Wow!

Both of you sound like it has been quite a week.  Beth, regardless of the exact details of your time at the fair, you spent a good chunk of time in social contact with your "neighbours".  I believe this sort of thing is critical to the well-being of retired people.  There is such a tendency to slowly withdraw from society.  Now, Cathy, from your blog, I'm betting you can't conceive of the idea of of having too little social contact!  It sounds like you would "kill" for the chance to withdraw a bit and have some time to yourself.  Somehow, we need to find a "happy medium", and it doesn't appear to happen as long as we are working.  And then we retire and are so happy to have a bit of time to ourselves that we lose a lot of our contacts--sometimes for good.   ( Sometimes this is a good thing, but not always) 

 I guess I am thinking about this sort of thing as it looks like my Ravenesque group is going to fold.  This group has been a lifeline for me over the past few years, but there is a natural life span to such groups, and I can see the end of this one.

Cathy, your "power cooking" puts me all to shame.  And I was so proud of what I did!!  I did the math and  converted the figures into meals--I was still stunned at how much you had accomplished.  And Beth, putting down all of the produce--Oh My!!  What do you do with it all?

My accomplishment this weekend was 23 jars of Rhubarb/Pineapple jam, a batch of blueberry muffins, a Rhubarb Cobbler, and gaining 3 pounds.  By this morning several of the lids on the jam have not "popped".  Does this mean I have to throw it out?  This has never happened to me before.

It has been ages since I made muffins from scratch, and as soon as I bit into one of them I appreciated the difference between muffins made from scratch as a "quick bread" and the cake-like crap we buy at the store.  The other difference was shelf life.  I could manage to eat the muffins the second day, but not the third.  It was great to be able to use some of the blueberries I froze last fall.  But it was a bit of a shock to realize that the rhubarb that came out of the freezer was not last year's but 2012!  For the jam and cobbler, it worked just fine.

Today I am planning to "gird my loins" and head into Hakim Optical to complain about my new glasses.  I can read with them but with difficulty.  I get the best results if I put on my dollar store readers over top of my new bi-focals.  Not a good thing.  The sunglasses appear to be fine, but then I only wear them outside and rarely read with them.  I'll let you know how it goes.