Look at all those lovely tomatoes (even though I can totally understand feeling like they will never end). I see you cooking them down. What are you planning to do with them? I had planned to grow potatoes but between my bad foot and the extreme surplus of peppers plants from the greenhouse, they just never happened. I do have some starting to chit on my counter so I will stick them in buckets and set them around the cucumbers in my basement. I did the last year and the overflow light was plenty to keep the potatoes happy.

yeah for me walk is a little more aw sound and wok is a bit more ah sound but not quite a full short o sound either, kind of in between. But to answer the original question, no the l doesn't make a sound on it's own but it influences the sound the a makes.

Overstock bought the name and now uses it. But I agree, my basic one has worked fine for many years.

I never realized how much this must vary depending on location. 25-30 years ago, hospitals in my area were mostly 2 to a room but as they've remodeled (and every single hospital I've been to has), they have all switched out to private rooms. Even the hospitals that are twice as old as I am, are all single rooms at this point.

I think it depends on who is in the hospital and why that person is in the hospital. My mom was recently in the hospital including being med flighted to a bigger hospital. Normally we would have someone with her for all hours that visitors are allowed. For this we made sure to have at least 2. Reason being, the support person needed a break but there were doctors to discuss things with and one never knew when they would appear. Phone calls had to happen and either you stay in the room and disturb the patient or you step out and miss a doctor/therapist etc. Mom understands most things but gets confused very easily and also forgets. Someone needs to be there at all times just so that the family gets the correct information, can ask questions etc and then re explain it to mom everytime she forgets. So in the case of your MIL, I can totally see having a couple of people there as much as possible even if it's just to give FIL a break from sitting there all day. Now if they are making noise and disturbing MIL than sure they need to tone it done but at least in my mom's case, she slept when she was tired and nothing that happened around here interfered with that. But for someone like a new mother, or who was recovering from surgery who generally just needed to sleep and didn't need a support person to understand what was going on, yeah, I would find having several people in the room exhausting.

Could you sew a thin piece of fabric in to cover it?

I use the stick blender which doesn't whip them as frothy as the stand blender. Then I cook them another 15-20 minutes (but have to stir often). That gives it enough time for the extra air to work it's way back out. But I gave up removing the skin on tomatoes years ago. As long as they are fine pieces I don't mind them at all.

Gee I think I could have written this post except the reason my tomatoes didn't get staked is because I sprained/fractured my foot and it was too painful to make the effort to stake them. But looks like you have a busy week ahead of you! Hope you have lots of uses for them. I'm finding I have enough made of my normal things and am trying to figure out what new things I can make to use up the surplus.

Saturday we cleaned and froze 40 whole peppers for stuffed peppers this winter. Sunday I canned 8 quarts of spaghetti sauce. Tonight I froze about a quart of cherry tomatoes plus put another 4 quarts in the dehydrator. That with what DS took emptied the picked cherry tomatoes, but tomorrow is picking day for those. I filled the rest of the dehydrator with sliced tomatoes (so probably close to half a bushel) and weighed out the 20 pounds I need for tomorrow's batch of spaghetti sauce. Still have about 3/4 of a bushel on the table to dela with but I picked them a little less ripe than I normally would since rain is forecast and I didn't want them to split. I'm hoping they will hold till Saturday because I'm not sure I'll get to them before then. Tomorrow's project is turn the 20 pounds I weighed out into spaghetti sauce and then can it. Blanch, slice and freeze the bushel of peaches on my table. Pick the cherry tomatoes (and hope it is smaller than the last picking which was 7-8 quarts worth). I need to get the eggplant picked but it keeps getting pushed off because I run out of energy (Iron is very low and I need to go get an infusion but just it just takes a while to work through the medical system to get it all set up). Raspberries are starting but from the looks of it, it will be a smaller crop so hopefully we will be able to keep up with everyone just going out for fresh snacks and not have to find time and energy to pick and process. Enough peppers have turned colors since this weekend, that I need to make another pass and get them picked too. But since I have no fridge space, we will have to clean and core them the day I pick so they can go straight into the freezer. Might be able to squeeze that in Friday afternoon but we shall see. I think my watermelon will be ready soon too. I haven't grown them before so not sure how to tell when they are ripe. Google says when the tendrils start drying up near the melon so I'm watching it closely and hope I time it right. I discovered a lone volunteer cucumber plant in an area I ripped up last fall and then covered with wood chips (for my future perennial flower bed) a few weeks ago. It's on the path to the compost bin so I assumed DS dropped something there. Was out today and picked 2 cucumbers off it. Since my other cucumbers all succumbed to the wilt over a month ago it was a welcome surprise. What I find most interesting is that it a variety I had planted last year and not this year so the seed had been laying out there all year and still took until July to germinate. Such an interesting thing. It is a parthenocarpic variety which in my experience are much heavier producers than others and this guy seems to be following that trend, he's absolutely loaded with baby cucumbers. Hope the cucumber beetles stay far away and this guy keeps producing into October when my indoor cukes should be starting.

I talked DS into stopping by and picking up a shepherd's pie I had made. I was needing to make freezer space for the peaches. While here, I was also able to send him with a couple of quarts of sunsugar cherry tomatoes a couple of red peppers and a small cantaloupe. I was glad to help him out with his grocery budget but also really glad just to move something out without having to process it. Like you I'm getting tired of it and there is still much to do.

Add me to the list of kids who grew up with horrible gym teachers. I vividly remember my 7th and 8th grade teacher. He was the basketball coach and loved sports and of course every else should too. When we did track and field everyone had to run a mile. Anyone who finished in under 8 minutes was "finished" with that activity and moved on to other track and field things and eventually group sports. Next class anyone who didn't finish in 8 minutes or less got to run the mile again if they finish in under 8 1/2 minutes they were done. And so it went, every class period it went up by 30 seconds. I remember the last girl. She had asthma and couldn't even run a whole lap before needing to walk and catch her breathe. We had class 3 times a week and she was out there well over a month after everyone else finished. I know her time was well over 20 minutes. I always felt so bad for her like why couldn't the teacher just say good enough or bump it by a minute or anything to give her a break but nope. Anyways, I coordinate a gym class for our homeschool group. I describe it as gym class for couch potatoes. The goal is for the kids to have fun while moving their bodies. If too many kids complain about the scheduled activity, the teachers change it and we remove it from the schedule for a few years. Even though we at times do traditional sports, there is a lot of leeway in the "rules" so that even the "worst" performer can be successful. We had one family whose kids were in competitive sports leave because we were too casual on the rules and her kids didn't think it was fair that people got extra chances but everyone else loves the relaxed set up. But yes much of the way it's structured is in backlash to the horrible gym classes of my youth. There is no reason that schools can't make exercise fun and children should not be dying because of it!

Funny you should mention these. I had never heard of them till last week when my doctor recommended I get some for my foot (I severely sprained my foot and had a slight ankle bone fracture in May and I'm still having issues). I got them about 2 days ago. There are definitely cushy but I still don't like them. For me the arch seems too high for my natural arch (I did have to wear arch supports as a kid since mine were low even then). But on the flip side, the achiness I was experiencing in my arch and the pain from the bunion I developed from the boot have improved from them. So while I greatly dislike how they fit my foot and how they feel when I walk, I'm still wearing them.

My tomatoes and peppers are flooding in now but unfortunately I've lacked the time and energy to keep up. But for my third weekend in a row, I've loaded up the dehydrator with tomato slices (probably about 1/2 bushel or so fits) and made spaghetti sauce in the digital pressure canner. The last two weekends it was a double batch (10 pounds of tomatoes which worked out to about 4 jars of sauce) but this weekend it's a 4x batch (so 20 pounds). I'm going to have to do another double batch tomorrow and then cook down a roaster full for some stuffed peppers. That should leave me another 10 pounds on the table to deal with. Sadly if it cools down enough I need to go pick again tonight. There is easily another 40-50 pounds ready to go. I also have somewhere between 1/2- 1 full bushel of colored peppers to pick and hollow out for stuffed peppers (I just free them empty since I don't have time right now to make the filling). That leaves me the eggplant, cherry tomatoes, and poblano peppers to deal with in the coming days. I also have a bushel of peaches I picked up yesterday sitting on my table to finish ripening. I hoping to them Wed/Thurs. depending on how fast they finish ripening. I am tempted to try FaithManor's peach salsa even though I generally hate sweet/savory combos. I expect other people in my family will appreciate the effort because they enjoy those combos. And then by next weekend the tomatoes I get pick this weekend will be more than ready to be processed. I did get my winter cucumbers transplanted into the pot in my basement and get a trellis hooked up for them to climb. If all goes well they should start producing late October which will time well since the outside summer veggies will pretty much be done by then and we are not as fond of squashes and root veggies they we typically have readily available in the cold months. Oh and the ginger I planted is started to pole through the soil. I was pretty excited to see that as it's a totally new to me thing.

I'm so sorry! Those things are awful to deal with. Do you happen to have any lavender essential oil available? I generally think of essential oils as nice things to smells (despite all the people who think they do everything including curing cancer), however I do really think that lavender oil helps with burns.

Mine wasn't that bad. Just one small fracture that they weren't even sure was a fracture until it started healing. The bigger issue was the severe sprain (with the majority of my foot turning purple at various stages of healing). If it wasn't for the boot, I would have had no garden! As it was I did have to rely on the kids to help me move a lot of things so most of what I did was sit and plant. Yes there is so MUCH to learn about gardening. I grew up working in the greenhouse so have tons of knowledge from a lifetime of working with vegetable plants and I STILL learn new things every year.

This year I planted 29, down from my usual 40 or so but I'm still using tomatoes that I canned in 2020 (I had 89 that year because I hated to see the greenhouse leftovers end up in the compost), so I've been trying to plant a few less so I don't get so overloaded on tomato products. I'm in zone 5a. I never ever ever prune a tomato plant! What you are pruning is your next crop of tomatoes. Pruning MIGHT make them slightly bigger but I care far more about quantity that size since 98% of them are getting chopped up in some fashion or another (well technically 100% are chopped, the 2% I use for BLT's that I want big are sliced too). I always but a large cage and then using 3-4 stakes (6-10 feet tall depending on the variety) but I fractured my ankle this spring and still haven't fully recovered so they each only got the cage and one stake. So they are definitely flopping more than I'm used to but it's what I could do this year. However the Amish paste don't care, have grown straight up through the roof of my cage and I have a couple of feet of plants and lots of tomatoes growing above the roof. A couple have ripened but I haven't had a chance to open the roof to harvest them. Just wasn't something I had considered when I built the cage. I do plant my tomatoes with a large quantity of egg shells (and this year used some bone meal because I hadn't had enough shells since we didn't use many eggs when the price was so high) and some time released fertilizer. They do get regular daily watering since I have a drip line installed so I never have to worry about uneven watering. But my only other tip is to make sure you have some decent soil (or mix in a large amount of peat moss and compost to improve the quality) as tomatoes are heavy feeders so really need good access to "food".

I've tried many flavors of oreos (I have a kid who loves to try all thing new, so buys every new flavor of oreos, pot tarts, mountain dew, cherrios etc that comes out) and all I can say is I have never been able to understand the appeal of them. The cookie is so utterly dry and tastes likes cardboard. The filling is usually okay but it seems so wasteful to buy them for the filling and turn around and throw the cookie out. The one exception is they once made pistachio flavored filling with the thin cookies. I actually really liked those, sadly they have been discontinued.

I am picking probably 2/3-3/4 bushel of tomatoes a week now. We eat a few meals with tomatoes during the week and each weekend, I load up the dehydrator with sliced tomatoes (minus the first slice off the top and bottom) sprinkled with salt and dry oregano. Takes about a half of bushel to fill and when dry they all fit in a gallon jar. I'd love to get 8-10 jars (because DS eats so many during the winter) but we will just have to see how long the tomatoes hold out. Then I take the rest of the week's picking and make spaghetti sauce. Got 4 quarts last weekend and 4 this weekend. I have oodles of peppers I need to get picked but I was just too tired to muster the energy to tackle that. Hopefully I'll get to it in the next few days. I also need to pick cherry tomatoes. I'm picking about a gallon every 2-3 days. Youngest DS has mostly been keeping up eating them all which is fine by me. I haven't had a lot of time to work on preserving so as long as they aren't going to waste, I don't care if he eats them all fresh. I harvested my first homegrown cantaloupes and they were delicious. The watermelon are almost ready too. The okra is a completed dud this year. The plants struggled in the greenhouse and just never took off. They are the spindliest looking plants I've ever had and are lucky to produce one pod a week on each plant (and only 4 plants survived). Not much I can do with only a few pods a week so I've just been tossing them into other things just so they don't go to waste but I can't really taste them that way. A few of the fall raspberries are starting to turn pink so I would expect in another week or so, it will be time to start picking those. Even though I hate to think of winter coming, I realized I need to get things started if I want to maintain a continuous supply of fresh veggies so I did start cucumbers and tomatoes for my winter garden this week. Cucumbers should start producing the end of October and the tomatoes by the middle of November. My tomatoes from last winter are still producing too but we only get a few each week. I tossed some radish seeds in the other end of the pot since it's just empty space right now I figured I should put it to use. I also had some ginger starting to sprout on the counter so for fun I stuck it in a pot of dirt that was sitting around. We will see what happens. I've got some potatoes on the counter starting to chit so when the cucumbers are ready to go in the big bot downstairs (and thus warrant turning on the grow light), I'll stick them in some buckets to make use of the overflow light.

You definitely need to. You can make it as hot or mild as you like. The sugar counters the spice but you can leave seeds in or take out as well as adjust the cayenne pepper to moderate heat. The first time I made it, I just cooked it extra long on the stove (to simulate the cooking time for canning) to see how we liked it and then modified the heat from there for canning. These are the recipes I use. Cowboy Candy - Check this out! - SBCanning.com - homemade canning recipes Spicy BBQ Sauce Canning Recipe Using Leftover Cowboy Candy Syrup (ourlittlehomestead.org) There is another version called cowboy delight that is a bit milder and includes pineapple. I don't like it nearly as much but one of my kids prefers it. Pineapple and Jalapeno's - Hawaiian Cowboy Delight! - SBCanning.com - homemade canning recipes

Have you ever made candied jalapenos (aka Cowboy candy)? They are an amazing snack with cream cheese, I also like to pour some on roasts when cooking for a bit of sweet heat. The extra brine can be used to make an excellent BBQ sauce.

I was home sick that day too but I don't remember what grade I was in. I just remember being so annoyed because it was on EVERY channel (there was only like 5 to choose from) and they interrupted every single one. I was sick and miserable and then completely bored because I really didn't care one bit about what happened. I was driving to my lifeguarding class when the wall came down. I've always found the news to be incredibly boring so paid very little attention to it. But my dad had it on before I left for class and I actually turned on the radio to continue to follow the story on my way to class. I remember sitting in the parking lot at the YMCA, trying to decide how long I could listen and still make it into to class on time. I was home with my oldest two kids on 9/11. We didn't have a TV (and still don't) so the only coverage I saw was what I could find on the internet (there was still plenty). I honestly don't remember Columbine at all. For some reason this one (nor any of the shootings) have ever stuck in my head as important/traumatic/? (can't really find the right word). I realize that sounds terribly cold-hearted but for some reason they just don't hit me emotionally the same ways as the others do.

Other providers. I don't like grading writing nor discussing literature so I outsource English starting in 7th grade. I've never used R &S so I can't say. My kids mostly use CLE on their own. I will provide clarification if they are struggling with a concept but the lightunits provide enough instruction that my kids don't need much instruction from me at all.

My kids have all used it through 6 grade. My goal was for grammar too so we just skip all the penmanship stuff (we also skip the creative writing stuff). My kid sometimes have complained that there is too MUCH grammar practice but when they switch to online classes in 7th grade, they have all done very well and notice that they seem to have a much stronger grasp on sentence structure both in identifying parts as well as crafting them compared to many of their classmates.

No hunting in the city limits (sadly), or I would have been out shooting years ago. Also growing up we didn't have a lot of money so almost all the protein we ate was stuff we raised or bartered for. Pigeons, rabbits, and raccoons are all on my list of things I will never eat again! As it was it took me years to be able to eat chicken and turkey again (and I'm still not very fond of duck or goose). I could happily eat beef every day (probably because it was rare to have in my childhood)

My girl dog was going absolutely bonkers at the door but I had no idea why. Sent her out but didn't really think about it (because she goes bonkers for lots of things outdoors). Well she managed to communicate the urgency to my male dog and pretty soon he was beside himself to get out too. And then the rukus began. We discovered a squirrel had breached my backyard cage. Only one solution to that, let the dogs in and quickly close the door. I'm sure we lost a few future items and probably a few tomatoes as they tore around the cage and through the beds. My poor girl was jumping 6 feet up but she was just shy of that bugger when he clung to the roof. I started banging the outside to encourage him to move down. My girl only needed him about 2 inches lower and finally she got him. Another one bites the dust! I promise I'm really not normally this heartless when it comes to the wildlife and I've got tons of produce planted around the yard that is unprotected (and thus fair game for the critters) so I'm not really depriving them but there are just a few items I just don't want to share with the wildlife and they are determined those are the only items they want to eat. So in my spare time, I have to add a bit more fencing to the cage to prevent future breaching. The list of projects is never ending!