Grape Jelly and Salsa

I wrote a letter to the editor this week, and they published it almost immediately, but not until the opinion editor gave me a call to verify I had really written it. The letter was critical of the paper, and I guess he couldn’t believe that I would actually write something critical. I can probably kiss goodbye any future article I might have wanted to write for them, but I’m just sick and tired of all the fluff pieces and the lazy reporting. In the letter I criticised their coverage of the moratorium on drilling in the Gulf after the big BP spill. They have relied on a laid-off offshore worker and a nut case local activist, neither of whom have the correct facts, care to have the facts, and are only out to further their personal agendas. It just makes me sick to read about so-called news coming from such ill-informed sources. Lately, almost every day something in the paper makes me angry, so I just decided to let them know. Not that it will affect any changes. The new general editor isn’t made of the same stuff the old editor was, and that’s just too bad for everybody in this area who relies on this paper for news. If there was a different newspaper I could subscribe to, I would.

After much negotiating, I got my grandson for a night this week. I took him camping at a local water park. We got off to a rocky start, but after a little “talk” things turned for the better, and we enjoyed being with each other. He liked the new travel trailer and wanted to take pictures of it, but his camera battery ran out, so I took the pictures for him with mine. I still haven’t downloaded the photos, which I promised his mama I would do, but it’s on my to-do list, and I will email them to her. She’s expecting a new baby and I’m mildly worried about my grandson's reaction to it. He used to want a sibling but seems to have changed his mind now. I think, sadly, he believed in the past that another child would hold his parents together. Now, I think he sees it as the final straw, as if his mom remarrying hadn’t been that straw, but children often hold to unrealistic hope. He'll be 13 years older than the baby, and that may be a too much for them to really have a close relationship. He's been moved from his old bedroom, into a larger room, but he seems to resent the move. Poor guy; he’s had a difficult life so far. But we had a great time together, just he and I, at the water park, and that night, played Farkle until it was time to go to bed. We had lots of laughter. It was important, I think, to both of us.

Friday, back home, I made salsa. We’ve had a bumper tomato crop, so I used the ugly tomatoes and the ones I had grown especially for salsa, saving back the big, pretty “company” tomatoes for slicing. While I was making the salsa, my SO was boiling grapes he had gathered off some vines growing wild on his land. I put up 8 jars of salsa, and he got a gallon and a half of grape juice. We drank some of the juice for breakfast yesterday, and then I strained some through cheesecloth and made jelly. It seemed to be a blessed batch, with everything going as close to perfect as possible with jelly. Even the foam skimmed off easily, and now there are also 8 jars of jelly in the pantry, right beside the salsa. We had just a smidgen of the jelly left, and so we tried it out at supper on some crescent rolls. Yummy! It has a gorgeous color and clarity, if I do say so myself. Funny how something as simple as a good batch of grape jelly can provide you with such a sense of accomplishment. We could be getting TOO domestic.

Onward ....