Oy! Why didn't I think of that????

Wow! I am so impressed! Jelly and Jams are things I don't do. I feel like if I make applesauce I have stood at the stove too long! 😁

Well, I hate to say it, but it isn't much of a recipe. My kids like it tart so I get honey crisps, peel, core, chop, and cook down. We don't add sugar and freeze it in pint containers. Then when I serve it, I warm it and have some warm maple syrup in a little pitcher on the table which they can drizzle over it if they like. Sorry, not much help there!

I never thought about sauting mushrooms. How is the texture after freezing?

Ditto what everyone else said. In my area, they do not provide any in home care. It can differ by state and region. So we had to do all of my dad's meds and physical care. My mom even had to continue to drain his drainage tube so he could comfortably breathe and not panic. A nurse was slated to come in once per week to check on everything and see if his pain management was up to par. But he only blasted five days, so we didn't get that far. After he passed, the organization was wonderful about calling and checking on my mom and referring her for grief counseling for that first year so that was very nice.

I think that the FDA is just going to have to change those recommendations on vegetables. 1 tbsp should be a serving! 😁 I had four large heads of broccoli, and it only turned into five quart size bags. The brussel sprouts were in a box that my guess is would hold three or four quarts of strawberries so maybe a similar amount. Bagged up doesn't seem like much. My four large red bell peppers are going to dehydrate into molecules, 😂, but that is to be expected. It is also going to take 24 hrs for one batch, and I can't do more than two peppers at a time since my big dehydrator gave up the good fight after a decade. I will end up needing to do several batches of those. Next week I do carrots for stews. Mostly, if my family would just stop eating, that would be easier! 😆 The twenty something trio of boys asked for homemade applesauce for Thanksgiving and Christmas. They eat generous helpings of this. My guess is it is going to take a dump truck of apples. 😜 Anyone else in preserving/harvest mode yet? Trying anything new?

I agree. I think that changing family culture from one generation to the next is very challenging. And I am not sure that it happens all that often. I think some members of the next generation simply break off and don't look back, starting a new family culture of their own, and often ostracized by the family in which they were raised. I actually nothing that is easier, than standing up to family for what one believes is right or necessary and trying to change it from within and that includes other things like emotional abuse and manipulation, alcoholism, etc.

I live in a very rural area of the lower peninsula that has had a couple of locals associated with the group that plotted to kidnap our governor and her family, and assassinate her. People are beyond openly hostile with their extremism. Except for UMC, Presbyterian, Episcopal, Catholic, and Lutheran churches, the churches tend to be very fundamentalist even if not associated with fundie denominations, and largely ignored by denominational authorities. The independent churches also run very fundamentalist, very much "everybody else has a one way ticket to hell", and run Hell Houses in the fall, VBS's that focus on telling children that they will go to heel if they don't pray the sinners prayer and confess every little thing they can think of to god and their parents which seems to cause a good amount of emotional trouble in the children. The nearest city is 50 minutes away. The largest town has just under 4000 people. The county has lost a lot of population in the past two decades because of lack of decent employment for younger generations.

Agreed. Coronors are unfortunately, few and far between.

Oy! 50% of the population has a pre-existing condition called Y chromosome. I don't expect this particular pandemic to be an extinction level kind of event. On the other hand, it is seriously going to thin the herd if mutations keep getting worse. Lambda will likely be here soon. How many people have to die, how many applying for disability, how many children orphaned before the general public wises up????? 😡 It is no secret that this administration is having to hire a bunch of people due to the onslaught of disability applications due to long covid. This seems to me to be a pretty big clue. To quote a popular movie, "Hello! Anybody home? Think McFly, Think!" https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-tsunami-of-disability-is-coming-as-a-result-of-lsquo-long-covid-rsquo/

Though we are hunkered down now until ds leaves for his college dorms, I do want to get a bunch of veggies and fruits into my freezer for winter so I am going to a large produce stand, entirely outdoors, today. I am wearing a surgical mask under my cloth mask and have picked what the owners describe as a low time to go. Ds and dh are going fishing on Sunday to a rather remote, inland lake that is not likely to have anyone else there and if it does, that person is probably a DNR officer. So it should be just fine in terms of covid exposure.

They have surveyed rather informally in my town in which it looks like Mark and I, our college age son, grad school age son, and my mother are the only vaccinated people. Lots of homes with political and religious signage out that is anti-covid vaccine, and the one church in town actively campaigns against all covid protocols as well as the vaccine. There are about 200 people here. The hospital sent a medical van to do walk up vax because things are bit desperate in this part of the county. No takers. What they gleaned from the conversations they did have or more to the point, the yelling of insults and slurs at the van, was that people here have been told it is "the mark of the beast" and they will go to hell if they take the vaccine. Others have said they think masks are "the mark". The church has pretty big influence even among non-church goers in town. We have been open about being pro-vaccine, pro-mask, anti-parties and big gatherings from the beginning on what little social media we have as well as our own yard signs so we are viewed as dangerous people. I have found that one of the single most damaging errant theologies that has invaded many evangelical and fundamentalist churches is what is this End Times Eschatology. It really does make them see a boogeyman around every single corner. So much paranoia. Mom had measles and mumps as a kid, lost a cousin to polio. She remembers that measles ravaged her 5th grade class, and for the next two years they were all very sickly, weak, had a hard time putting weight back on, missed a ton of school, would lay down on the ground at recess instead of play, etc. The old country doctor told my grandparents that he saw this all the time in measles patients, some sort of post sickness syndrome that lasted a long time. Of course we now know measles has a tendency to wipe out a lot of immune system memory cells. She said mumps was the single most painful thing she has endured in life, and well, she has had some pretty bad injuries, and four surgeries so I think mumps must have been a pretty darn awful disease. To her, the prospect of long covid scares her more than dying of covid. Those measles and mumps memories never really waned. She is pretty damn mad at that town church right now! Our county voted 73% R, 2% third party/independent, and 25% D in the 2020 election. It has 38.8% of eligible persons 12+ with a single dose of vaccine. My township went 23% D, exactly one third party vote, and the rest R. Many of the houses that had R signs on their lawns are the ones that have anti-vax signs and also have anti-masks in school signs. So I do believe that in this area, it very much does go along party lines, and church division. Our district representative in Lansing is an R and absolutely a total covid is just a mere common cold nutter. All of our county commissioners are R's, and they have called the medical director of our county health department a witch, a b$tch, a liar, a communist, and an evil wench - in public meetings and they do not fear reprisals for doing it. She has resigned effective Sept.1, and we are going into a Delta nightmare with no one at the helm. Everyone they have interviewed for the job has been rejected for believing covid is a thing to be reckoned with, and they do not want a real medical director, just someone to the fill the desk because the state says they are supposed to have one. EMS is on the brink of just quitting en masse and leaving the entire county without ambulance service and medics. Their contract is up for renegotiation, and the company says it is considering pulling out and not even bidding. There is no other service who operates in this county or even wants to do so because of these commissioners. But if the editorials in the two newspapers in the county are any indication of public sentiment, these idiots are hailed as heroes.

Mark really likes the idea of regular Joe Olympics. He wants to organize the swimming events. 4x50 relay. Frog stroke, side stroke, dog paddle, and "get to the end however you can" for the last leg of the race. He recommends potty stops before the event starts because it will probably take a very long time! Personally, after watching the YouTube video of Katie L's 800 meter, I think forget drug testing. DNA tests! some of these people are definitely part porpoise!

Very true. Hospital ethics boards wrestle with this stuff all the time.

when I read this, I instantly heard Hunger Games, Effie Trinket, in my head. Kind of feels like that! Health line estimated that 60% of American adults have a pre-existing condition that makes them higher risk for covid complications. Sept. 3, 2020. I am not sure how accurate they are. Our doctor friend estimates at 45%. Either way, that is a rather startlingly large number, and variants keep getting more and more dangerous, we are going to experience a nightmare beyond our current imagination! My daughter was in tears yesterday. This topic is so close to my heart. Our little grandson was just diagnosed with a heart murmur, not just a mild, functional one, but a murmur that needs to be closely monitored. She was at the pharmacy wearing a KN95, and an anti-masker accosted her with "Faith not fear". Dd burst into tears. I don't know who this woman is, and I better not run across her the next time I am in Huntsville because I will yell at her so bad she will wish she hadn't gotten out of bed! 😠 But yes, it has also been said to my face that basically people with pre-existing conditions are expendable. The most interesting case was a pastor who is 60, very overweight, type 2 diabetic, and has high BP. He said so self -assuredly that the virus was only a problem for people with pre-existing conditions, and he just knew if he got it, it would just be like a 24 hour flu bug! 🤔😲 And here is the other crazy case, a family in our town with a child who had infantile spasms and after it was diagnosed several years ago had to go on 30 days of injections to stop them, dangerous injections of a hormone that suppressed the immune system and a simple cold could kill him. The whole family quarantined for six weeks, did not have visitors, asked family and friends to deliver their groceries and other supplies, and told said family and friends they wore masks in the house 24/7 to protect him. They would not let their other children out in the yard if anyone was on the sidewalk, and the kids knew to run back in if someone came along. Total hermits, PPE. Same dad and mom now claiming "faith not fear" and saying masks are the mark of the beast. So if it is their kid at risk, then prudence, caution, and extreme measures are okay. Someone else's kid? Who gives a crap. Let.it.rip. Oy. Really not a fan of people in general anymore.

I am always a little confused by folks who won't use a vaccine made with fetal cell lines that aren't even the original cells. Do they also refuse hypothermia treatment (derived from experiments on prisoners by Nazis), and other treatments that have unfortunately come from unethical experimentation in the last, often causing loss of life? Much of what we know today about cervical cancer came from many women not being told they had cervical cancer, allowing nature to take its course so the researchers could watch the disease progression instead of giving these women life saving surgery, anemia treatments derived from data mined from the Tuskegee horrors. Do those folks who protest fetal cell line vaccines also refuse cervical cancer treatment if needed? It seems to me that a consistent pro-life stance on the issue would mean rejecting many other treatments as well. Just curious. I don't have a dog in that fight because I am not concerned about next so cell lines.

No, that is not everywhere.

On the topic mentioned in the snippets, I think there is a very real danger there due to largely not well regulated capitalism. We have for-profit healthcare system based on insurance which bribes politicians with lots of campaign dollars to pretty much do what it wants. So, forget sick shaming as individuals, there is a real possibility that they will institute policies such as lowering coverage for unvaccinated individuals. That in turns often ends up falling on the taxpayers because medical bankruptcy has a cost to us all. On top of that, medical rationing already happening for many unable to afford their prescription meds, copays, or deductibles cause tens of thousands of deaths when not in the midst of a pandemic. Insurance companies deciding to increase profits to major investors by changing covid coverage for the unvaccinated could be absolutely catastrophic to this nation financially, and then horrific as the death toll rises due to people not going to the hospital with covid when they really should. and if allowed to do this, what else will they dream up not to cover? Dystopian. I feel like we have fallen into some kind of Hunger Games type novel. The system is just so broken. We desperately need universal healthcare. This pandemic just highlights how bad a for profit system is for the country.

Wow! Ugh.

And like my dh and me, vaccinated lots of precautions. As a nation, lots and lots of divides. Taking into account belief systems, there are religious divides over this as well with mainstream non-evangelicals like Episcopal, Methodists and Presbyterian taking more precautionary stands than other deniminations, plus divides in other religions as well.

And in the case of dd, transporting and treating a prisoner from the maximum security prison who told her when be got out, he was going to find her! Oy. Scary. Our HCW's deal with a lot of truly abusive, frightening, dangerous crap!! We don't appreciate them enough.

Astute. And again, it goes back to the role of government. People protest that government does not have a right to interfere in private business, and then the minute private business does something they do not like, suddenly want the big, bad gubmint to come knock the employer in the teeth. The logical inconsistency is staggering. Having watched my husband struggle through 30 years of employment in I.T., I can confidently say there are virtually no protections for employees. His corporate overlords can do just about anything they want with out fear. I think it need to change. He thinks it needs to change. Everyone who has worked a 100 hr. work week for no pay raise, bonus, additional vacation time, etc. while on salary thinks it needs to change. Everyone who is on call 24/7, and expected to work while at his son's hospital bedside thinks it needs to change. But when we advocate for that, we are evil liberals who want big government, and communists, and yadayayayayada. Same people then crap bricks if told by their employer to wear a mask or get a vaccine, all of sudden our "socialist" agenda sounds okay. Well, until they get their way on their issue, and then back to grousing about gubmint and liberals. It gets really, really old!

Applesauce, this looks like a lot of applesauce!

She could convert cash to a cashier's check at most banks for a fee even if not a customer of that bank, and her ex would not know. I think most apartments and utilities will take those bank checks. It means paying in person, and not the convenience of online, but would likely work.

Probably, but the apples will be okay! 😁