Before the Pig Roast pictures

Self improvement day 1 went fairly well. Still haven't lost 15 pounds or saved a thousand....maybe today!

Here are some pictures from the Thursday and Friday before the Pig Roast. Sooner or later I will get actual pig roast pictures up. I promise.

Gymnastics

These strollers were full all weekend

Gilbert and Lincoln talking to Ashley and Rilla through the window

Haying girls

Auntie Lisa and Lincoln

Owen coming back to tell the girls that he will send the pictures I take of them haying to all applicable young farmers in need of a wife. 

Cheyenne mid-something or other

JoAnna and Livie

The kids who were a little nervous about getting this picture taken in the doorway of the barn, since they had been told if they came out of the barn, they would probably be killed by a falling bale. 

Cheyenne is too cool for this sort of thing!

Tori and J-rita

Walking in

Gilbert scrapping his cake pan

And being chocolate-y

Being delighted that people are singing to him! and Olivia and Tori.

Love this picture!

Walking with Daddy

The kids, mainly Cheyenne had raked the lawn into a large pile of grass clippings with this tiny rake. It was impressive.

This time, Dave Weaver and Tim Taylor were here too help.

JoAnna, the queen of the barnyard

Getting water boiling to dip the sacrificial pigs

The cool kids

Dave and Evan

Each time I see this picture, I think Orianna is carrying some kind of wild turkey. But it is just her doll with crazy hair.

Lily complimented Tim on his choice of blue. 

I didn't really want to get in on the killing pigs thing, so I came out after the fact

The piggie wiggies. After we roasted them and were eating it, Lily told Connie "The pigs taste so good and they don't even know it."

Dipping them, to make it easier to strip the hair.

Self Improvement

I would blog this morning, but I am way too busy improving myself. In a couple weeks you will hardly be able to recognize me through the glare of my virtuosity. (Or do I mean self righteousness?)

I will eat healthier, exercise more, lose weight, spend less, save more, organize my house, keep my house clean, return library books on time, spend less time on the computer, do educational things with my children each day, and have supper started when Justin comes home.

Woohoo! Nothing makes me feel happier than making fabulous self-improvement plans. I will now start by doing the dishes and folding the laundry.

What is it about fall that makes me want to start afresh?

Things that make me happy

It has been a good week here in Lake Wobegone.... Also here in Moira. The great Orianna/school experiment seems to be going well. Justin is taking the kids camping tonight with the D Barkley Jr's, Cody and Anthony stopped in for a visit, and the week started with the tail end of the pig roast get-together. Hard to beat!

Here are some less important things that made me happy this week.

I discovered Matilda Jane clothing. This is not something that is going to change the girls wardrobe, since dresses are priced around $50-$60, but it is nice to know pretty, funky dresses and skirts are out there.



How the same company that made these fun dressess could think up such atrocious things as ruffle pants is beyond me. I hope no on loves these and I have just ruined your enjoyment of them. If you want to tromp around looking like a Cyldesdale or Belgian, your business. Heigh-ho!





We went to the library yesterday, which is the first time in a month or two. Our overdue fines were steep, even though our library only charges a penny a day. I look at them as donations to the library. I could probably write them off on our taxes as donations to charity and put us in a lower tax bracket. They are that high.

I love the library. Particularly ours. It is this large stone building with marble steps and Grecian columns. Malone is obviously slightly pretentious. When you walk in, to either side of you are huge reading rooms with gigantic fire places, over-sized leather chairs, and lovely big tables. It has that full-of-books smell that is so necessary in a library.

Some pictures from this morning--I love these kids.

Watching Daddy's coffee come out

A kids table umbrella from IKEA that seemed brilliant at $10. Our kids table doesn't have a spot to put umbrellas, so I finally decided to let the kids use it as a tent.

Gilbert was trying to get away. 

This story was on Yahoo. This drunken moose got tangled up in an apple tree and had to be rescued by the fire brigade. Intersting factoids, moose are called elk in Sweden, moose often get drunk in the fall from fermenting apples, and this mans neighbor laughs like a moose bellowing. Or so it seems. A quote....

And from what Johansson could gather, this particular animal had been on a day-long bender.

“My neighbour recognised it as the animal that almost ran into her car earlier in the day. She was pretty sure the elk was already under the influence,“ said Johansson.

It looks slightly dead, but no, just drunk. And perambulating on the road while drunk. Someone arrest this moose. 

And last, but not least, our fall LL Bean catalog came. Sometimes I pretend to myself that I am slightly avant garde and hip. And then our fall LL Bean catalog comes and all those suburban, New England feelings I have been harboring come to the surface. I blame it on the cooler weather. 

Obviously everyone needs a wool rug in winter. 

And totes! Made in Maine! In pink, orange, purple, and green! Exclamation points!

And rainboots. PLAID rainboots that you can't see because of the flash.

And just to drive home how deep these suburban, New England tendencies run, I will point out that I like this nightgown. There, I said it. I admit to being a dork. But a comfortable dork. Or at least I would be if I got this nightgown. I am pretty sure you are NOT supposed to like this nightgown in your 20's. You are probably supposed to roll your eyes at in in your 20s. But there it is. 

Love the Fair Isle, floral look! In the back there.

And I NEED A FLANNEL SHIRT. Pink maybe. 

Salsa

Last week, or maybe the week before that, I whined about standing in one place peeling tomatoes for an hour and a half. Sheena, brilliant, internet combing cousin-in-law that she is, sent me to canning usa's salsa recipe that does not require peeling. I hadn't heard of canning usa before, so I was a little unsure. But I liked how they only had one recipe for salsa. As in, you will NEVER need any other salsa recipe. It inspires confidence. Last Thursday, I had gone to the garden and sighed about tomatoes. Then I picked a laundry basket full. I can't be technical here because it was too heavy for the scale, but there were a lot of tomatoes. So I decided to do not one, but two batches of this salsa. This was the day before the pig roast, so time was not plentiful. But tomatoes wait for no man. I knew if I left it until Monday, I would have to pick a new batch of tomatoes. Which made me sigh again. I love my garden, I really do. But you might think tomatoes would have the decency to produce in a less than wild, rampaging plant sort of way. A less than 20-30 pounds of tomatoes a day sort of way. Clover has already voiced her opinion on the number of tomato plants I have, but if you want three different kind of tomatoes and they are sold in six packs, what do you do? You plant 18 plants. And really, I love tomatoes. It is just that the plants lay there in the garden (having knocked over their flimsy Wal-mart supports months ago--ungrateful plants) looking woe-be-gone and thinking about all the effort they put forth to produce these gorgeous specimens of red tomatoes and all they are being used for is a landing pad for the odd, stray volleyball. It is harsh. And then I feel guilty. Not so guilty that I want to can or freeze them during the pig roast, but guilty in a people are starving and tomatoes are rotting way. But no one was starving at the pig roast, so the guilt was definitely dulled heavily.

 I canned one batch and left the other fresh. I tasted the canned last night and it is good. But it isn't fresh. Fresh is the only way to go if you have a choice. In the middle of the winter, you don't have a lot of choice though, so canned it is.

I have a salsa recipe that I have loved since Trish O'Neil made in in Alaska. It involves canned stewed tomatoes. It is a GOOD recipe. One you can stand behind with pride. I have always wanted a fresh tomato salsa that was as good and I think I have finally found it! This stuff was super! So super, that after having a vat of it on Friday night, we only have the dregs left. My one complaint with this recipe is that it has a lot of juice. I wanted to drain in out a bit, but some people said they just liked to dip their chips in the juice, not break their chips with a quarter pound of garden veggies. So I left it.

This is canningusa.com's salsa recipe. It doesn't really make sense to me, since the dinner version doesn't seem to be an accurate reduction (18 times the onions and peppers in the canning version, 12 times the garlic, 9 times the cilantro, 4 times the lemon juice). But I don't know. Maybe it is just as good.

Ingredients:	Dinner:	Canning:
	2 cups	18 pints
Tomatoes	3/4 pound	14 pounds
Garlic (optional)	1/2 clove finely diced	6 cloves finely diced
Onions	1/2 diced	9 diced
Red Bell Peppers	1/2 diced	9 diced
Green Bell Peppers	1/2 diced	9 diced
Cilantro	1/3 bunch	3 bunches
Lemon Juice	2 tablespoons	1/2 cup
Salt	1/2 teaspoon	2 tablespoons
Pepper (Optional)	to taste	to taste
Tabasco (Optional)	to taste	to taste

I now have 17 jars of salsa sitting on a shelf. It makes me feel clever. I look at them when I make stupid mistakes.

Woe-be-gone tomatoes.

Salsa in the makin'.

This was Sunday afternoon, about a third gone. 

This was supposed to be in yesterday's post, but somehow, it was missed.