To market to market...

Just hit the farmer's market for:

-3 Lb saskatoon berries

-5 Lb strawberries

-cauliflower

-cucumbers

-tomatoes (cherry and green)

-carrots

-cabbage

-yellow beans

-honey

-peppers and onions

-fresh scones

-smoked bacon

-homemade yogurt

-BC peaches and apricots (just few...not quite ripe yet)

Now I'm off to the brew supply store and some other errands...I love this time of year!

mmm...pie

The spare room smelt mildly of pie yesterday. We have friends visiting overnight so hopefully they didn't mind sleeping in the "pie room". I pitched the yeast last night before I went to bed and hope it will be burbling shortly. With all the berries I don't really have a starting gravity bit I plan to let it ferment a few weeks and then move it over to the carbuoy for a few months before I bottle it. Think I'll be picking up another carbuoy and fermenter pail on the weekend to get some mead going. He hee.

It's a long weekend here and I really can't wait. Fringe Festival and Farmer's Market here I come. :)

blueberries!

Blueberries are on sale at the moment. I just picked up 10Lb for under 20 bucks...so that means it's wine time. Last blueberry wine I made was delicious! So...once again, I'll make another batch. I may add 10Lb berries instead of 8 Lb since I have them and see what flavour it imparts as they aren't quite as flavourful as last year......

My recipe was (for 3 gallons):

8Lb (10??) blueberries washed and cleaned and skooshed up.
5 Lb (11 1/4 c) sugar + 10L water (boiled 2 minutes) and pour over the fruit
Stir in:
1 1/2 t pectic enzyme
1 1/2 t yeast nutrient
1 can welches grape juice concentrate (~1.2 cups)
2 t acid blend
3 crushed campden tablets.

Bleaching the pail as we speak...
I'll get it all going sans yeast tonight and tomorrow ~ 24h later, I'll take the S.G. and then pitch the EC-1118 yeast and let her bubble away until it gets down to racking S.G. and tuck it away into the 3 gallon carboy to it sit until it clears.

I also have schemes for rhubarb mead...once this wine is in the carboy I'll be on that as well. A friend's girl who is the mead goddess has given me her rhubarb mead recipe and I have enough to try it. I also have a scheme for some cider from the 2 gallons of apple juice I have...but need to figure out my carboy situations. I may need another primary fermentor, or a few smaller fermentors for the few 1 gallon batches of wine I want to try out (peach and maybe pear too) and I want to get some beer brewing again too. Fact is I want some delicious homemade beer for my birthday end of October and since it's berry season am thinking another batch of the strawberry wheat beer I made previously would be a great idea...Just need 5 Lb of strawberries and a beer kit...which I think I can get at the berry barn and brew store this weekend. 
Oh yeah.
Brewing up some science...yo!

garden goodness

What started off as a very lame weekend ended up a great one, with us visiting Dad at the lake, going fishing, relaxing and just drinking coffee and visiting with him, playing around with the wood lathe he bought recently.  And then we stopped for supper and a visit with my in-laws on the way home from the lake too. As a huge bonus, after supper I got to pick raspberries in their garden - they have 2 HUGE hedgerows of raspberries and I came home with all kinds of garden fresh goodies in the end - tonnes of rhubarb, about 18 pints of fresh raspberries (they get that much every 3-4 days for all august, can you imagine??), some fresh peas and baby potatoes, and even some jams, pickles and sausage she had made earlier...I felt guilty at how much I came home with, but they insisted. They were happy to have me come and pick and she even picked with me so I could have a LOT to take home for freezing for jams and such...cuz I have a freezer now. He heh. Bazinga!

I plan to make some small batches of rhubarb and raspberry mead, as well as some jams. Soon there will be much a brewing and canning at Casa Geo. Oh yes....This has given me the itch to go berry picking next weekend too...it's time for the local u-pick farms to have lots of saskatoon berries and strawberries to pick, so I can get another bounty for the freezer and future wine cellar then too. Bwahaha! I want to try a bunch of small experimental types of wines so I know what is good to make bigger batches of next year...
This sort of thing makes me crave a garden. Reminds me of gardening with my mum and grandma and there is NOTHING like garden fresh veg. Next year I will have raised beds in my front yard for planting and I can't wait....my own carrots, beets, peas, lettuce and tomatoes? Yeah!!!

Got me so pumped that this morning I decided it was back to basics with my life again. We are done holidays until at least mid-september and I honestly have done not much at all this July exercise wise and so now, thanks to the help of the plyo box I made with my dad, it's back on. 
Groovy.

thinking outside the box

Dad and I made a plyo box. It will help me kick my own ass.
Giggedy...

Nice afterthought

Jus got a letter from the Dean saying my thesis was one of the ones that won an Thesis Excellence Distinction award last year. 

*hooray*

One! One hat! Ah ah ah!

Just stayed up too late to finish off my pixie hat. It even fits!

Hooray!

*grin*

Operation non-nibble

I have been biting my nails again over stress from my new job and I'm determined to stop again. Oh I've tried all the old hot sauce-random motherly-advice nail-bite-stop remedies and have found that only determination and a few sparkles works best for me.
Hence, Exhibit A:

OK so yes that's my summery sparkly orange toes (meep) but as you can see my fingernails have a few sparkly glittery bits on them...which oddly is enough for me to go "ooh shiny things!" when I look at them and give my brain the 2 milliseconds it needs to go "Oy! you don't bite them then..." and move on. So far so good. 1 week in and my nails are recovering.

And, I also tried pineapple upside down pancakes by putting pineapple rings inside a batch of regular pancakes for sunday breakfast.
Heavenly...






Yup -It's the little things. :)

Just chillin

I am quite overly excited to have a new mini deep freeze. I want to do more baking and freeze more fruit and veg and like having the space for freezing water for camping and other random things. Our current ancient fridge is half freezer but isnt actually wide enough to put a pizza box in and so after many annoyed years of never having enough freezer space we broke down and got one while we had the spare moolah? It was $10 more for a 7 cubic foot over a 5 so now we have more freezer than I think we would ever need for the 2 of us. I bought local too which pleases me...and now I can buy part of a cow or bake large amounts of things or...or...

Kewl.

Is it lame to be this excited about a freezer??

Get your gurl on

This weekend I had a girly weekend with an old friend I never get to see. We have the same name and are both nerdy lab people...yes, a bit of synergy there! I admit, neither of us are naturally too girly by nature but I was up for a day of whatever with an old friend sans men and oh...it was so. much. fun. :) We got up and met for greasy diner breakfast and wandered over to the local anime/comic fest for a while. When we'd geeked up enough we set out to be as mellow and girly as possible.
We went lingerie and makeup shopping, had random coffees and a decadent fruity late lunch at Cora's and then got some sparkly toenail polish and wandered through the mall and a few other stores we never spend much time in because our husbands get pained panicked looks when they're in there for too long.
Later we came to her place with our goods and took over the basement with mojitos, snacks and got caught up on life and painted our toes. Then came the hard core all night Tomb Raider...muahaha. Got quite far in the new Tomb Raider and we traded off playing until we crashed around 4 and called it a night. I crashed in the spare and headed home the next AM after some breaky and coffee with her family and spent the rest of the day with my J :)

I love my husband but sometimes there is nothing like hanging with an old friend and just being...whatever there is to be. Such a fun weekend :)

so close

I noticed to day during my second fine options shift at the Sally Ann that the racks requiring most work were the mens racks. There were so many take off an item to look at it or try it on and then drape it over the rack and hang the hanger back up. I ask you...why not just hang it on the hanger and hang it up?
Ahem, men I'm talking to you. :)

I will say though -I will definitely not ever put anything back where it doesn't belong in a store again after doing this fine options work. Realized just how annoying that can be today :)