Funny things seen around town

First of all, canning season is done!! Yay!!!!!! It's officially done when I put away the water-bather pot (I'm sure this has a technical name for it but I prefer my use-descriptive one instead), I stop searching for Sure-Jell rather than any other lesser pectin, stop buying salt and sugar in abnormal quantities, and replace the tongs and jar lifters back into the drawer. I have no idea how much we canned this year but I'm pretty certain that we could live the rest of the winter on our applesauce, pear sauce, pickled beets, spaghetti sauce, and various jellies, although we would probably end up with some type of protein deficiency BUT we would be scurvy-free! Yay for no scurvy!!

We had been freezing our tomatoes as they came ripe so we could "can them at a later date" which made perfect sense every time you popped a tomato into the freezer but after a while, our freezer was only tomatoes and we had no room for ice cream (a true tragedy if you ask me!) So last weekend was "Can or Bust" weekend. Matt and I canned 5 quarts and 3 pints of spaghetti sauce which we cooked down in our Nesco cooker because we don't have enough large stock pots to cook down that much sauce (no one has enough stock pots unless you have an institutional kitchen with 30 gallon pots). We also made 16 jars of beet jelly. We could have made more. I had enough juice for one more batch but I was out of sugar, pectin, and jars. I only had jello and juice. SO, I made the hard decision and dumped the juice down the drain. Still, we have plenty of jelly! But now our freezer is ours again complete with pumpkin ice cream (very yummy!) and now when you open the freezer, frozen tomatoes don't come flying out at you like little frozen Ninja balls of death fruit.

School is going well. I found out that if I take a full load next semester (which I was planning on doing) and some summer classes (what else would I have to do in the summer), I can student teach next fall and then start job hunting/subbing more full time. Most of my classes are fairly easy but a couple (microeconomics) make me want to pull my hair out. But I just have to get through them and I will. (This philosophy comes with age, experience, and grad school, in my opinion. I would not have felt this way in Mer's undergrad experience, part 1, the saga begins)

Ok, for the true nature of this post:

Three funny signs seen this week:
Sign on a quik-lube place "Stop here for your tranny flush"
At a health foods place "Colon cleanse, yay!"
"O-B-A-M-A" spelled out on the sides of hay bales (true sign of living in the country, when you campaign for president using hay)