Peach Pie Jam and a Class, ear clog

How Ear Clog Can Facilitate Inadvertent Telephone Game

I awoke this morning with severely clogged ears. The children and I were like ships in the night because I could only hear about half of what they said. Now I'm not saying this is a bad thing, because the Pokémon obsession has not waned and my interest in it has definitely not grown, but it was such an odd experience to have misconversations. Kinda funny too.

"Boys, why are you each clad only in a shirt?"

I meant this literally because they were both completely naked except for tees which hung to mid-bum; tragically, they resembled what I imagine pedophiles look like when home alone. It's a terrible look.

"Where is my bathing suit?"

"What? We have no laundry chute."

"What, MOM?? What does that even mean?"

To myself: "What the eff are those kids making up now? They are nuts, and I really wish they'd at least put on some underpants."

I make coffee for me and breakfast for them. While they eat I attempt to explain what clogged ears feel like and with them how one experiences sound.

"I feel like I'm underwater or far away."

"Mom, can you hear me? Can you hear me?"

"Yes, boys, you're four flipping feet from me. I just mean the sound sounds garbled."

"What's garbled? Like weird? Can you hear me?"

"Yes, like hard to understand."

"What?"

Who's on first, for the love. I do feel that I've turned a corner in the health department so that's good.

I made their lunches for camp (just seven days of lunch-making left! Making lunches blows; that their school provides excellent-quality lunches every day makes me not care about the tuition. SUCH.A.LUXURY. I can see why my mother went on cooking strike after making my sister and me lunches for 10 years.) and got them to camp and came home to attempt to clear my ears and prep for my canning class.

Peach Pie Jam

As these events pretty much always are, this one was an absolute delight. It's fun to meet new people and welcome those you already know and then preach the gospel of something you love to do and probably would be doing anyway. We made Peach Pie Jam and also did a jam tasting of six or seven I'm canned so far this summer. Everything was a hit!

And now, back to the couch. Just in case!

Sloth on a couch

The sloth

That would be me. I am sorry to report in a fairly self-pitying tone that I feel a bit like ass today. Did I usher this in by going ahead and making chicken noodle soup last night? No, I didn't. In fact, that was fortuitous because when T got home, looking rather like the wrath himself, he complained of a sore throat and basically jumped into the pot of soup with glee. I ate with one hand propping up my head, he supped (souped; hah!) in front of the TV, laughing wanly though sincerely at John Oliver's Last Week Tonight which is a really clever show.

The couch

That's where I have been for most of the past seven hours. I am still there, as it turns out. A soup lunch seemed very necessary a few hours back, yet reheating chicken soup seemed too onerous. So, I dusted off my blender and made some cold saffron-tomato soup. No cooking, no real chopping, just into the blender and vroom. Often, this lovely soup is pink, but today, because I used a Mr. Stripey tomato (which is primarily yellow) and the saffron, the mixture turned out to be a stunning shade of coral. Not unlike cooked shrimp, really. Some chopped avocado here, a drizzle of oil there. Solid.

One can do many things while on a couch if a computer is close at hand.

Glum over having had to cancel lunch with a friend (because she is one of my favorite people AND we were going to get Ethiopian food; grr; a double loss), I put my energies into a project I pretty much never want to do unless I'm sick or desperate for a holiday gift for hard-to-give-to family members: making a photo book. Jesus h, the captions alone could drive the sanest of us into a vortex of madness, but I persevered -for THREE straight hours because what do I have but time in prostrate form- and successfully completed this scrapbook of sorts. I know I will be exceedingly glad to have it.

Because my camera was also near, I snapped some pics of Nutmeg because I am that person. Isn't he handsome? Outrageously so? If he were human, he'd wear tuxedos all day long just because he'd feel it was the right way to live life. Of this I am certain.

Plum-Cherry jam, ick

Friends, I'm having a discomfiting sense of déjà vu. Perhaps you recall the two weeks I spent with pneumonia last summer? I did about 84 thousand-piece puzzles, lost several pounds as I could only tolerate chicken soup and smoothies and recovered just in time for BlogHer. I was told that my posts during that time bordered on hysterical (funny not insane), so if you want to revisit and laugh, click here for the onset plus the time Jack cut his hair by himself in the dark and looked like a serial killer, here when I joke about not really turning a corner, here when I talk about just how seriously I was nerding out with puzzles and here when peevishness tips me into no-nonsense'ness.  In any case, I don't feel so hot right now and being that it's around the same time, I'm having flashbacks and the odd urge to get out that card table and start one of those puzzles anew. At least I already went to BlogHer so I don't have to recover rapidly. Oh wait, I do. Cuz I have children.

I blame this on Oliver because last night I was up late rocking and snuggling him because his tummy hurt and it had two nights before that too, but I thought he was angling for a "Tum" then. Last night he really did seem a bit droopy, so we sang and I showered him with kisses and he attempted to cup my boobs and I had to slap his little paws away, and now I'm achy and my throat is just not right.

I have zero patience for being sick although the damn puzzle is sounding more and more appealing.

The whole plum photo session this morning made me want to make jam while those pups were perfectly pre- to just-right-ripe, so I did. Having just made a large batch of my plum-basil jam, I went in a different direction today and created a new recipe: Plum-Cherry with both brown and regular sugars. Now, lest you think I was just on a magical tear of creativity, no. I ran out of regular sugar after three cups so could either put on a bra and go out to the store OR find a work-around. There was absolutely no chance of the former, so the latter won in uncontested fashion.

I gotta say, you win some, and here I surely did. 8 cups chopped Shiro plums, 2 cups pitted and quartered bing cherries, 3 cups unrefined sugar, 1 packed cup brown sugar. That's it. Fab!