Spider of DOOOOMMMMMMM!! *gasp*

We encountered the biggest damn spider EVER today.

Matt was on his way down to the basement when he noticed a huge spider chilling in the upper corner of the stairwell. I wanted him to hold the flyswatter next to it so I could show how big it was. In my opinion, the next logical step would have been to kill it with the very same flyswatter. But, noooo....

Matt decides to use it to herd the spider towards me! *screams of outrage and pure panic*

Finally, he caught it in a plastic cup and decided that the humane thing to do was to put it outside so it could live. (So it can come back inside the house???) But the spider lived. And so did Matt...

Garage Sale Success Story

We had a garage sale!

It was a success!!

What? You were expecting more?!?

Well, Mom is moving to Korea the end of October so everyone has to get their stuff out of the house in order for us to get it ready for the renters. The general thought was, "What the hell are we going to do with all this shit?"

Our original plan was to donate it. But then we came to the conclusion that if people were willing to pay money to take our various pieces of junk off our hands then we would try out that option before hauling everything into the van, driving it across town, unloading it and wallowing in the general unhappiness caused by sweating.

It was such a rousing success that we decided to do it again next weekend! And the leftovers from that garage sale will be donated to charity, probably Good Will or something.

Feel free to come and peruse through our piles of discarded goodies to add to our worthy cause of padding our pockets and withholding from the needy!! (Or don't come, keep your house uncluttered and ensure that a minor portion of something gets wrested away from our greedy little fingers to help some person in need.)

Canning Party: Take Two!

If you read Saturday's entry, the original canning party was a disaster/fiasco. (You'd think that would abbreviate into "disco"...)

Luckily, today was Labor Day and no one was working. So to commemorate the day, we labored! Matt, Tim, Heather, Liz and I canned 28 jars of peachy goodness!! (Lesley supervised and taught us how to play cribbage.)

This is how the day went:

First, Matt and I went over to Lesley and Tim's. The canner and the various pots were already on the stove and filled with boiling water. Matt got the syrup started and prepped the first batch of jars.

Heather and Liz were on their way. In the meanwhile, I set to blanching peaches. (It turns the water a pretty pink color.)

Then I passed them onto Tim who slipped the skins. And finally, they reached Matt to get hacked in half and pitted. The girls got here in time to help pack the jars and pour syrup. And we had our first 7 jars of peaches in the canner! While we were waiting for them to cook for the 3o minutes, Liz decided it would be a good opportunity for her to take a nap.

So Lesley taught me and Heather how to play cribbage!! Matt suffered our one and only casualty when he tipped the lid off a pot towards his wrist instead of away from his body. *ouch!* But at the end of the day, we had rows and rows of beautiful peaches. And they lived happily ever after.

The End

Transformer's Burlesque

Heather had a birthday party. Last year's theme was toga. It was a lot of fun! We ran around everywhere in our togas and looked super cool. This year's theme...Transformers/Burlesque?!?

How in the world are we suppose to manage that? *utterly confused*

Like this!

And this!!

As it turns out, the idea was to dress burlesque and have Transformers themed plates, cups, etc. It was a little more doable that way. *sigh of relief*

We had yummy cocktails (with a virgin option, of course), swimming rama and ice cream cake!

Oh, the cake.

I guess Heather had a vision in mind as to how she wanted her cake to appear. (Wait! Let me precede this part of the story by telling you how much she loves Optimus Prime. I mean, she LOVES him. *psycho!* Back to the cake...) So she picked out her ice cream cake, bought a Optimus Prime figurine and made sure that is hand was formed so that he could hold up one of her candles.

Everything was going fine until we started lighting the candles. What in the world possessed her to have 24 candles on the cake?!? There was wax everywhere, some of the candles were already half melted and then Optimus's candle started to wilt. *mass pandemonium* OH NO!! Quick, Heather! Blow out the candles NOW!!!

Poor Optimus. Not only did he have to survive the trial by fire, he then was molested by Heather. It must have been a sad, sad day in his life... *moment of silence*

Moving on. We played a trivia game in which the object was to find out who knew Heather the best. Since Heather has a long held tradition of crying every birthday, I was sure this was her ploy to provide an opportunity in which she could sob maniacally while screaming, "You don't even KNOW me!!" Alas, it was not the case. And I won. Duh.

Then the fun part. SCAVENGER HUNT!! *super excited!!*

We had to all sorts of crazy things. Find someone wearing polka dots and take a picture with them, have someone serenade us, find a couple on a date and have the guy give us his number while his girlfriend took a picture with us, find a dent on a car and put a bandaid on it, pump gas for someone, make Heather's initials with our bodies and more! (All within an hour.)

Can you picture us running around in our burlesque gear at 10pm on Capitol Hill? FUN TIMES!!

Happy Birthday, Heather!

Canners of Peaches

Matt has become fascinated with the whole canning process. I have no idea what started him on it but it may have had a lot of factors. (Apparently, his mother used to talk about canning peaches as a child because her dad loved peaches. And while we were at the Farm, Gram had talked about all the different things they used to can every year before the winter. So, we're up to two factors... *counting diligently on my fingers*)

Matt LOVES peaches. And so it came to be that we decided to can peaches. I was actually excited. After all this talk about canning and everything, it sounded like a fun thing to do. And I love anything that involves large groups of people. People make everything even more funner! (More stressful too but let's overlook that. *grins* Also, if you could bypass the fact that funner isn't a word, I would appreciate that too.)

Matt's mom, Lesley, bought a canner and said that we could use it...in her kitchen, no less! YAY FOR LESLEY!! (And Tim! You can't leave out the husband. He lives there too.) My house is a horrendous mess right now between the remodel, the move and various other insanities. So it was seriously awesome that we had a kitchen other than mine to can in.

Matt and I set out on Friday afternoon to buy some peaches in Thorp. What a deal! *faints with joy* A box of peaches for $7.50?!? That's cheaper that at the grocery store even with all the driving! It was so pretty out there and the wind was insane. (For example, look at my hair. I would hope you wouldn't think that I actually style it that way...)

We brought home six boxes of peaches. We were hoping it was enough to can about 40 jars as well as leaving enough for us to share fresh peaches with other people. The only disconcerting things was that the peaches were as hard as rocks! They were cold so we hoped that once they warmed up that they would be ripe enough to can. *crosses fingers*

So this morning, we showed up at Tim and Lesley's with our boxes and boxes of peaches. Lesley had the whole kitchen all set up! She's so nice!! I was so unprepared because I had forgotten to read up on canning before joining the venture so I was pretty lost the whole way through. The basics were:

1) Blanch the peaches in boiling water for up to 30 seconds
2) Slip the skins of the peaches
3) Cut the peach in half, pit and scrape away fibers
4) Stuff as many into a hot jar without making a pulpy mess
5) Ladel in the syrup
6) Remove the air bubbles
7) Wipe the lid, screw on the top then set it in the canner to boil for 30 minutes

Woah! That's a lot of steps!!

Luckily, we had lunch first. *yum* And Matt's aunt, uncle and cousin showed up to eat with us. They're very nice people and Natalie is adopted from Korea which is super cool. Soon lunch was over and it was time to can.

WHAT A DISASTER! WHAT A FIASCO!!

We blanched and blanched those suckers and the skin would NOT come off. Finally, we gave up because we were practically cooking them to death. So we had to peel them with vegetable peelers which should have given us the first clue that they weren't ripe enough to can. But we were determined! They had a slight yet distinct green tinge to them (indicating non-ripeness) once the peels were off yet they were still passed off to the cutting board. Then the circus act began.

We sliced it in half and then tried to twist the halves off. Do you have any idea how hard it is to try and twist a peach in half when it's hanging on to its pit for dear life?!? Needless to say, there were a lot of peaches that popped up and out between fingers covered with peachy slime. They flew into the sink, onto the floor and everywhere. We were a mess! And yet, still determined. We managed to find the ripest peaches from all six boxes and were able to can one jar of peaches. ONE. *laughing hysterically*

It was still fun. With all the "not quite ripe" peaches, Natalie and I made cobbler. Lesley had a fantastic recipe. We added our own secret ingredient. (Orange extract) And it was SO good! All in all, I think it was a successful day.

P.S. By the way, the first jar of peaches looked good in the picture. But the fruit shrank a little after being boiled and it ended up looking like specimens floating in peach-colored formaldehyde. I'm assuming it's not suppose to look like that...