Three 3:14's: cherries, power tools, and laundry baskets

Phew!  What a bunch of catching up I get to do this evening.   Here's three different 3:14's:  cherry picking, basement cleaning, and laundry.  What a glam life I lead!

Friday the 17th, I was on a three-generation cherry picking expedition.  

Stats:  Sweet cherries, 25+ quarts, $125 (sheesh).  

Last year, I made cherry syrup (which was supposed to be cherry jelly, but I wimped out on the sugar, so . .  syrup).  This year, I just pitted the cherries and hot-pack canned them in water, no sugar at all.   I canned up about 30 pints (one of which got a special label and will be a birthday present for this special picker below). 

I also (and I think this is super clever, if I do say so) canned up about two dozen one-cup jars of cherry juice.  Next year, when I have the Purple Dress dinner, we'll have our individual cups of cherry juice, beautifully labeled, ready to go.  Whoop!

With all these cherries canned up, I needed some place to put them.  Which leads us to . . . 

 . . . Saturday June 18th at 3:14 I was cleaning out the basement. As storage places tend to do, it had become a dumping ground for various kinds of clutter, and also increasingly disorganized. I had spent the morning canning cherries, and my canning supplies are all in the basement, and I think my morning trips up and down the stairs -- back-and-forth in the basement space -- had convinced me that it was time to shuffle things around. One of the last things I did was to saw up a chair that has given the family good service for 30 years but that we no longer wanted.

My basement workspace

I don't know if the wooden posts that were once legs (etc) will be something that I use in a new project, or whether I'll just give them to some friends who have a fire pit. Either way, it felt good to use power tools to break this into smaller pieces, and the space looks so much better not having chairs and other giant boxes full of unwanted odds and ends congregating like guests at a cocktail party, making small talk and dropping crumbs rom their hors d'oeuvres on the floor.

Sunday June 19th at 3:14 I was putting away laundry. The week before that, I had been emptying the dishwasher, and as I mentioned when I wrote about dishwasher emptying, this is a rare chore for me these days. Since my husband is the Lord of the Laundry, putting away my own clothes is not unusual, but actually using the washing machine is exceedingly rare for me. I did, of course, hang the laundry on the drying rack rather than use the dryer (naturally!).

The 19th marks approximately the midpoint of my husband's European tour, so with any luck, I won't have to do laundry again until he gets back – which means by implication that I probably won't touch the washing machine again for about a year. In fact, I probably could've made it a month without resorting to the washing machine if I had just had a somewhat larger stash of undergarments. I don't usually order things via the computer, either, but after putting away my clothes I did order enough knickers to tide me over if my husband hast to travel for an extended period of time in the coming year. Phew!