Vyxxan's Virtual Venture

Got the new screen for the food mill during the week. It’s well made, although hard to see if it’s welded any better. Obviously not made by the same company, but it does fit and the spirals turn inside of it.

I used the old screen yesterday when I made more blackberry jam. Only took out 1 gallon bag and one pint bag from the freezer. Cooked them up, ran the stuff through the food mill twice just like before. Ended up with WAY too much juice/pulp for the amount of jam I wanted to deal with, so I put the extra into a labeled container in the freezer.

This time around I made sugar-free jam. I have a friend who is diabetic and so I said I’d make some jam for her, too. I couldn’t do sweetener free… that would be too tart… so I opted to go with Splenda. The recipe calls for 1.5 cups of Splenda if using. (you can also use sugar with the “no sugar needed” pectin, up to 3 cups, which is WAY less than a normal batch would use)

It gelled quite nicely, but is slightly on the tart side. Tastes great, though, and that’s what is important, right? I got 4 full jars (1/2 pint size) and an almost full jar that I will put in the fridge until my friend comes to visit.

Instead of throwing the seed stuff out in the field… this time I put it on a cookie sheet covered in foil and stuck it in the oven to dry. I’m thinking that it would make a good addition to homemade suet cakes. I don’t usually feed the birds here, but I can see finding some places for suet cakes when it’s all snowy or icy. When it’s totally dry I’ll break it up and store it until I can get some suet or lard to mix up with birdseed and stuff and form into cakes for the birds. (there are tons of recipes online if you feed birds)

Made labels again, too. Probably forgot to mention that I spent about 2 hours fixing a photo of a berry until I could use it on a label, lol! I have a really ancient program that I use to make stickers/labels. It doesn’t really like to run in Vista but it does…. and I can import art, but only if it is in bitmap form! I keep using the program, though, because I can move things =exactly= where I want them. I’ve tried to make good labels with other programs but this old program that came with my first Canon printer is the one I use. I use it for my return address labels, stamping swap labels… anytime I need a label or need to tweak things better than I can do with other programs I own. Only bad thing is that it doesn’t do barcodes for shipping labels. Oh well, can’t have everything, right? I even do baggie headers with this program, as a custom sheet.

On to other stuff. Friday I bought a carpet cleaner machine. Mid-range priced Bissell. My little dog Rita is on medication now for congestive heart failure and it makes her pee more. She’s not hitting the potty pads all the time and I was starting to smell it. Can’t really do anything about how much time she’s outside, as I’m gone for over 12 hours a day. I hate wall to wall carpeting… it’s just a big dirt suck and needs constant vacuuming and cleaning, especially if you have pets. I’m not big on house cleaning anyhow… but the carpets here are a disaster. Not all my fault…. gosh knows how old the carpeting is here and no one ever took care of it. But I can’t have the smell of dog pee, so I have to clean the carpeting where Rita has “missed” her pads.

I vacuumed first of course, and we do have a decent vacuum… so good that you can’t get through one room without having to empty it. Like I said, the carpets are dirt sponges. Then I ran the carpet cleaner 3 times over the area I was doing… twice with cleaning solution and once with plain water. It still stinks… and the carpet isn’t really clean yet. But I was worried about putting too much water into it in one day.

I will be doing over probably next weekend… and until I get the smell out… which may be never! But I’ll try, that room is the one designated as the guest room. Oh, and I blocked Rita from going in there, moved her potty pads and put them where she HAS to hit them in a small area blocked around.

More other stuff…. :)

Early today Ron went out to feed the cats and take Rita out. No cats were on the porch, but when they heard the food hit the dishes they came running…. including Wild Thing who came running from the barn with a giant RAT in his mouth! Silly cat! He sets it down so he can eat kibble, and another cat takes it to play. The rat is still very much alive. They kept taking it from each other and Rita finally came up into the area and got very excited. She IS a rat terrier, you know! Ron made her come in the house… she got her treat, and then she kept jumping up to the window to watch the cats and going to the door and whining. So, Ron let her back outside. She ran out and attacked the rat, gave it a shake, dropped it and let the cats have it again. Ron said she yelped, too, so she might have got nipped by the rat and that’s why she dropped it… but she was done, she had her turn at it and came back in the house all proud of herself. As many rats as these cats get down in the barn, well, the barn must be seriously infested. (oh, and Wild Thing is a BOY cat, not usually the best hunters, but all the boys we have now seem to be)

It’s Superbowl Sunday, and I have no plans on watching… I never do. Always miss all the good commercials, lol! Today is also what I think of as the anniversary for Ron and I. We took each other to meet our Mom’s on Superbowl Sunday. Things were great when I met his Mom… Beulah told lots of stories and told me how much happier Ron seemed since he met me. Then we went to my Mom’s house and she had a house full of people drinking and talking politics. When we left there I was thinking… OMG, he’s gonna run away screaming and never want to see me again. But all he said was… “No Bush fans in that house, were there?” And here we are, all these years later… a gazillion cats that I’ve named, a very prolific blackberry bush, the adoption of 3 dogs and the moving of one here, and kids moving in and out. I cook, Ron cleans it up most of the time… and we work different shifts and miss each other a lot. We take time to have fun together… and manage to talk every day. I’m still his computer guru and he’s still my mechanical guy. Long live Ron and Vyx together! :)

This is all for now…

Hugs,
Vyx

We had good warning on the storm that dumped ice and snow on us, and I made plans to keep busy.

I had planned on making jam this weekend, lots of it. We have that huge thornless blackberry hedge (below) that started out as a single cane the year I met Ron. I can only make so many pies and cobblers and blackberry buckles… I really need to make jam, too. This year I think I’m going to have to work harder at selling some of the blackberries. I offered them up free to anyone who would pick them last year and I still put a gazillion bags into the freezer.

I took 3 gallon bags out of the freezer Thursday night to make jam. Just had a look in the freezer and there are 2 more gallon bags… plus 6 quart bags! That is just from this past year… I took a couple gallon bags to my friend over in Oklahoma last year when I visited. LOTS of berries!

Anyhow, in preparation of the big blackberry jam making, I went to visit my Mom and borrow her food mill. I absolutely cannot stand seeds in berries. I dislike them so much that I won’t usually even eat fresh strawberries… the crunching seeds in my teeth makes me forget how wonderful they taste. I can make all the blackberry pie and such that Ron will eat, but I don’t eat any of it myself because of those seeds.

Mom bought this food mill a few years ago. It’s really wonderful at getting the seeds out… I’ve used it previously on raspberries. Mom uses it for tomatoes, but hasn’t used it in a few years. The funny thing is, we don’t even have the berry screen… just the standard screen that it came with. The berry screen is supposed to even get strawberry seeds out… but the standard screen works great at getting out regular berry seeds and tomato seeds.

So, there we have the machine processing the cooked berries. The instructions do NOT say to cook things first. What I did yesterday was try to process the thawed berries without cooking. They were still a bit frozen but squishy, so I thought the machine could handle it if I went slow.

To make a long story slightly shorter… it couldn’t. The screen broke apart from the bit that holds it to the machine. AUGH! When we looked at it, it was easy to see why… it only had 2 good welds on it and those were both about an inch apart… so the rest of it wasn’t really welded. Pop goes the screen.

I was freaking out… this belongs to my Mom, and now I have to find a replacement part. I did, too. This is an older model but I found a place online selling replacement parts for it and bought one. The internet is great! But I’ve got a dilemma here… what the heck do I do with 3 gallons of thawed out berries? Refreeze them and do this when my replacement part comes? Get seeds out the old fashioned way, with a sieve? (blargh, but that would take forever)

Ron came to my rescue. He has a MAPP gas welding kit. He got it out of the garage and let it all come up to room temperature, and then he welded the screen back to the holder bit. Not a perfect job…. but at least it will hold so that I can get on with my jam making!

While the whole welding thing was pending, I packed most of the berries into a canister and put them back in the freezer. (bags were leaking) The partial bag I dumped out into a pan on the stove and brought them up to simmer. By the time the welding was done and the machine put together to make sure it would work… well, it was late and I was tired of messing around. I got the canister back out of the freezer and put it in the fridge.

Bright and early this morning I got the canister out of the fridge and poured it all into a pot to cook. Didn’t cook it long, just enough to soften things up a bit. I also decided to use the grape spiral for the machine, instead of the regular (longer) spiral. Blackberries have a lot of seeds and they also have a pithy center.

This is what you get out of the end of the machine….

Looks like a lot of pulp left in that too. And it was, so I did like they recommend with the grape spiral and put all the waste back through the machine again. Probably could have gone one more time but the bowl of good stuff was nearly full at that point.

I forgot to take photos of any of the rest of the jam making process… or the jars all filled and everything. I made 3 batches of jam today, and now have 6 pint jars and 12 half pint jars of SEEDLESS blackberry jam. There were a couple teaspoonfuls left in the pot after the last batch… so I made some toast and used that up! :)

Still have a bit of clean up to do… as soon as I was done with the last batch of jam this afternoon we went out to walk the dogs in the 8 inches or so of snow we got. I should have taken the camera, it was really beautiful down by the pond. I did upload some more photos, though… continuing yesterdays picture story of the yard. So I’ll just paste them in here…

First, the yard last night just after dark. It was still snowing, and the flash helped catch that.

Then again this morning. The snow had stopped falling, but the sun never actually came out today.

The big tree and the neighbors house… not the exact view as last year, but you could still compare it a bit…..

One of my bluebird houses. Good thing the birds don’t need them this time of year, that’s a lot of ice hanging on it.

Last picture for tonight… the west side of the storm shelter and how much snow piled up on the wood pile. The snow was blowing from the east…. so the boat on the east side of the cellar has no snow on it to speak of. Looks like about 2 feet of snow on the wood. We didn’t get that much snow… only about 6 or 8 inches….

I’m very tired, and my feet hurt. Walking dogs in the snow was fun, though. Right up until I realized I was packing snow up the legs of my jeans and coveralls with every step. Bits started falling into my boots, lol! The snow is pretty deep… beagle tummies were brushing it as they walked.

hugs,
Vyx

We got about a half inch of ice. It was still doing the freezing rain this morning, but switched over to sneet and then finally snow around noon. The above photo is a close up of the walnut tree branches. Below is the yard… and I tried to get a photo of this view about every 2 hours today.

When it changed to sneet or sleet or whatever it was, it was hard to tell, except more white stuff showed up on the ground.

When it finally started snowing it was coming down heavy. I tried to get photos of the snow falling, but with a point and shoot camera that I don’t really know how to use very well… it didn’t work out. But here is some snow…

It’s STILL snowing. The wind is blowing like crazy, too… and from the north east. Weird, very weird. This storm system is moving steadily to the east, so why the heck is the snow blowing from the east? Ah, I guess it’s because of the layers of weather interacting… but it’s still very weird in my opinion!

More snow…

Some more snow before it got too dark to take pictures. Well, I do have a few more on the camera, might post em later.

In case anyone has forgotten, clicking on a photo opens up a bigger view of it. I resized all photos to about 800 px wide, so they aren’t too huge but get you a bit more detail.

Hardly anyone in the area has lost power… the electric companies did a good job of getting the right of ways cleaned up good. The biggest power outage I’ve heard of was when a car took out a major pole. Duh, stay HOME when the roads are bad. I can’t believe how many people feel like they HAVE to go somewhere when the roads are so messed up. I just took photos of someone in a pick up truck turning around almost in our driveway. He had about a 10 inch hole of cleared windshield, maybe wipers not working. Not going fast, but someone was behind him. Backing out, well he wasn’t IN our driveway quite, so he backed out in the fairly deep ditch. Made it okay tho, must have 4WD. He turned around and went back the other way (north)…. it’s still quite a bit of climb from here going south. Going north its a slide down to the lake, then a climb… and then either more up or more down and up depending on which way you go. I know the snow will drift really bad over the top of the hill south of us… if I’ve got 6 inches of snow in the yard that hill will probably have a lot more on top.

South is town, well, the small town closest to us. I don’t need anything. But I’m sure there are other people who do… even though we had a LOT of warning on this storm.

So, that’s the weather report…

Hugs,
Vyx

Just about a year ago we got this:

That was an inch or more of ice. The weather guys are saying that we are going to get from 1/4 of an inch to maybe 1 inch of ice this storm coming in. A quarter inch of ice is enough to do damage, I don’t know what will happen to our poor trees if we get a whole inch of it!

Only good thing is that it’s not supposed to hit us until tomorrow afternoon. I’ll probably be able to get in a full days work and then zoom home and hunker down until it melts. Hmm, maybe better would be able to miss work, but I need the money.

I have plans for the weekend, anyhow. Stay at home and cook jam plans. I’m going to be doing seedless blackberry jam until I either run out of sugar and pectin or jars, whichever comes first. I know I won’t run out of blackberries… I haven’t counted the gallon bags in the freezer, but there are a LOT of them.

I hope I don’t wake up Friday to something like this photo…

Hugs,
Vyx

Well, I’m home from work early… They let us leave at 1 pm. Closer I got to home, the more rain… and ice already forming on things! Augh!

I dyed more yarn yesterday and today. I mentioned that this time I was going to be using acid dye, rather than mx dye. I love how it works… the yarn just sucks all the dye out of the water!

With mx dyes there is always a lot of wash out. Excess dye that didn’t bind to the fabric and has to be rinsed out. Not so with acid dyes!

So I took some photos. This first one is of the yarn going into the murky dye pot. I left a bit sticking out so you could see the color it was. (pale lime green, almost yellow, yuck!)

When the water gets to a certain temperature, the dye magically disappears into the yarn. (the magic temp was 150 F for me) The water was still faintly blue, but you can see all the way to the bottom! Couldn’t do that before!

That was so cool… I mean, I was expecting it to happen, did quite a bit of reading online before attempting to dye wool… but still, nothing like seeing it in real life!

The almost dried yarn looks like this next photo, a very blue green. It’s also quite tangled, I didn’t tie off the yarn more like I’d done with longer skeins in the coral to red/brown batch. I tied off the second batch of this with some cotton yarn before putting it into the dye pot, though. Can’t be having a bunch of tangled yarn! (sorry about that, Jan, it’s gonna be a chore winding this)

Second batch is cooling in the dye bath and will get rinsed/washed as soon as I can put my hand into the water and have it not feel too warm. Sometime before bedtime, I hope, so that it can dry overnight and get mailed early this week. Er, of course Jan may not approve of this color… so I may be doing over and changing it somewhat. Hey, but at least it’s not pale yucky lime any more!

Lastly for tonight… while I was waiting on dye bath to cool down yesterday I finished knitting my hat. Now, previously I’ve only knitted 2 fun fur scarves and a purse that got felted. Just basic garter stitch, aside from a few rows of purling on the purse. I was sort of experimenting on this hat I made with cheap acrylic yarn… to see if I might like knitting anything fancier than just plain old knitting every row. I do love knitting in the round… if I had to do stockinette stitch by switching between purling and knitting it would NEVER come out as even as it does with circular needles. I knit very tightly, and I purl very loosely. Switching between those, like for the ribbing… Big Holes. But as you can see, I managed to do some more garter stitch that came out pretty good.

The bottom of the hat was done back and forth until I wanted to switch to stockinette, then I went to knitting in the round. I think it came out pretty good, considering I was knitting without a pattern. It’s not as long as it should be, I underestimated how far it would go when I got to decreasing at the top. The decreasing bit was fun… I realized about the 3rd round that it was NEVER going to work continuing on the circular needle. Switched over to DPN’s and went a little smaller because my bamboo DPN’s are in metric and the corresponding American size was actually a bit larger. It’s easier to switch to smaller needles than to larger needles when you knit as tightly as I do.

While knitting the hat I also tried to train myself to knit in the continental style, with the yarn held in the left hand. I got good at it… but my rows got tighter and tighter and I had to switch back to right hand yarn after the 3rd round or so. Could BARELY get the needle in at that point. It’s probably just a matter of practice… I’ve also taught myself a bad habit knitting the hat. Using my fingertips to poke at the tips of the needles while working stitches. I’ve got a fairly well bruised right index finger, so with my next project (already started) I’m trying to untrain myself at that. Hey, I’ve got so I can sort of watch tv while knitting… long as I remember to look over the reading glasses when I look at the tv, lol!

Expecting Ron’s daughter Candice to come over in a little while… she needs to use the computer… plus I want to talk to her. My new project is something I think she’ll like… but it may have to be the next project after this one. We’ll see.

Hugs,
Vyx