For what it 's worth...

My goals for this week are simple. Finish a pressing task for work, can some salsa & mint jelly, dig a hole, keep the mess inside to a minimum and try to not to kill the boy while he's home for holidays.

Today being Wednesday, I think so far..I'm winning.

Thanks to our visitors last weekend a clean house is pretty easy to maintain. Dishes, laundry and floors all kept in line. There was a brief scare yesterday when the kitchen sink started leaking. One of the plastic connectors underneath broke at a glued section. I had to cut/pry/beg the broken part loose and almost gave up but once I realized we had lots of replacement parts it all went back together fine. Making me very happy - since many of my goals relied on a kitchen sink.

The work thing is for a customer who sells to schools & daycares via their catalogue. This means I have to review all the titles we featured last year for sales, price changes and in stock status. I, then, have to suggest any new titles for their upcoming year - including catalogue copy and images. In all, it requires checking our inventory system for about 200 individual titles, a crap load of cut and paste and about 100 emails. Every year, I ask if there's an easier way, and every year I get ignored. While I do like the inventory system, it's not the best software I've worked with. Plus it's not really designed to handle retail, more like individual shipments to teachers. But they are making progress with our demands. So I really cannot complain.

Anyway, I think I'm pretty much done the 2008 titles and oh so close to finishing the 2009 titles. Just have to confirm which ones the customer wants and request the images. The catalogue get mailed in Feb. Once again, I resolve to spead this task over the year & not leave it to do all at once in August 09. Yeah. Right.

With the work stuff on the back burner I woke up early to get canning before the heat of the day took over. 5 lbs of tomatoes on the cook for salsa and 4 lbs of apples went into mint jelly. It was my first attempt at preserves. And yes. It was a lot of work. But it was 2 jars of the bestest salsa ever and 1 jar of dreamy jelly. I'm very pleased. Now I'm waiting for some Lee Valley stuff to make tomato sauce with rest of the crop & the couple dozen jars I still have left. Note to self - buy smaller jars....

Yesterday, I managed to dig out some more of the flower bed against the house. Dug out rocks, dirt and tree roots. Actually dug down to the septic tank. Now all I have to do is find the output pipe from the house to the tank, figure out the where the roots are growing into it and clear out a section for the boy to fix it. That's for this afternoon.

As for killing the boy... well, that remains to be seen. Only came close once but it was quickly surpressed (related to the kitchen sink). He's home trying to clean the dugout. It's always been overgrown with willow and we can't have the foliage clogging our pump during the fall/winter. Every year the boy spends his evenings cutting it down (thankfully there's less and less each year) but he's actually taken time off this year to get it done at once. Seems to be working so far. But 12 hours of work makes him very tired as you can imagine.

On an upnote - the boy wants to go to Estrella. How cool would that be?????

So yeah, I win.