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Ok, moving right along…

My grape vine produced an obscene amount of concord grapes last year. I don’t know if the long freeze we had over the previous winter did it, but I’m now crazy in love with the grape vines.

You shoulda seen the things coming out of my kitchen. Grape pie (*recipe below), grape jam, grape seeds. Holy crap, EACH grape has a seed. Did you KNOW that? It’s one of those things in life you just don’t think about until you have to face it head on. Hee. Anywho, I finally figured it all out and made lots of yummy stuff. The pie was most excellent.

But the jam… oh my gawd, the JAM!! I’ve never even made jam before, so I had no idea what I was getting in to. I just knew I could not let those little pearls of sugary sweetness go to the birds. I had thousands of them and I had to make use of them somehow.

So, jam I made. And it was divine!

All this is leading to plums. Lots and lots of plums!

And even though I had to wrestle many of the plums from the dogs, and teach the dogs to not eat the pits, lest they throw up in the bedroom at 3 in the morning on the new carpet (ahem!), I still managed to make two huge batches of plum jam. One is less sugary than the other, but they both settled into being very tasty. Tomorrow I’m going to make one last batch. Something in-between… the baby bear jam.

I’ll be sure to let you know how it turns out. Oh, and in case anyone is wondering, ladleing jam from the pot to the jars… hot, molten lava!!

eta… the Concord Grape Pie recipe, adapted from my friend, Liney’s original:

2 quarts fresh concord grapes
1/2 c. sugar
1/2 T. cornstarch (or another thickener if you don’t use corn products, like me. Arrowroot is a good alternative.)
1 T. butter
Pastry for two crusts

Wash the grapes. Remove the skins and put aside.
Place pulp in saucepan and bring to a boil; cook a few minutes until the pulp is soft. Put through strainer or food mill, while pulp is hot, to remove seeds. Mix strained pulp with skins. Stir in sugar and arrowroot. Pour into crust. Top with a few pats of butter and add the top crust.
Cook at 450 degrees for 10 minutes and then 350 for 35-40 minutes or until the crust is browned.

Make sure you put something under the pie dish as this WILL drip in your oven.

The Turkish hackers got to my blog about a month ago. Fortunately (and smartly, I might add!) I was all backed up. I told my host and reinstalled everthing and thought I was good to go. That didn’t stop me from spending all my time out in the yard and neglecting my poor little blog, however. Until one day when I found this cool little toy called Wordle. With Wordle, you can create artistic little word clouds from any text or url you provide. I tried it out on a couple sites and wow, cool!! I plugged in my little blog’s url and… whoa, not so cool. The main, really large font-sized words were Poker!!??, and Ringtones!!??, and Texas Holdem!?!, and, Cell Phones?!?, and… well, you get the idea. What the…?

I poked all around my blog for a few days looking for errant code and leftover hacker droppings with no luck at all. Boo Hiss!

Until I peeked at one of my posts. Deep within five or six of my posts was hidden code for all sorts of advertising links. Wha? How? Who? The bastards!!

I spent quite a bit of time cleaning out my archives, changing my passwords, and updating my Wordpress code. Try and hack me now, losers! Or not!

So, not only was Wordle kinda fun, it was very helpful too! Thanks, Wordle Dude! And lookie, I’m all clean now!

Anywho… I am now playing around with new looks. This is one of them. I can’t seem to corral my tastes into one style so I’ve made a few designs… none of which look ANYthing like the others. I’ll probably rotate them, or stare at them until I think they’re ugly and completely redo them, or just toss them and start over. I can’t help myself. Last night I was up until 3am working on this one. In the last 1/2 hour, I accidentally created something entirely different (and quite adorable if I do say so myself), but I worked so hard on all the code for this one, you’re going to have to suffer with it for awhile. Ha. I like it too, but the other one is soooo cute! Yeah, I’m all over the place. I need to live longer!

I’m finally realizing that I’m like that with my blog content too. Most of my favorite blogs tend to stick to a main topic. Like home decor, or politics, or gardening, or going green, or babies, or animal rescue, or SOMEthing! I can not seem to do that. And I’ve sort of stopped blogging thinking I might surf around a bit and figure out my own little niche. BUT, alas… I realize that I’m not the niche type. I’m just going to vomit out my brain on a somewhat daily basis and you get what you get.

You won’t mind, will you?

Oh, well, you can always look at the pretty pictures.

The roses (they look like lettuce or kale now, don’t they?) in the banner picture actually came from these old shots. I think they might have been prettier in their original rainbow sherbet state. You never know, they might just make a reappearance in this banner. Blue? Orange? Oy. I’m so indecisive. Was I always like this?!

Feel free to help me choose! Any other comments on the new, and very much incomplete design (I’m still trying to figure out how to get the title OUT of my header so I can put it in the banner art in a font I actually like) are welcome too. Already I see the hyperlinks could be darker, no?

Congratulations, David Cook!!!

Scrawny, age 19. I never expected him (or his sister, who died just last year) to live to be a year old. We found them in the attic after their mother was killed by racoons (ah, ranch life!). They werejust a couple of weeks old. He’s a good boy! And he’s finally the leader of the pack (all dogs now)! He’s livin’ it up!

…and what goes better with messin’ around in Photoshop than music…

David Cook music!! Squeee!

But it’s about to rain again. Just for a few days. It’s probably a good thing because I’ve been shoveling dirt and moving boulders and dethatching the lawn. And I am soooore! The good sore, though. Gardening sore. Ahhh!

The birds don’t mind a little rain anyway!

So, um, about my oak tree? Never mind.

The deck is going to be fixed next week - yay! I’m just going to finish off the cutout where the tree was, but, man, I’m gonna miss that big ol’ tree. It helped create my favorite corner of the yard.

That corner is a leeeetle more exposed now. Whoa… hi neighbors!

We’ll definitely have to figure out how to soften up that corner again and get.some.privacy! Eep!

I cannot WAIT to get back outside… Is it March yet?

Final Results of Parade Magazine/America’s Giving Challenge

See the blog at A Place To Bark for an update re: the donation prizes and for Bernie’s thanks for everyone’s generosity and hard work!!

We raised over $42,000 dollars. And on top of that, the Zoline Foundation is matching the first 35k dollar-for-dollar, which makes the total over $77,000 raised.

A Place to Bark may not have won the $50k grant — they came in fifth — but they are winners still! Thanks to all of YOU!

Ok, this is getting nerve-wracking!! A Place to Bark is currently in the top four badges. But the race is on!!

As a thank you to the donors, a group of Bernie’s artist friends have donated their artwork as gifts to those who donate $10 to A Place to Bark. Click here to see a listing all of the artists who have generously donated thank you gifts. The winners of these gifts will be chosen at random after Jan. 31st.

To enter the drawing for one of these cool gifts, donate just $10 to A Place To Bark. Click the donate button on this badge — Your donation made through Network For Good enters you in the drawing.

Click here to keep track of the top 10 charities on the sixdegrees.org site. Remember, the charity with the most individual, unique donations wins. That’s the number of unique donors, not how many times they donate, nor how much money they donate. Just $10 by every person.

And watch this cute montage made by Claudine Hellmuth of some of the many dogs and cats saved by Bernie and A Place To Bark!

My heartfelt thanks to everyone for all your support!!

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“A Place to Bark” is a private no kill rescue run solely by Bernie Berlin. All animals come from high kill shelters in the south and are on death row. Combining health care, rehabilitation, and working with animal welfare organizations, A Place to Bark provides a true no-kill vision. Registered 501c3 non-profit. Visit A Place to Bark’s web site for some amazing stories of rescue and placement.

Six Degrees is a charitable initiative of Kevin Bacon in partnership with Network for Good.

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