Plum madness nearly over

[ritaxis]

Let's see. Canned plums, check: plum jelly, check. Chinese plum sauce, check: dried plums, check. Plum wine: in primary fermentation. Nice fellow will move to under apple tree tomorrow. I think there are enough good plums still on the tree for me to make more of the plum sauce (it's really good, though it's a color that would frighten you if you came upon it unexpectedly, or in a dark alley), or maybe that plum thing that personhead dragonet2 gave me the recipe for.

Sadly, after spending hours trying to figure it out, I do not have a name for the troubles the plum and apricot tree have. But I do have a remedy, short of euthanasia. So I have a plan, more or less, around that.

Plum madness ends just in time for apple madness to begin. Let's see: I have I think seven quart and three pint-and-a-half jars I can put apple juice into. I do not think this is a good year for me to make cider. Well, it could be. Dried apples are stupid, unlike dried plums which are cool. Apple butter, good, applesauce, better. Apple pie is wonderful. The only problem the apple tree has is worms, which I have been treating faithfully with codling moth traps to no avail. I don't think it's brown apple moth, because the moths I saw were different looking in ways I cannot remember.

Speaking of euthanasia, did I mention that the old refrigerator, which I have roundly hated for the last several years of its life, finally gave us an excuse? The fan motor gave out, or went moribund, anyway, and started making loud noises and stinking up the place with that burnt-motor smell. If your refrigerator does that and you like your refrigerator, you have it fixed. But that refrigerator had tiny cracks all through its structural plastic, and almost everything nonessential was broken: crisper drawers, the shelf that sits on them, door shelves, door handle . . . it was just hideous.

So we got a new one from Sears. We could not afford it: but we're breaking out the last bit of savings anyway to send the boy to Prague, and there's enough left over to buy the fridge. The nice fellow believes to the bottom of his soul that having black appliances is worth an extra fifty dollars, so it's black. To bore you with more details: it was the smallest non-stupid model they had -- 18.2 cubic feet (I know, those of you from countries where they use rational measuring systems are thinking, "what's next? is she going to give the energy usage in poods per fortnight?" but hey, I just live here). It was the least energy-greedy model they had. And let me tell you another effect of a Republican administration: several years ago when I first started daydreaming about replacing the refrigerator, the models that were on display at the Sears store were markedly lower in energy usage across the board than the ones available now. And they varied more. There were more sizes and there were more different options. Now most of the refrigerator models are humongous and take too much energy. One improvement is the almost-universal glass shelf instead of the annoying wire ones. They all had split shelves, which I think is a good thing. The vegetable drawers are tiny, though. I think a large head of cabbage will not fit in one. So I have retained one of the plastic bins I was using to replace the broken vegetable bins in the old refrigerator, and I've put it on a shelf and filled it with leeks, cabbage, carrots, and celery, the things that don't fit into the bins. Also went online and ordered an extra door shelf to put little jars of mustard and pickles and stuff on.

I love having a functional refrigerator and refrigerator light.

Now, if I can get the dishwasher freed from its prison, fixed, returned, and defended from groat, I will be happy.

Comments

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

Oh dear. I read that first bit as "Caned plums, check" and had this vision of you hitting them ...

[del-c.livejournal.com]

There's nothing irrational about cubic feet: it's a volume you were quoting, I presume, and cubic feet are a volume, albeit a unit of a different size. I R a trained engineer, so I'm used to using odd sizes of measurement.

The units that make me want to stab my eyes out with a pencil are the ones whose dimension doesn't match what they're supposedly measuring, like force measured in units of mass, or impulse/mass measured in units of time.

(...and then called "SI", because hey, the second is an SI unit, right? Aaargh!)

[hrj.livejournal.com]

I don't suppose you'd be interested in doing any swapping? I have some quince jelly still left over from several years ago. And if you ever have a need for all the fresh Italian Laurel you could ever need, just say the word. I've been trying to get a good, productive plum going, but my tree has spent most of its life being depressed and mopey. (Not enough sunlight is a big problem. Storms that hit right when it's started blooming is another. And then there's my tendency not to water much in the summer ....)

[ellarien]

My mother just bought a new refrigerator -- a British-style, under-the-counter model, of course, maybe 8 cubic feet with one cubic foot of frozen-food space; there's nowhere in her kitchen to put an American-style one even if she wanted it. Her old one was slightly older than me (and I'm starting to think of myself as early-middle-aged); the door went rusty some time in the early 70's and was covered with wood-effect stick-on plastic that had faded to a sort of purple shade, but it still worked. The delivery men were surprised by the weight because it was made of metal rather than plastic.