it's been hard to put down and go to bed each night. I'm obviously loving it and I'll let you know if that changes by the time I'm done.

Listening - Hypocrite alert! I wrote a while back that I don't really like live music and then shortly thereafter went to see Arcade Fire. This time I've got tickets to see Andrew Bird at Memorial Hall. In my defense, I have always said (to myself) that if I had the opportunity to see him again I would (documentation!) so I could hardly pass up the chance.

Buying - prints from Berkley Illustration. I have wanted some of these for the longest time so now that I have a new space to decorate I'm switching up a lot of my old artwork for new stuff. I ordered the cheetah, the doe, and the goat and I think they'll fit nicely in the half bath. I love the little descriptions of each print so I will probably print those out and label each one once they are hung. These are really just the poor student substitute for Catherine Ledner's prints. Words cannot explain how much I love those photos.

Canning

I mentioned a while ago that my sister and I had visited my aunt to can tomatoes back in July. I've got some pictures of the three of us hard at work and will hopefully have some more later. This year was different from last year because my grandma wasn't there but we still had a great time and got a lot of work done. Our regular tomato place in Tennessee didn't have enough ripe tomatoes so we had to stop about a day earlier than we had planned and my aunt finished off the remaining tomatoes after they had time to ripen.

I've given away some of the spaghetti sauce and I took an appetizer of ripe tomato catsup and brie to a recent party but for the most part I've squirreled away the jars and saved them for myself. As the months go by, my shelf of full jars will empty and I'll accumulate more empty jars. Our family (and anyone else lucky enough to get sauce and juice every year) knows that you have to return your empty jars to get full ones next year. So as my supply runs low I'll be able to look at my empty jars and remember that we'll get to do this all over next year.