Unemployment

*First of all, I want to apologize for some of the details of this blog. I am going to use it for reference later in the year.

Well, I finished my year of Americorps VISTA, and now I join the ranks of the unemployed. But don't worry, I can't take any of your hard earned tax dollars since I am not even able to file for unemployment. (Part of the VISTA credo, we pay you shit ((10K/year) and then leave you to the wolves) But alas, I have been applying everywhere, telling everyone, and hoping something comes up.

However, this has given me ample opportunity to get stuff done at the house. When people ask if the house is done, I want to say, will it ever be done? We did finish the siding on July 4th, so at least it looks done from the outside. We still want to put a porch on the second st. side (is that the front or the back? I don't know) but first we have to tear off the kitchen of the old house. That means shifting what is in that house. So that is one project.

In the house, I finished the floor to the pantry. It was just various sized plywood that I fit together so that I could put the freezer in there. Since the freezer was empty (was being the operative word) I moved it out, bought some pine tongue and groove at our new Habitat Restore for cheap, installed it, and gave 2 coats of poly. Then I promptly moved the freezer back in and turned it on. Which leads me to my second big project of the past week.

Preservation of food. I can and I freeze depending on what it is. Canning tomatoes is easy and tasty when they come out of the jar. Other vegetables I like to freeze, i.e. broccoli, beets, beans, corn, peaches and berries. I have been going to the market and produce auction to buy large quantities of produce to put up for the winter months. Yesterday and today I canned 42 quarts of tomatoes. That was from 3 bushels that I bought at the auction. The tomatoes were $30 and I only needed to buy one more pack of 12 jars for $10, so my total cost was $1/quart. That doesn't include energy costs, but if I were to purchase the tomatoes over the coarse of winter, I wouldn't include gas costs, so we'll call it even there.

I also froze 3 pecks of peaches. These will be awesome in the winter when the only fresh fruit I can get locally are apples. I also froze some peach sauce, which is a first for me. I usually just freeze slices. We'll see how that goes. I froze a bunch of berries too earlier in the summer, and canned some strawberry jam (sugar free, wahoo).

Kent and I have been hard at work gathering wood for the winter. After two seasons of heating with wood, we are still trying to get a handle on how much wood we need. I will say that I like burning certain types of wood at certain times of the year. There is nothing like a oak and locust fire in the middle of winter.

This is the boring part of the post where I am going to describe where wood is stacked so that I can come back to it later in winter and know what piles of wood are.

Stack on Karen's wall: Locust that we got in early spring when they put the sidewalk in behind our house.
Stack near telephone pole: Trees that went down in last September's tornado and sat until late July when we cut it up, took it home and split it. (About 1 1/2 cords)
Stack on our wall: First layer is the cherry tree that went down in our extra lot. Don't know when it fell, but we cut it up in the beginning of August. On top of that is the wood we got from B. on N. Congress. It was cut in April, not sure what the wood it. In front of that is the groovy wood that we got from the guy on the corner. Not sure what the wood is, but was cut early in the year.

Okay, thanks for reading all the way through.