Every so often we have a weekend where we are more exhausted at the end than necessary. It doesn’t happen very often, just often enough that Tom and I look at each other with joint expressions of “WTF?” and “Is it time for the boys to go to bed yet?” and “whimper…” This has been such a weekend.
Not a bad few days, by any means, just busy and exhausting.
Like planets that finally align, this weekend had 1)us both in town, 2)warm, sunny weather, and 3)nothing on the calendar. Yesterday was yard work day. The day that Tom finally mowed the lawn with his new electric/cordless mower. Finding one to replace the electric/cordless that died mid-mow 2 weeks ago has been a quest for him. He also planted the vegetable garden, started the sprinkler system, and discovered that when the nursery came out this past week to replace the tree that didn’t make it through the hellish winter, they sliced through a drip line. And that was one hell of a run-on sentence. But I digress. While he was doing the outside stuff, I was inside, playing out the life of a 1940s housewife. I was entertaining guests, working with the exterminator, and (God help me) making rhubarb jelly.
Yes, my friends, I made a sextuple batch of rhubarb jelly yesterday (that’s 6 batches, for those who don’t want to reach for the dictionary. How many containers, do you ask? I stopped counting at 20). And today when it was cool, I went to put it all in the freezer in the garage. What did I discover there? Three containers of rhubarb jelly from last fall. And apple butter. And peach preserves. And roasted tomato sauce. And spaghetti sauce. And the pork and beef we got from the processor. And frozen pizzas. It looked like Little House on the Prairie had a one-night stand with Costco.
I wasn’t very keen on making rhubarb jelly when the temperatures were in the 80s; that’s a bit warm for standing over homemade napalm…uh, boiling sugar. But Roger the Wonder Shrub (aka the rhubarb plant hell-bent on world domination) is having a growth spurt and if I didn’t do something with the (ahem) 42 cups of chopped rhubarb in the freezer, we were going to have a problem.
A went to a birthday party today. I should have skipped running to Target to get the twins’ gifts and instead just given them jelly.
We hosted Balloonfiesta this morning at the unholy hour of 6 am. Why? Because that’s when the balloons go up. My five favorite ladies and their families trek up to my house and we watch 60+ balloons launch from behind my house while we eat, drink, and be merry.
Two of them went home with jelly. The others hid.
I saw my neighbor outside this afternoon. She got jelly. (And she just stopped by with oatmeal-three kinds of chocolate chips cookies. Mmmmm…)
If you come by my house and try to sell me meat off a truck, you’re gonna get jelly. You’ve been warned.
And our final bit of home improvements for the weekend (after two trips to Home Depot and one to the liquor store), is to do something about the crushed gravel patio we have. The crushed gravel patio has a summer home on my kitchen floor. Apparently it doesn’t much care for the outdoors and migrates in on the boys’ shoes. I hate the crushed gravel patio, it angers me and my sweeper. So today…sigh…today we nailed down fake green grass outdoor carpet in an attempt to keep the crushed gravel patio in its place. It’s a lovely shade of holy crap that’s green!, but I’m sure with the summer wind dust will temper the color.
And now, while Tom finishes that up, and A plays and J naps (as we all should be doing because of the early morning), I will go and complete my weekend of 1940s housewife and begin supper.
What’s for supper?
Rhubarb jelly.