Life Lately

There's been a lot of canning going on at my house lately. So I thought a can can gif was appropriate. Get it? ;)

Over the past couple weeks, Kim and I have picked enough strawberries and blueberries to make more than 50 eight ounce jars of jam. Combinations have included strawberry, strawberry rhubarb, blueberry, blueberry lemon and blueberry lavender.

In addition to selling some and keeping some, we're mulling the possibility of trading some of our canned confections, too. I just discovered a local canning exchange via a flier I picked up in Pittsburgh, so I'm going to see if we're able to take advantage of it.

And over the next few weeks, we're planning to make a raspberry jelly and other blueberry jam variations. Strawberry pepper jam is also a possibility, if there enough strawberries left. I'm hoping to post at least one of the blueberry jam recipes soon.

In other news, things have also been a little nutty for me expense wise. I learned last week that I need a crown on one of my teeth (RIP tooth), which turn out to be pretty damn expensive. The dentist said he could've tried a putting in another filling first, but with my health insurance changing at the end of July, it's probably not worth the risk if the filling doesn't take and I have to get a crown anyway. The crown is going to cost more than $300 out of pocket. Sigh. Bye money. I'm more mad at myself that it's happening, because it could have been prevented. An old filling began to crack because I have a teeth clenching habit I wasn't even aware of until my appointment. I noticed myself doing it a ton at the dentist's office; I guess I do it a lot when I'm stressed. The hygienist showed me my teeth x-rays, pointing out the erosion, and it was shocking to see how flat some of my back teeth have gotten. So not clenching is something I've been trying to work on. If it gets worse, I might need to get a mouth guard for when I'm sleeping. Weird.

In addition to what my mouth is going to cost me, I've had some minor problems with my car, which ended up being more than $300 in repairs. Ugh. But at least, as of now, my car is running great. It's about to hit 150,000 miles, so I want my little Honda to last for as long as possible.

Lastly, I cut my bangs over the weekend, and let's just say I made them a little shorter than I wanted them to be. I cut them unevenly, so I just kept chopping until they were pretty high up on my forehead. Yikes. Maybe I should just go to a hairstylist soon. Oh well. I still saved a few bucks, right? :)

Hope I wasn't too much of a downer here. But to make myself feel better about all these unexpected costs, I did some thrift store shopping over the weekend. I'm hoping to share some of my finds later this week as well.