Hacking

I was a neurotic mother this fall season. I was on a mission: the kids will NOT get this H1N1 flu. I made everyone wash their hands. A LOT. I pulled J out of daycare. We avoided the playplace at McDonald's. I used the anti-bacterial cart wipes at the grocery store. We ate vegetables. I bought five bottles of hand sanitizer and put them all over the house, in the cars, and even at church.

Well, so far, my mission has been successful....sort of. Right now, the kids are perfectly healthy, probably eating candy, and waiting to take their prophylactic doses of Tamiflu. Why the tamiflu? Because their MOTHER is at home, sick with the flu. And pneumonia. I even have an x-ray to prove it. Drat.

It started last week with a little wheezing for three days. I have asthma, so I blamed that. Except that I was puffing on my inhalers like a drug addict. One night, I had a fever and a few chillls. That was it. The next day, though, my lungs grew angry. Breathing is not something to be taken for granted. I started taking steroids for the wheezing, and soon it turned to hacking. When I called Mom yesterday (in the middle of her clinic) asking for antibiotics (I had a sinking feeling that something was growing down in my chest because I could hear it rattling in there), she ordered me to go to the ER. I called her from the ER and said I had pneunomia. Little did I know that she had already dropped EVERYTHING at work and drove up here with Dad, picked up the kids, and told me to go to bed.

My mother loves me.

Thanks, Mom. And thanks, Dad. I hope the kids aren't driving you too crazy and you are getting something done today. Don't forget: television is a wonderful invention....

PS: YES, I have halloween pics of our brood...and they will get uploaded eventually. Now, it is naptime. See ya.

PRODUCE!

Mike and I joined what we affectionately call "The Hippie Farm Co-op" this year, which means we get big box of fresh locally grown veggies every Monday. This year, since September was so very warm, they had some extra canning shares of broccoli and tomatoes. At Mike's request, we bought one. I was thinking we'd have a few jars of each and we could eat them sometime in January...



WHOA. When the "canning shares" arrived, I finally figured out what I had committed to: a winter of Rabbit-dom. FIFTY POUNDS of broccoli awaited me on our doorstep...and then came a box of SIXTY POUNDS of tomatoes. !!! I had a hundred and ten pounds of rabbit food on porch...and two days to pack it away before we went on vacation. Ugh!



That night, I cleaned up my favorite cleaver (yes we have more than one) and spent five hours hacking away at the broccoli pile. I didn't know this, but broccoli wants to be steamed before you freeze it...which meant I was dumping steaming piles of green cruciferous vegetable matter on any flat surface I could find. With the added smell of the HUGE box of tomatoes on the floor, our kitchen smelled like a V8 factory.


HACK.

The next night, it was time to can tomatoes and spaghetti sauce. When it came time to do the work, Mike popped his head around the corner and said, "Dear, I will be back in two minutes to do the canning for you. I think the canning part is a little complicated for you. Just give me a sec to sew one corner on this mitten." (He was making grandma Mitzi a pair of mittens for her birthday...) So, slop, squish, squirt, smush...I peeled the little red suckers and gutted them for TWO HOURS before I saw my husband....apparently the mitten tried to get the better of him. Conquering the Tomatoes was supposed to be a team project, but the other half of my team copped out at game time. Oh well. I had a blast listening to Metallica and being a Domestic Diva. I learned that you don't have to use a spoon to neatly remove the seeds and juice from a tomato....after you peel it, just hold it over the sink and squeeze. Pretty soon, a little stream of tomato guts comes zooming out of the fruit and hopefully lands somewhere in the sink (or on the wall...or ceiling...etc) What fun! After awhile, I even learned to aim properly.

The sixty pounds became sixteen quarts of tomatoes, nine quarts of sauce, and a bunch of pint jars with various combinations of the above. Ahhh...success.

Before we could get to all the canning, Miss Mary came along to help. She loves tomatoes, and I do believe she ate ten or twelve of them. Since they spent two days sitting in a box on the kitchen floor, she had plenty of time to help herself to a bite when passing through. She would bite a hole in the tomato and then suck out all the insides. It was funny until I discovered that she was secretly hoarding them upstairs. I noticed that there were red splotches on the carpeting through the living room and up the stairs. After following the trail upstairs, I found a small heap of juiceless tomatoes under the crib. Queen Mary was sitting near her throne of tomatoes, with gobs of tomato guts on the front of her onesie. mmmmm... Thank God for Lysol Deodorizing CArpet Cleaner...

Pass the Tylenol.

Apparently it was really important that we get all of our snow for December, January, and February in the space of about 36 hours. I just finished shoveling the walk for the umpteenth time, and it's time for some painkillers. As a lifelong Minnesotan (say it with me: "Minnesoooohtan") I appreciate the value of good snow removal tools. A broom propped against the back door to get those really light fluffy flakes that fall when the clouds sneeze in October. A sturdy shovel with a handle long enough so my nose doesn't touch the sidewalk for the medium stuff. And a snowblower for those batten-down-the-hatches-here-she-comes-holy-cow-is-that-a-lot-of-snow blizzards that start in January and pretty much settle in until March.

Broom? Check.

Shovel? Check.

Snowblower? Buried in the shed under about three feet of snow.

Since this is the first real snow (and by real, I mean it will last longer than until the clouds clear) we've received this winter, there hasn't been an occasion for me to fire up the old gal. Unfortunately, by the time I finally realized that Old Man Winter meant business this time, the shed and its contents were already entombed under a foot and a half of the white stuff. It's been coming down pretty much solid since Saturday night, and though I've taken the time to keep the front walk clean (at the expense of my back, arms, legs, and several other things I won't mention) my duties as student and Papa haven't left me enough spare time to tunnel to the shed. Okay, okay, yes, I did have a few minutes free between laundry and dishes and toys and diapers and infectious disease notes, but I used them to sleep.

So now I face the prospect of trying to retrieve my faithful friend from her white prison either after everyone else is in bed or before they get up. As you can see, I'm wisely using my time now to blog for you. And why, you ask?

The gas in the tank on that snowblower has been sitting there since September. I'm sure it's become a gelatinous goo by this point. Which means that it probably won't start anyway, even if I can get it out. I have grudgingly promised my aching self to try tomorrow, if only to give my arms a reason to hope (I may be approaching the overdose point on Tylenol) but if you hear a groan/scream/snarl followed by an explosion...well, you can guess.

Ah, the joys of winter. Next year, I'm buying a Bobcat.