Octocon was this past weekend, and a fine Octocon it was! I decided to do a dealer’s table at the last minute, and it went…well. I brought jam and books. About…70 jars of jam, and 30-40 books. In fact, I had to restock for the second day, because what I’d brought on day one had sold out to the tune of about 80%, which was sort of Beyond My Expectations. I don’t seem to have gotten a picture of the books on day one, but (first photo courtesy of, by…
I keep doing things and not having time to blog about them. Or not thinking to. Or thinking to but deciding sleep is better. Or that making pear jam is better. (It turns out making pear jam is a GREAT idea.) yeah, so the thing is that I have, like, a ton of jam-making posts to do, except they’re all just pictures of jam in the process and that starts seeming boring and…anyway, I made crabapple jelly that’s perfectly gorgeous and I made…in fact I made 4 kinds of jam…
I went blackberry picking this morning, which I’ve been feeling torn up about having had no time to do. (I genuinely feel better for having gone.) I’d found a good run of them a couple weeks ago and went to check it out, to great success: That’s over a kilo of berries picked in about 45 minutes, which I felt was a pretty good haul. While I was picking, one woman walking by said, “Good day for picking!” and another one who had been out picking yesterday actually stopped to…
We picked apples on Sunday. This warped panorama does not do justice to the numbers of apples currently residing in our entryway: The bag in the back corner, and the white box, which is like 2×3′ or something, are also full of apples. There are So Many Apples. There’s a fairly large bag already missing, too, as I sent one home with my sister. A friend just dropped by and took away the small box next to the plant pots and the black bag at the foot of the photo,…
We discovered we have a crabapple tree in the front garden. Chaos immediately ensued, resulting in this: I may have a fruit problem. Today I washed and chopped and boiled and strained all EIGHT POUNDS of those, and by the time I was done I was too tired to make jelly even if all I had to do was pour it all into a pot and boil it with sugar for fifteen minutes. And actually jar it. That was the part that seemed too hard. But the juice is an…