Oh the times, they are a-changing

It has been brought to my attention that I haven't updated my blog in a while. Since June. Like I didn't know that . . .

Here's what happened. While I was waiting for strawberry jam to seal on the counter, I composed several new blog posts. If I remember correctly, I was having some trouble getting Blogger to load my pictures in the correct order. Blogger was not the only source of trouble that day. Only two of my 13 or so half pint jars of jam sealed. The jam was a mess - the recipe I'd been using said to stir the jam till it "sheeted" off the back of a wooden spoon. I cooked the heck out of those berries and sugar, and it never sheeted. Eventually I just poured it into hot jars, figuring enough was enough.

So much for giving out strawberry jam to friends and family members as Christmas gifts. The jam, I have learned, is excellent for making Giant's Thumbprint cookies - I think I have used up about 3 jars of jam on 5 or 6 batches of cookies since making the jam. But that is all it is good for. It is almost impossible to spread at all, even on something as hard as one of Krista's Kitchen's sturdy "Best Crackers Ever." I pawned a few jars off on my immediate family, and the rest is waiting to be made into cookies, possibly for Christmas.

This summer my dad and I grew a decent garden, although I did not freeze much food at all - just a few batches of chicken stock made with garden ingredients and stuff from the farmers' markets and lots and lots of zucchini bread, zucchini muffins, and zucchini cookies. I didn't make it to as many farmers' markets as I would have liked, either. We did have a steady source of produce from our CSA (we just ate a salad out of the last box) but this was not a great summer for eating real food.

I spent most of the summer applying and interviewing for jobs, and doing some traveling. Michael and I took Amtrak out to Reno, Nevada for a Scrabble Tournament. We had quite the adventure getting there and back again. Not as much of an adventure as old Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit, but almost. I had a job interview the second day of the train ride out West. By the time we go to Reno, the train was something like 18 hours delayed, which got us to Nevada mere hours before the tournament started, instead of a full day. On the way home we were another 10 or so hours late, so we had to spend the night in Chicago before catching a bus back to Madison. That was going to be a blog post, but it never materialized. In general it was fine with us that the train was delayed - we got to see some beautiful sights in daylight instead of missing them in the dark.

Here are some pictures in reverse order:

The Rocky mountains, from pretty far away.

I don't really remember where this was but it was before we got to the Rockies.
Foothills of the Rockies?
That is a CAFO. This was in Nebraska. It was the first thing we took pictures of on the trip. Once I saw the cows, I had to dig the camera out. Apparently (I later learned) it is illegal to take pictures of these places. We'll see what happens.
More CAFO. Some women sitting in front of us wondered what kind of ranch this was. I told them that if they've ever eaten a McDonald's hamburger, or bought ground beef at the grocery store, the animals probably spent some of their lives in a place like this. This picture cannot capture how vast this place was, or how many cows were there.

Michael came in second in his division at the tournament. I did not.

We arrived home to Madison in time for me to go to the Art Fair on the Square with my mom, which has been a tradition for several years now. Then it was back to the grind - searching for jobs to apply for, writing applications, hoping for interviews, going to interviews, and then waiting to hear about jobs.

We also went to three weddings this summer, which were fun. Congratulations Krista and Nate, Mark and Pondie, and Charlie and Tricia!

By mid-August I had been offered two jobs, and ended up taking a full time job teaching both English and History in Pardeeville, where I taught half-time last semester. So far I am enjoying teaching, but it has significantly impaired my ability to garden, cook, and can. (It has interfered with my ability to clean, too, but I'm not complaining about that.)

In spite of getting a job shortly before school started, my dad and I made two batches of Barbara Kingsolver's spaghetti sauce in late August, and my mom and I made three canner loads (plus some!) of applesauce in October.

On the first day of school, Michael and I met at the bank at 4:00 to get preapproval for a home loan. Working with a realtor who we have known for many years through Scrabble Club, we started looking at houses. We weren't sure how house-hunting was going to go, as Michael wanted a new house and I wanted an old house. I was partial to two-story houses, and we really wanted to stay in our current neighborhood, even though it is not in the best school district in Portage. Two weeks ago, we accepted a counter-offer on an 11 year old house about a mile from where we currently live. It is also two blocks away from the best elementary school in town.

We will miss the river, the sandhill cranes who got into our engagement pictures and seem to return to the sandbar every spring (we saw them taking a goodbye-for-winter stroll along the edge of the sandbar tonight), and our wonderful neighbors. We will miss being a block and a half from the levy path that runs along the river. We will miss panoramic views of the changing seasons. We will not miss mowing the huge yard or only having one bathroom. I will not miss being a renter, although I am somewhat scared about the new responsibilities that will come with home ownership.

I'm planning a small garden at our new house (yay, even less yard to mow), and Michael has grand plans for the large unfinished basement, which will be his "man cave." (He has promised to let me set up a little corner of the basement for my 'reading nook' though.)

We'll be moving into the house during the month of December. It will be a happy, exciting, sad, fun time of change.

In the meantime, I'm keeping a day or two ahead of my US Studies students, trying to motivate my 6 Media Analysis students to participate, and feeling grateful that I have 18 students who, after about three weeks of school, finally learned to participate in American Literature.

It is the tail end of a 4.5-day weekend, three days of which I spent in Chicago spending too much money with my sisters. It was nice to kick back with my sisters, get pampered (mani-pedis on Friday), read (Snow Flower and the Secret Fan), eat, and shop. We stayed at the Inn of Chicago - the same place Michael and I spent the night after getting in to Chicago at 2 a.m., long after our bus had left.

Now it is time to get back to work, re-learning US Studies, creating an assignment sheet for Media Analysis, and reviewing The Crucible for American Literature. I like being a teacher. It is a lot of work, but it is work that I generally enjoy.

I don't promise to blog more frequently in the next few months, but here's hoping I have a garden next year, and that after my freezer is depleted this winter, I stock it back up next summer.