Ordinary Time

I read an article the other day about undirected attention . (I linked to it in case you want to read it.) Essentially, due to being constantly connected to our phones, our brains get no rest. If we have to wait for a few minutes for something, we are likely to pull out our phones and start scrolling. (Yes, I'm as guilty as anyone. It's all rather insidious.) Instead of having pockets in our day when our brain is free to wander and rest with no demands being placed on it, we fill those moments with... well, whatever happens to catch our notice on our phones. If your feeds look anything like mine, not only are we not giving our brains a break, but at the same time we're causing huge releases of cortisol into our systems due to the nature of current events. This makes it even worse than just not having a break.  I think I found this particular interesting because over the past few months, I have been listening to very little as I clean the barn each morning. It kind of felt a...

It was a good day, but a lot of peopling. Enjoy a few past posts if you need something to read that makes you smile. Gretel locks  You must like to cook Block City

As I mentioned, last week L. and I tried to take advantage of the Adler Planetarium's free Wednesday night deal, but after four plus hours of driving the best we could do was to see the outside of the museum before heading back home. Last night we made our second attempt. We did things a little differently this time. First, before getting tickets, I checked the Soldier Field schedule to double check there weren't any more huge events. Second, we parked at my sister-in-law's house in the South loop. (No, I don't know either why we didn't do this the first time. In fact somewhere along Michigan Avenue last week I was realizing the magnitude of that missed opportunity.) These two things made for a much different... and significantly more enjoyable... outing.  The walk from my sister-in-law's is about twenty-five minutes to the Adler. It's a lovely walk along the south side of Grant Park and then along the museum campus. After you go around the Shed Aquarium, yo...

This morning I finally finished bagging up the last of the frozen blueberries. As I was working on it, I realized I thought U-pick places such as the one J. went to with the masses was a good deal, but I had never actually done the math. And to clarify, they picked at a place where you just pick the fruit. There are no activities or petting zoo or concessions. The commercialized places are rarely a good deal , plus I find them tedious and annoying. But as usual, I digress. All this to say, I actually did the math when the blueberries were back in the freezer.  The total amount of blueberries frozen was 44 cups. We baked with and ate at least six cups, plus J. and everyone baked and ate probably another six cups. I'm going with 56 cups of blueberries total, but that is probably a little low. I did some math and learned that we paid $1.25/cup of blueberries. So that seemed like a good deal, but I wanted to be sure, so I looked online at frozen blueberry prices. Our local chain grocer...

One day last week I had a day with nothing on the calendar and no project at home that needed my attention. It was the perfect day to work on something that I had been putting off because I didn't want interruptions once I began... Finishing up little odds and ends of projects that we're lying about the studio and getting things put to rights. So that is what I did. The little projects were the last 2% of many different things that I hadn't bothered to completely finish, so I couldn't put them away. I washed skeins of yarn, I completed various notes on projects and filed them, I completed weaving a swatch for my ongoing breed study project so that could get filed away, etc. It wasn't even things that warranted a picture.  This allowed me to clear the decks a bit. I realized that I needed a dedicated staging area for future weaving projects, so I reorganized a bit and made that. Things are much more organized now and it makes me happy.  The large inkle loom needed a ...

Since H. and R. had picked so many apples on Friday and they were covering most of our counters, it was time for J. to begin his cider pressing activities. He has kind of fine tuned the process this year to make it more efficient. This is a good thing because the apple trees are loaded. Step one is to grate the apples in a food processor. The next step is to press them with that guillotine-shaped thing there in the center of the table.  J. has it set up so that it has a jack pushing down a block of wood inside the strainer which is holding the grated apples. The key piece to this is the paint straining bag that holds the apples inside the strainer. It is so fine that only cider can come out. Plus they're cheap and washable.  The strainer is sitting in a foil pan with a spout cut out of it. In probably about an hour J. processed all the apples that had been picked and had about two gallons of cider. These early apples that he's using are pretty tart which makes a great tasting ...