Days of Labor

Yesterday was Labor Day, which is a federal holiday in the USA to honor and recognize the American labor movement and the work and contributions of laborers to the development and achievements of the United States. Many people celebrate with cookouts–a last hurrah before settling down to autumn and winter. We celebrated by laboring. As EJ often says, “We worked hard and got a lot done.”

Last Thursday EJ mowed the lawn while I blanched, diced, and froze a large bowl of garden tomatoes that he had harvested. Sometimes EJ likes to can them, but when he can’t get to them in a timely manner, I freeze them. In our family, we have a policy that whichever one of us has a desire to do something is the one in charge of doing it. He/she becomes the “job boss” while the other provides “hero support” if needed. So EJ cans while I freeze/dry herbs and vegetables. He bakes bread in the bread machine while I cook most of the meals. He takes care of the vegetable garden, while I take care of the herb garden. I do the housework while EJ does maintenance and repairs. Things like that. I usually mow the lawn but sometimes EJ does it.

After the tomatoes and lawn were done, we went grocery shopping. With prices so high, we have created a “priority list” for shopping. Gone are the days when we could make a large list for extensive shopping. We now determine how much money we can spend–sometimes little, sometimes a little more–and then we buy only the highest priority items that fit within our budget. Everything else is kept on the list for another time.

During the holiday weekend, in addition to my normal chores of laundry, cooking, and watering the garden, I peeled, cut up, blanched, and bagged carrots for the freezer. Hannah Joy took up her position under the table so she could eat any carrot peel or piece that fell to the floor. She’s our cleanup crew and she takes her responsibility seriously. I also went out and carefully picked a bowl of nettles–using tongs so I didn’t touch the prickly/burning stems–which I then put into the dehydrator and later ground up and stored to use later for tea. Nettle tea has a lot of medicinal uses. I also picked some of our sunflowers and we sat at the patio table on the deck and took the seeds from the heads. I sorted through them to select the best for next year’s planting and then stored the rest for the wild birds to eat this winter. We also had to pick out the worms. I am going to have to look up how to naturally prevent worms in sunflowers. We don’t use toxic herbicides on our plants.

We’ve had several weeks of very autumnish weather, with cooler days and nights. The days were so cool, especially in the mornings, that I often wore jackets. Even when the temps warmed up in the afternoon, there was an underlying coolness in the air that felt nice. The nights were so cool (low 40s) that I put a heavier blanket on the bed. This week, however, the temperatures soared into the low 90s during the day. It was so hot yesterday that when we went out to shut the chickens in their coop in the evening, we were horrified to see that the vegetable plants were wilted. We quickly watered them and they revived quite a bit. I watered them extensively this morning to help them make it through today’s hot temperatures. There is a possibility of rain in the forecast for the next few days so I won’t have to water the gardens. Unless, of course, the rain misses us, which it often does.

The weekend was so busy that today I am taking it easy. Mostly. Which is good because the temperature remained so warm last night (low 70s) that I didn’t sleep well. Fortunately and happily, the temperatures will begin cooling again tomorrow.

On Friday I emailed the rescue woman we are adopting two barn cats from because I hadn’t heard from her in a week or two. I know she is busy and has to rearrange her schedule to deliver the cats to us, but I just wanted to keep in touch and maybe get an estimated day for delivery. The woman has several “foster families” that take care of the many cats she has rescued and is trying to place in homes. She emailed me that a recent tornado had destroyed the home of one of the foster moms and she’s been busy trying to re-rescue the missing cats. She sent me photos of the destruction. Wow. I vaguely knew there had been severe weather downstate, but I hadn’t realized how damaging the storms were. One of the photos showed that the 70-year-old foster mom’s home–it looked like a trailer or modular home–was upside down on top of a car. My heart goes out to her and I am praying for her because I was told that she didn’t have house insurance. I reassured the rescue woman that we can wait patiently for our cats while she deals with this problem. (FYI: our cats aren’t among those that were living at this home.) I merely alerted the rescue woman that our driveway becomes impassable without 4-wheel drive when winter hits.

Our son is currently working on a Great Lakes bulk carrier as a deckhand. It’s hard and dangerous work but the pay is excellent so whenever he needs extra money, he signs on for a month or so. EJ and I enjoy tracking his ship via marinetraffic.com as it travels around the Great Lakes. There are also Youtube channels that air live stream webcams in various places to watch the ships as they pass. It’s quite fun. When we know our son’s ship is going to pass a webcam, we get on the appropriate channel and watch it go by in real-time. It’s possible we could actually see our son on the webcam, although so far I haven’t. I’ve also been learning different information about ships–what types of jobs the crew does, what they eat, what products the ships transport, how they load and unload ships, the history of the ships, the canals they travel through, and so on. A couple days ago, marinetraffic.com showed that our son’s ship was going to travel to the northeast part of Lake Ontario, which was very unusual–as in, we’ve never seen him travel to Lake Ontario before. Our son later told us that someone made a mistake and their destination was actually near Detroit. However, that “mistake” made me wonder how ships make it past Niagra Falls, which connects Lakes Erie and Ontario. I looked it up and learned about the Welland Canal and St. Lawrence Seaway, which is very interesting. I’ve always enjoyed learning about different types of jobs and I now have a personal interest in Great Lakes ships. I actually like learning new things about everything, which is why I’ve been compiling my page of Everything Links. Every time I learn new things, I add the links to the Everything Links.