MyLife-When I Got A Paycheck

With my husband's support, I have been a stay at home Mom for 9 years. My eldest will be turning 10 next month, so you can see that for most of her life, she's had the quantity time as well as the quality time. During that almost decade, however, I have earned a paycheck twice, for 2 months each time.

The first time was for American Promotions, Inc.. American Promotions is an advertising specialties company. That means they sell and have logoed any product you can imagine. Most companies want mugs or pens or t-shirts. Think about how many times you opened an account at a bank or attended a conference--most of the freebies were one of those three, right? Well, that is what most companies seemed to want. But if a company wanted a product outside the box, well, AP had six filing cabinets with catalogs from companies who did far more than mugs.

One of my favorite products was a zippable coconut. It was a real coconut, with a zipper around the middle that you could open and shut and thus use the inside as a container. Who would ever throw that away! And that is, of course the whole point of advertising specialties--for a company to keep its name in front of you so when you want what they sell, you'll think of them first. Of course, a coconut might not be thrown away, but people won't wear it, write with it or drink with it (well, maybe that last one is possible). And that's why pens, mugs and t-shirts remain such a popular choice. Because they get used (and keep the company name in front of customer's faces). I still like the zippered coconut though. I would keep my jewelry in it!

My husband, Theron, was the President of American Promotions, and needed my skills temporarily, so I obliged. I enjoyed it, knowing it was temporary, and then returned back home ready to work where my heart is, even if it's without a paycheck.

The second job I had in the last 9 years was for two months as a legislative aide to my Oregon State Representative, Dennis Richardson. He's also my dad, and so, knowing it was temporary, I bridged his gap between aides.

I loved it. Not everyone would like to be a Number Two guy--but I do. I liked organizing his office, scheduling his day, and anticipating his needs. I liked having him ask me about a paper, and knowing right where it was. I liked having him call me en route to a meeting and asking for the best route to get there. Maybe because I like controlling and organizing things, and his office stayed in control and organized far better than a household with five children. Or maybe because I like making a difference, and Representative Richardson's work made a visible difference in people's lives. I had never before met a politician so concerned with answering constituent's problems--and actually finding answers, not just commiserating.

Ironically though, my current and constant "job" of the last 9 years has been making a huge difference in people's lives. Particularly the lives of one man and (now) five children. I cannot control or organize as consistently as I can in an office. But I make more of a difference in those six people's lives than any person can in any other job. So, after a great two months with Rep. Richardson, I again left paid work for the unpaid kind (thanks to the support of my husband).

Are you making the same choices? Why or why not?

Food-Canning Applesauce, A Saga

Canning feels so cozy-old-fashioned. I like to jar something at least once a year. I will only make the effort (and it is actually a great deal of effort) if I can find a great deal on the food. Free is best. Last year Harry and David's had a super sale (for locals) on their fresh peaches. I put up over 70 quarts of peaches and we currently have two quarts left only because I hid them and then forgot where I hid them. The other quarts didn't last past Christmas. And we tried to ration them.

This year I found a friend with yellow apples that she wasn't going to pick--seven trees worth. I grabbed my sister-in-law (age 13) and brother-in-law (age 15) and bribed them with visions of homemade applesauce to come help me pick apples and then can them. They came! And we filled the back of my mini-van with bags of apples.

We then started to prepare them the traditional way. We cut them in quarters, put them in water to boil. Then we pushed them through a Victrola Strainer and out one side flowed the apple waste parts and out the other flowed real applesauce. I had heated the lids and sterilized the jars and prepared the rings--everything was working so well. Then I realized I couldn't find my steam canner. I tried calling my Mom and twin sister, but neither of them could help me. That's when I had a brand new idea that should have worked.

I felt like I was figuring out a whole new way to process lots of canning jars at once. A path unavailable to the old time canners. A canning conclusion that perhaps I was the first to conclude: Use a Dishwasher!

A steam canner processes the jars of food using hot steam. A dishwasher, set on the hot water setting, on ultra wash (so it washed on the longest setting) could hold 25 jars at once--and how could its steam be any different than a steam canner? Steam is steam, right? And the outside of the jars would be sparkling clean too. It was the perfect idea!

So I loaded up the dishwasher, turned the settings on, and by the end of its cycle, only four of the lids hadn't inverted. It worked! So I did it to all 54 jars. By the next morning, only five lids hadn't sealed. So, we ate some fresh applesauce, gave my dear relatives their share, and put the sealed jars out in the garage.

The garage was as cold as a refrigerator until we hit our Southern Oregon October Week of Warmth (it comes every year). It was just after that warm spell that I decided to make granola, which requires applesauce, and I walked out to my garage for a jar of that tasty, homemade applesauce. As I picked up closest jar, I noticed a hairy blue growth on the applesauce surface.

I put it down, thinking it an anamoly, and then picked up another jar. It had orange spots "icing" the applesauce. My heart beat fast now. Another and another and another jar. Every jar but five had hairy spots of black, blue, green or orange mold growing on top. Ah, the variety of colors. But how could it be? The center of the lids wasn't popping up. So I tried to take off a lid. And off it flipped off with just a bit of effort from my pointer finger.

I could push every lid off every jar with a push from my finger.

I felt sick.

I tried to do something with the wasted applesauce. I mixed it with glue and cinnamon to make some great smelling sachets. But it required too much cinnamon to make it worth it for 45 jars of applesauce. So I threw the rest out.

And when I made pears the next month (only $1.00 a box from a church pear farm!), I used a steam canner.

So I learned the moral of the story, which is...Well...what do you think the moral of the story is?

Review-Charlie Bone is NOT Harry Potter

Does it seem to you that a lot of fantasy coming out of the publishing houses in the last 10 years seems an imitative shadow of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter? The publishing mantra seems to be: if they bought Harry Potter, then they will buy ____fill in the blank___.

The Charlie Bone series comes directly to mind. Sorry if you are a fan, but I found the writing weak and I didn't really like Charlie Bone. It's impossible to like a book if you don't like the main character! There is plenty of action and potential in the books, but I couldn't help but wonder how many times Jenny Nimmo read Potter before she created the Bone world. The magic school adventures Bone experienced forced me to compare it to Potter. And Charlie Bone suffered from comparison.

There are five books in the Bone series. And I dragged myself through them all.

Re-read Potter instead. Don't you think?

Review on Author Shannon Hale

I was going to talk about one book, Princess Academy, by author Shannon Hale. But I can't limit myself to talking about just one. She has four: Princess Academy, Goose Girl, River Secrets and Enna Burning. That order is how I rank them. If you read them, however, the order should be Goose Girl, Enna Burning, River Secrets and then Princess Academy is a stand alone book. They are books I'd like to suck up with a straw. Delicious! I devoured them like I was starving. Perhaps because I had so recently finished reading a whole row of poorly written fantasy. These books were like breezes that brushed aside the tasteless writing I had just endured, and left me satisfied--although I hated for them to end. A bit of magic, royal blood, battles, true love, with a depth in the characters that is surprising complex in a fairy tale world.

Read one! Then tell me what you think.