I got a cheerful letter and a check today from the county clerk for primary election day. One hundred and twenty-five dollars for election clerk. It's actually more than I make in a day of childcare ( Read more... )

The deck is paved in almond blossom petals ( Read more... )

I made another batch of peach leather, this time not as a side project to canning peaches. Yield: one big mesh orange bag of windfalls makes five trays of peach leather. Remember to line the trays with the drying mesh and the parchment. The mesh orange bag is for selling ten pounds of oranges, but peaches are much denser than oranges because of ( Read more... )

I bought a little kitchen scale a couple of weeks ago. Now know: 29 pounds -- 13 kilos -- of apricots, together with a pineapple (for some reason the nice fellow's recipe -- which he carries in his head -- calls for one pineapple no matter how many or how few apricots), the juice of several lemons, requisite sugar (I wasn't there when he measured ( Read more... )

The application fee for the Charles University medical program in Prague is $47: the tuition and fees are $14K/year ( Read more... )

12 pounds of apricots (half a lug), one medium pineapple, 2 lemons, sugar to 2/3 the volume and the nice fellow's mystical homeopathic dollop of pectin makes six quarts and something more than a pint of apricot pineapple jam ( Read more... )

for locals who care what I think: I have abandoned the John Boutelle strategy. He's gone off entirely and says nothing that is of use in pushing Chris Krohn and Neal Coonerty leftwards. Coonerty, the most conservative real candidate (I am not counting the poisonous loony nutter, I mean the other one besides Boutelle), is to the left of Boutelle, ( Read more... )