I would have written yesterday but I didn't have time. One of the kids had a doctor's appointment that was almost an hour late and then we had to go clothes shopping in the afternoon. When I wasn't doing that stuff, I was attempting to catch up on sleep or traveling to do things. I haven't been sleeping well for the last several weeks. I am definitely in perimenopause. I've been having night sweats to the point that they wake me up and make the bed damp. Hot flashes are not my friend, nor are the chills. I know I'm not sick. But this is all super annoying. I called the doctor's office yesterday asking for ideas on how to ameliorate my symptoms but I didn't get a call back. I am hoping that will happen Monday.
Today, I have been awake since 0430. I spent the first two hours of my day doing my best to be quiet. Then the kids got up and Beloved moved from the couch to the bed. He, fortunately, didn't mind the fact that my side of the bed was still pretty damp. I spent a good amount of this morning staring at Facebook. There are a lot of stupid memes on there. I mean really stupid memes. I don't know if this is the FB algorithm feeding me stupidity or if there's just that much of a lack of thought behind internet humor today. I think it's more of the bots at FB being lame than anything else. After all, posts from yesterday vanish but posts from three months ago appear as though new in my feed when it refreshes in the middle of reading stuff. (Am I the only one who hates that feature?)
Aside from the astounding stupidity of the memes I saw, there were a lot of people sharing information about programs that are in danger of having their funding cut, civil rights fights happening at the state level, and general bad behavior of political people here in the US. I have a very socially conscious circle of friends and associates. We're all very concerned about how things are happening here. I am glad the information sharing is happening. I find myself wondering what information is getting edited out by the bots.
Incidentally, there has also been a sharp uptick in the number of posts that I have been seeing about gardening and homesteading. It seems I wasn't the only one thinking that the state the country is headed in, it's time to put my hands in the dirt and grow veggies to preserve. When I next see my mother-in-law, I am hoping to plan out some container gardening for the year and figure out what sort of things she'd like to see in her raised bed planter. It is my hope to get enough produce grown and preserved for three small households.
The biggest challenge to this is not growing things, to be honest, but remembering how to preserve them. I am going to get some canning supplies and a Ball Blue Book to work with. I have access to frozen fruit, so I can make some freezer jam. Being diabetic will make that a bit of a challenge to not eat the whole batch, but strawberry freezer jam is awesome stuff. I figure one pint of it will last us a quite a while. You get the sweetness and freshness of ripe strawberries out of this recipe that my late grandmother gave me no matter if you use fresh or thawed out frozen strawberries. On the whole, it's pretty wonderful.
I may also make a gallon of apple butter. While I can't get those awesome crab apples that grandma used, I think that the larger pie apples are going to work up just fine with her recipe. If I remember it correctly, she used the juice from the apple pulp to make apple jelly. That would be pretty cool to pull off too, to be honest.
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