Sunday Randomness #25 More Peaches

The continuing saga of canning peaches...  We bought some more peaches for canning around the first part of October-this time the variety is known as Angela peaches.  The finished bottles of Angela peaches are pictured above-the picture was taken downstairs in the storage room-hence it is not as clear and sharp as the Rosa peaches picture.

They had orange and red skins but a slightly more yellow interior than the Rosa peaches.  Size-wise they are very similar-averaging the size of a softball.  The Angela peaches are also free-stone but they had to be slightly pried from the center of the peaches.  They also required a longer boiling water bath-we scalded them for a full minute rather than 30 seconds and I still had to cut away peach skin.  And the third but most deciding factor that will strongly influence whether we buy them again in the future is taste.  The Rosa peaches were sweet, juicy and had a touch of tangy flavor whereas the Angela peaches were just blah in comparison.  They were still far above store peaches but the Rosa peaches (despite their great tendency to bruise easily) were a grade A peach for canning and Angela peaches I would probably knock down to a B-.

On a side note, my parents canned Elberta peaches this year which probably would get a A- to B+.  The Elberta peaches are more lemon in color both in skin and interior but they are a bit too tart for my taste.  The Elberta peaches are free-stone and the skins slip off easily.  They are also smaller in size-on average about the size of a tennis ball.

Author #112: A new take on an slightly old poem by Julia Donaldson

Alfred Noyes first published his poem, The Highwayman, in 1906 in a Scottish magazine.  Julia Donaldson published The Highway Rat in 2011 with illustrator Axel Scheffler.  Julia's version makes us laugh, Alfred's version makes us cry.  And Loreena McKennitt's song of the Highwayman is one of the most simpatico examples of how to  bring poetry out of obscurity.

Ms. Donaldson's book is a clever new take on the poem with the romance portion now between a rat and food.  I love how she starts the book:

 "The Highway Rat was a baddie.

 The Highway Rat was a beast. 

He took  what he wanted and ate what he took.

 His life was one long feast." 

 The book chronicles the Highway Rat's food thievery-he wants something sweet to eat but gets all manner of other food instead of treats.  This is definitely a book worth reading to find out the humorous  and "poetic" ending for the Highway Rat.

Replacement lighting just in time for Halloween

fluorescent spooky light

getting ready to connect the wires from power to the new light fixture

and the new incandescent light sheds exponentially more light than the old one

We had fluorescent lights in part of the basement and they just kept having flickering, on/off issues- it was watching a scary movie but in our own basement.  You'd flip the switch and it may or may not light up-if it did go on, it was often with only one out of two bulbs and the light would flicker, waver and dim. "Creepy" definitely applied and we weren't going for the haunted house look.  (Although I do think some spiders benefited from the arrangement because we just couldn't see them with the bad lighting.)  So we took on a new lighting project.

We turned off the power to the area in question - this is where the those work lights come in handy-the kind you can plug in with a long oranges extension cord into the outlet a room or two away.  We used one similar to this one featured by Home Depot: http://www.homedepot.com/p/HUSKY-75-Watt-Metal-Shield-Incandescent-Trouble-Light-HD-408PDQ/204222074#.UkOfaz948g8  to light the way for the project.  We took down the old fluorescent lights (and recycled the bulbs through our local household hazardous waste collection events), put up metal housing units for the new lights, connected the power wiring to the wiring of the new fixtures, put on safety nuts, put in a fresh incandescent bulb, turned the power back on, flipped the switch and viola, let there be light!

It's great to actually be able to see in that part of the basement although there's a  certain poetic sadness (but not much)  to the loss of traditional creepy basement lighting (or rather lack thereof).

Sunday Randomness #24 Peaches

Busy canning  peaches...

These particular peaches are the variety known as Rosa.  They had red-orange skins, orange-pink flesh, the skins just slipped right off after a 30 second boiling water bath.  They are free-stone and quite sweet.  They were also large (softball sized) peaches and I had to cut most halves into thirds just to get them in the bottles.  The only drawback would be that they tended to bruise easily but their taste makes up for the delicateness of the peach.  We obtained these the first part of September at the Murray Farmer's Market.

Author #111: Books against Bullying by Erin Frankel

Erin Frankel's series of books by Free Spirit Publishing cover the ever present problem of bullying.  The three books show the same scenario from different perspectives: Dare is told by the bystander, Weird is told by the subject of the bullying and Tough is told by the person doing the bullying.  At the end of each book are steps each one can take to change behavior to getting along instead of victimizing or standing by the side.  Some of the lessons learned include:  In Dare Jayla refuses to take part in the bullying and encourages other kids to help instead of watching.  In Tough Sam learns that taking her anger out on others doesn't help her own situation.  In Weird Luisa learns that she is not to blame if someone bullies her and she doesn't have to change to please them; she can have confidence in herself and what she likes.  For more about the series and steps to prevent and change bullying, visit: http://theweirdseries.com/

2013 Summer Movies: #16 Something The Lord Made

Mos Def and Alan Rickman star in this true life story of  Dr. Thomas and Dr. Blalock who started cardiac surgery in 1944 on a baby suffering from blue baby syndrome.  Through their research, they introduced cardiac surgery to the world (over a million heart surgeries are now performed each year in the US alone) and they also saved countless lives through their research and work on traumatic shock.  Although Vivian Thomas performed almost all the lab work on the shunt process in hundreds of operations on dogs, he was only able to coach Dr. Blalock during the actual human surgeries since he was a lab technician and was not awarded an honorary doctorate from Johns Hopkins until 1976.

The film was made in 2004 and is not rated but would probably get a PG rating for surgical work on both dogs and humans and some language. 

 This was a wonderful film that not only tells Blalock and Thomas's story; it touches briefly on the story of Vivian Thomas's brother, Harold Thomas, and his fight for equal pay for school teachers.  His attorney?  Thurgood Marshall.  They won.  For more information there's another blog post at: http://gdhslawblogwill.wordpress.com/tag/thurgood-marshall/