Catch Up

Well…I’m back! And in more ways than one:  back to blogging and back in good health. Thank you for all your good wishes and thank you for being patient with me in my absence. All of you mean a great deal to me.

If someone had told me a year ago I would have a problem with my thyroid that would turn my life upside down and take about a year to fix I would have thought they were nuts.  But that’s what happened to me and today I’m doing much, much better and am back to my old self.  I’ll share my thyroid story with you soon. But today I want to briefly bring you up to date on what we’ve been doing since I was last here on the blog.

Back in August, the wild plum trees we planted in our yard several years ago had fruit for the first time.

I picked several buckets and made wild plum jelly.

Over Labor day, we took another trip to Maine. Ironically one of the neatest pics I took, or rather Harland took with my phone, was of the Chicago skyline.

Back home again, the apple trees were weighed down with fruit.  In the town where I work, a resident with a small orchard in his yard put up a sign, “Help Yourself.”   So we did:

And then I made 10 pints of apple butter.

Kitty made another trip to the vet, this time just an annual check up and shots.

I wish I could say she behaved, but that would be a big fat lie. She was a good girl until the end of the visit when the vet and I were putting the top back on her carrier and she lost patience with us. There was hissing and taking swipes at the both of us.  Bad Kitty.

Back at home she engaged in some drier therapy to recover from yet another indignity from the evil humans:

Kitty:   “Put another load in, this one’s done.”

I picked more apples,

and while Kitty slept in my clean laundry, I put up 11 bags of sliced apples in the freezer, all ready for pie or cobbler-making this winter.

I also made 10 pints of applesauce:

I cleaned out the closet near the front door sorting everything there into piles.

Do we really need this many pairs of chore gloves?

Harland bought me a new vacuum cleaner:

I’m so excited! It replaces my 20 year old dinosaur and about sucks the carpet off the floor. Does a great job on hard floors too.

This was the result of the first cleaning:

Shocking!   The old vacuum was really falling down on the job.

Recently I made a new recipe: Apple Pumpkin Bread.

Yummy!  I’ll share the recipe with you soon.

And finally, here’s a selfie I took over the weekend.

I sent it to my sister. She has straight hair and I wanted to gloat about my curly hair which she is jealous of. After all, what are sisters for?

 Be back soon….

xoxoxoxoxoooxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo