by Judy Handley | Aug 25, 2012 | Cape Cod, USA, Sailing Logs Year 7 |
Day 291, Year 7: More Tomato Processing
Date: Saturday, August 25, 2012
Weather: Still Beautiful
Location: Eel Pond, Woods Hole, Massachusetts
While Mark worked at West Marine today, I finished processing the twenty
pounds of tomatoes we bought at the Thursday Farmer?s Market. They were an
heirloom variety something like an Italian Roma which is good for making
sauce. I?ve been adding a huge amount of saut?ed celery and carrots, with
some onion and garlic to the tomatoes, and pureeing everything in the food
processor to end up with a smooth sauce. Sam and Jonah, like most kids,
don?t like chunky sauce, and I am finding that I like the pureed sauce as
well. Between blanching, peeling, and deseeding the tomatoes, and chopping
and saut?ing the other veggies, and then cooking the sauce and getting it
into the canner, the whole day disappeared. I was twenty minutes late
picking Mark up from work and then we raced back to Woods Hole to get ready
to go to a birthday party for a friend named Olivia. This was a belated
birthday party as Olivia turned 75 in late July, but it was also a
celebration of her 50 years as a US citizen.
Olivia was born in India and came to the United States in the early 1960?s
to attend seminary school. Her true goal was to get a graduate degree in
biology, but seminary school was the ticket out of India and into school in
Texas. There she met her lifelong partner, Terry, had their daughter
Sherri, and got her PhD in biology. We met Olivia and Terry through our
friends Bruce and Jane Woodin. They were there tonight and it was great to
catch up on everyone?s summer. Olivia?s daughter has a friend named Carrie
who was also there tonight. Carrie owns Peachtree Circle Farms and it was
from her that we bought the heirloom tomatoes that I was processing today.
Carrie and I talked for a long time, sharing tricks of the trade with one
another. She has never used a pressure canner, and is, in fact, scared to
death of them. I have used pressure canners for years and assured her that
if your canner is in good condition, you have nothing to fear. She has been
renting a state approved kitchen at night to process the tomatoes she s
growing into sauce and is selling it for $8 a pint. At that rate, Heather
and I have put up about $200 worth of organic marinara sauce. Carrie and a
friend have been processing 120 pounds of tomatoes in one night, from 7 pm
to 3 am. Unbelievable. She can make about $500 from the sales of that
sauce, so it is truly a good night?s work. I?m not sure I?m ever going to
be that fast, but a couple of the tips from Carrie should help.
Tomorrow Heather, Jed, and boys will come to the boat mid-morning and we
will sail to Tarpaulin Cove for a day of fun in the sun. I am hoping to
snorkel the point there and see what I can see. I know Heather and Jed are
interested as well, and I?m hoping Sam and Jonah will join us. We will
return to Eel Pond tomorrow night and the gang plans to spend the night.
Early Monday morning Heather has to go to work and Mark has to drive to
Boston for an appointment with his urologist. Heather will be only a dinghy
ride away from work and Jed and I will probably go to the beach with the
boys. When Oliver gets hungry, we?ll just plop him in the stroller and take
him to momma. It is about a half-mile from the beach at one end of Woods
Hole to WCAI, the public radio station where Heather works. So in ten
minutes we can easily get Oliver to his food source. By late morning, Jed
will have to go to work and I will have all three boys for a bit until
Heather finishes up. So Jed and I, along with the boys, will come back to
Windbird. Then Jed will take the dinghy to shore so he can go to work, and
then Heather will have access to the dinghy to come back to Windbird when
her work is done. At least that?s the plan.
by Judy Handley | Aug 24, 2012 | Cape Cod, USA, Sailing Logs Year 7 |
Day 290, Year 7: Fleeting Days of Summer
Date: Friday, August 24, 2012
Weather: Yet Another Beautiful Day
Location: Eel Pond, Woods Hole, Massachusetts
I’m having a hard time dealing with the fact that the closing days of summer
are upon us. I feel like summer just started, but I think that is because
Mark and I were both so immersed into the routine of the bi-weekly chemo
treatments that we missed a huge chunk of summer. It was not until the
chemo treatments ended on the 24rd of July that we started thinking about
sailing. And although there is still a lot of sailing weather left here in
New England, the busy fall calendar interferes with sailing plans. Mark has
worked a couple of days at West Marine recently, but tomorrow he starts back
to work in earnest. He works tomorrow, and then he works next Wednesday,
Friday, and Saturday with trips to doctors in Boston on Monday and Thursday.
We think his Sunday is free, but then he works Wednesday through Saturday of
the following week. And so it goes. It is time for the year-round staff at
West Marine to take vacation time and they need Mark to fill-in. They were
so wonderful about all of the time he had to take off in the latter stages
of the chemo treatment that he feels a bit of a commitment to work whenever
they need him now. So we will just have to eek out sailing times here and
there.
This morning Mark and I had Oliver onboard while Heather had a couple of
meetings and then we went home with Heather to help with kids while Heather
completed another list of chores. And I worked on starting to process the
twenty pounds of tomatoes we bought yesterday. I got about half of them
blanched and will complete the job tomorrow while Mark is at work. Sam and
Jonah had their last day of summer camp today and will be home next week
before starting school after the Labor Day weekend. Sam has a Kindergarten
visiting day on Monday and then has his first official day of school on
Tuesday, September 4. Jonah will return to the Wds Hole Cooperative Daycare
school on Wednesday, September 5. He will go three full days a week which
will be a change for him. He and Sam have only gone to school half-days
this past year. But since we will be leaving in November for the winter,
Heather has to get the boys into a schedule that allows her to work
part-time. I’m already having serious withdrawal symptoms just thinking
about leaving, but we will be back in the spring and have a FULL summer of
fun next year.
I’ll end with a story about Sam and Jonah. Since Heather has had to return
to work, albeit part-time, she is seeing the results of that in Sam and
Jonah’s play. Yesterday she took photos of Jonah cooking in his play
kitchen while holding his baby Joey. When the pot on his stove got too hot,
he threw it to the floor to make sure it didn’t burn the baby. And when Sam
was working at the tool bench, he was holding the phone from the play
kitchen to his ear talking to his work mates. These two little ones have
obviously been watching mommy at work. Heather has to hold Oliver while
doing all sorts of chores, cooking included, and often is on the phone or on
the computer at the same time. Sam and Jonah are learning to multi-task
from the master.
by Judy Handley | Aug 23, 2012 | Cape Cod, USA, Sailing Logs Year 7 |
Day 289, Year 7: Tomatoes and Bees
Date: Thursday, August 23, 2012
Weather: Another Beautiful Day
Location: Eel Pond, Woods Hole, Massachusetts
It was another beautiful day here on the Cape. We should have been at the
beach or out sailing, but instead, our focus today was on tomatoes and bees.
We didn’t intend for the bees to be a focus of attention, but mid-afternoon
while we were at Heather’s, I head Heather exclaiming that the bees had gone
crazy. I looked out in the front yard and all I could see were bees, bees,
and more bees buzzing about in all directions. Brian, the next door
neighbor was out on his riding lawn mower and was near the bee hive. I
yelled for Heather to go tell him to evacuate the area and while she was
outside, I watched the bees swarm into a cloud, and fly away. It was an
amazing thing to watch but it happened so fast that none of us thought to go
grab a camera. Sam and Jonah were asleep, so they didn’t get to watch this.
We thought things were going so great with the hive, and Sam had declared
yesterday that he was going to start a business next summer selling herbs
and honey. He and his parents had even come up with a name-Goldpebble
Gardens. He might still realize his little dream, but we are going to have
to figure out what to do about the bee hive. The queen is gone with about
60 per cent of the worker bees. We think Heather will have to wait until
next spring to get another queen, but we’re not sure about that. So more
research must be done to figure out the best way to keep the bees she still
has happy for the winter and how to restore the queen and bees that ‘flew
the coup.’
Heather had a meeting at work this morning, so Jed and Mark took Sam and
Jonah to the aquarium in Woods Hole while I took Oliver for a stroll. It
was great seeing the three boys after their week away. Absence makes the
heart grow fonder, and we really missed those little guys. Sam was wearing
a new pair of red suede shoes he bought in a Maine Outlet Mall on the way
home yesterday. He really wanted the red shoes for his first day of
kindergarten and we know he will make a definite impression! Both of the
big boys had a great week with their Papa and Grammy in Maine, and I’m sure
Oliver did as well, but unfortunately he didn’t sleep much. So Heather is
exhausted and not sure she ever wants to go on vacation again-at least not
until the boys are old enough to handle traveling without it disrupting
their sleep habits. This morning, Oliver slept for about an hour as I
walked around Woods Hole with him in the stroller, but when he woke up he
wanted mommy. It was time to eat. I took my cell phone out of my pocket
and tried to call Jed, then Mark, and then Heather, none of which I could
reach. I finally realized that the problem was my phone. It’s a phone I
bought in Puerto Rico at a Radio Shack. I have a GoPlan (pay as you go)
with AT&T but I have to put more money in it each month or I lose the
service. I keep about $40 dollars of credit in the phone and then put in
just a few dollars near the end of each month. Evidently I missed the date
for adding a bit into the phone and as a result, lost everything. We’ll go
to an AT&T shop tomorrow and figure out how I can keep the phone going. In
the meantime, we will rely on Mark’s phone.
Now about the tomatoes. When Heather’s meeting was over, we all headed back
to Falmouth. We stopped at the weekly Farmer’s Market to buy food and
picked up another 20 pounds of tomatoes to turn into spaghetti sauce. I
spent the rest of my day cooking down the huge pot of pureed tomatoes that I
processed yesterday and getting those canned. The tomatoes we bought today
were not quite ripe, so we will wait until Saturday to process those. We
stayed at Heather and Jed’s for dinner and enjoyed some of the fresh tomato
marinara sauce over delicious ravioli that Heather bought at the Market
today. The ravioli was locally made with local goat cheese and locally made
pasta. It taught me a lesson about pasta. Ravioli is not just ravioli.
This was truly delicious and having the marinara sauce made from fresh
tomatoes just added to the wonderful tastes. Heather also made a fantastic
salad with arugula, salad greens, grated carrot, and diced ginger. And we
had super long, super thin green beans from Grammy Marti’s garden in
Maine–totally yummy and all locally grown. Yeah! The 35 pounds of
tomatoes we bought yesterday ended up making five quarts and four pints of
sauce. We ate one quart and pressure canned the rest. It is a lot of work,
but totally worth it. The tomatoes we bought today need a day to fully
ripen, so Saturday will be our next totally tomato day.
by Judy Handley | Aug 22, 2012 | Cape Cod, USA, Sailing Logs Year 7 |
Day 288, Year 7: OneDrop
Date: Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Weather: Beautiful Day
Location: Eel Pond, Woods Hole, Massachusetts
This is not a commercial, but for any of you out there that own a boat and
aren’t familiar with a McLube product called OneDrop, we’d like to bring
that to your attention. Alan Kanegsberg told us about it this weekend and
Mark went straight to West Marine to buy a little tube as soon as we got
home from Nantucket. We have used a spray version of McLube for a number
of years, but this little tube is so handy when trying to lubricate anything
that rolls on your boat and it literally just takes one drop. Because it is
a dry lubricant, it maintains a clean surface, free from dirt, sand, salt,
and grime. Mark is using it on anything that moves and he seems to be happy
with the results. Alan also told us about Captain Tolley’s Creeping Crack
Cure for boat leaks. West Marine didn’t have that product, but they have
ordered it for us. This is a penetrating sealant that claims to find and
fix mystery leaks. Sounds too good to be true, so we’ll report on this
product after using it. We surely have enough little mystery leaks to give
it a good try.
On our way to Heather and Jed’s today, we went by a local farm and bought 30
pounds of tomatoes for making sauce. I spent the next three hours blanching
them, peeling the skins, seeding them and cutting them into quarters, and
then putting the tomatoes through the food processor to make tomato puree.
Tomorrow I will go back and turn the puree into marinara sauce to be canned.
Heather and Jed got home from Maine tonight, so we will probably buy more
tomatoes tomorrow.
by Judy Handley | Aug 21, 2012 | Cape Cod, USA, Sailing Logs Year 7 |
Day 287, Year 7: Harvest Time
Date: Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Weather: Mostly Sunny Day
Location: Eel Pond, Woods Hole, Massachusetts
It is harvest time here on the Cape. Tomatoes are ripening and it’s time to
go to a local farm to pick a couple of bushels to process into marinara
sauce for the winter. It is much cheaper to just buy canned tomatoes to
make sauce, but cans these days are lined with plastic and that is just not
good for you. I think I would prefer rusty cans to the ones lined with
plastic, but there is no alternative these days. Today I picked cherry
tomatoes in Heather and Jed’s garden, washed them, laid them out on baking
pans, drizzled them with olive oil, and then roasted them in the oven. When
they were done, I put them in pint jars and into the freezer they went. I
also picked and canned a couple of quarts of green beans. We have had a
steady flow of a few green beans, but no major picking that would allow us
to fill the canner with seven quarts. So I’ll just keep canning a few a
time. Heather and Jed come home from Maine late tomorrow, so Thursday will
probably be tomato picking day.
We talked to Justin, Jo, Ziggy, and Coco on Skype tonight. Coco is doing
great and Ziggy is a bundle of energy. While we were talking to Justin,
Ziggy ‘played’ guitar on Jo’s Iphone using some music application, and then
he did lazer fingerpainting on the phone’s screen and sent us the picture.
I guess there is no end to what you can do on your phone these days.
Amazing.
We also talked to our friends in Little River, South Carolina, Lee and
Lynda. We asked them to start scouting out places where we might dock
Windbird if we stay there for the winter. We will be looking for a weather
window to head south starting on October 31st and I’m afraid that date will
be here before we know it. In the meantime, we have to get serious about
enjoying our last few weeks of summer sailing here. Mark starts back to
work at West Marine this weekend, so that restricts the sailing time. But
he is anxious to get back to work, so we’ll just work around his schedule.
by Judy Handley | Aug 20, 2012 | Cape Cod, USA, Sailing Logs Year 7 |
Day 286, Year 7: Doing Something Right
Date: Monday, August 20, 2012
Weather: Mostly Sunny Day
Location: Eel Pond, Woods Hole, Massachusetts
It’s a good feeling to think you might have done something right in your
life, and today I felt that way. When I checked our daughter-in-law Jo’s
Facebook page she mentioned that her ‘brilliant’ husband (our ‘brilliant’
son) was going to be speaking at a TEDx conference in Santa Fe in November.
I followed the links to see what TEDx is and what he would be speaking
about. TEDx is an organization dedicated to Ideas Worth Spreading “through
riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world.” Justin will be
speaking at Santa Fe’s first live TEDx conference on November 3 at the Santa
Fe University of Art and Design. Go, Justin. He will be talking about the
impact of the global economy on our ecosystem and why globalization isn’t
going to see the century out. The description of his presentation went on
to talk about the fact that as the resources of our planet are consumed by
an overpopulated earth, learning to use our local resources is what will
create a sustainable future. Our daughter Heather believes the same. She
is also passionate about buying locally and growing your own food and
preserving it for the times when it is not available. So both of our
children have gone loco about local, and Mark and I are very proud of them
for taking this stand. It makes us feel proud that we might have done
something right in the way we reared our kids. They seem to have
deeply-seated values supporting the longevity of the planet, and we can only
hope that we had something to do with those values. We know it is more
expensive to buy local, organically grown food, but we know it is good for
the soul. We firmly believe that the organically grown food from the Farm
Institute on Martha’s Vineyard is what kept Mark so healthy during his chemo
treatments. We have slacked off a bit and his blood tests are showing it.
So we’re going back to our ‘locally grown’ organic diet and paying the
higher prices as we feel we have proof that it really makes a difference.
This past weekend, Silvermouse–Justin, Jo, Ziggy, and Coco–played at the
Tribal Vision Festival in Taos. Justin wrote today, “The festival was
awesome – we played late, Ziggy pushed to stay up until the show, came
onstage, played his violin (he has a giant full size one he plays with –
it’s purple – a gift from a friend) for about 5 minutes, then laid his head
down on Jo’s lap and went to sleep. Coco slept the whole time.” The
performance was well-received and both Justin and Jo were so excited that it
was a whole family experience. They have ear protection for Coco and
evidently that worked and she slept through the whole thing. Jo wrote that
it was great to have both kids on stage with them.
After a fantastic four-day sail with Alan and Helaine, they left this
morning and we spent the day at Heather and Jed’s. Mark worked on the
computer and I worked in the garden. We are back aboard Windbird tonight
and settling into life as usual. We received some photos of our newest
grandchild from her maternal grandmother, and other photos we have copied
from Facebook. The ones from Facebook are not super quality photos, but
they show Coco. That’s the important thing.
