Ha-HAH! It's fixed!!!!

.

Happy dance! Happy dance!

Yes! My beloved Flock browser is fixed. I can't tell you what an awesome browser this is.

Look, I can drag and drop pictures once again, quick as a flash!

Drying more peppers.





Three gallons of blackberries in one day from our Doyle Thornless.





Figs, just beginning to form.





Fennel, with bulbs below.





And, IF I were so inclined, I could put pictures into several social networking places at the same time. But I'm not that social. LOL

Anyhow, thanks to the generosity of dear friends, we have moved up from 512 MB to 2 GB of RAM, and thanks to the job we did this week, we have on order a 1 TB external hard drive. So my computer will be happier, and my browser is patched.

I do like the borders and watermarks on the photos, I think I'll pursue that.

It's a good day. :)

~Faith

.

Canning Green Beans

.

Still working on getting photos up here correctly. As soon as Flickr works with Flock again I can quit all this nonsense, but until then I've got to figure out how to do it all differently.

Right now I'm batch resizing just a few of the pictures with Irfanview (Thank you for the reminder, Walter) and seeing if the smaller size will work with the TinyPic.com account that I have now set up in my Flock browser for drag and drop.

While I've not yet seen the results, I did discover a nifty feature in Irfanvew - I can put a watermark on my photos as well as give them a border at the same time I resize them. Kind of fun. :)

So one of my latest things is learning to can green beans. This are mostly from my parents' garden, but I made them a deal. They grow 'em, I'll can 'em and we'll share.

If anyone knows of another way to fix them, I'd love to hear your recipes. These are simply raw packed into hot jars, boiling water poured over them, and pressure processed for 30 minutes at 10 pounds.









Oh, and cherry tomatoes have begun to ripen this week! I've only been dehydrating them so far, but looking forward to some canning soon.



~Faith

PS ~~~ SUCCESS !!!

.

A Painting Day...

.

One of our Saturdays, a couple of weeks ago, we set aside for kicking back and painting.

My daughter and I took about 10 Bob Ross, wet-on-wet oil painting classes a few years ago. I have all the equipment to paint, PLUS a terrific DVD where most of the landscape elements are covered in detail, so you can play, rewind, slow-motion, etc your way to a lovely oil painting.

It's great!

I invited our artistically inclined friend over and she and Michael spent the day trying out full landscape paintings.


























I enjoyed seeing their creations so much!

~Faith

.

Trying out a photo post.

.

I had done one the other day, but the tinypic.com widget cut off the photos too much, so that one is only a draft now.

I'm going to see if these pics of our blueberry picking day will come out all right.

Saturday, Michael and I met with several friends at a local blueberry farm.








Much cheaper than the other places, one of them 18 dollars a gallon, we got these luscious berries for 5 dollars a gallon.









We left early so we could get in a lot of picking before the group tired out. In years past, most folks peter out after about an hour. So we arrived at 8 and picked for 1/2 hour before a few showed up, and the rest came at 9 am.

Some came bearing doughnuts. I got the low down later that Michael managed to finagle the ONLY Bavarian cream in the lot!







We found a sweet spot against the hill with shade, a light breeze, and big juicy berries,









and we proceeded to be silly and enjoy ourselves until 11 am.











































We picked about 4 gallons for ourselves, in about 3 hours. The law of diminishing returns applies here, we discovered. Leah needed help finishing her last 3/4 gallon, so we all jumped in and got it done in about 5 or 10 minutes.








And here are most of the wonderful faces from that morning.








We spent a wonderful couple of hours with some of the gang, eating fresh blueberry muffins (Thank you, Miss Angie) before heading out to stop by my parent's house and give them some of the berries. We were repaid with a nice time of visiting, AND BBQ burgers. Not a bad deal!

It's good to be out with dear friends and family, and it's good to be home, sweet home!

~Faith

.

A favor please?

.

Could someone please comment on this post, even if it's just a single word. I am trying to figure out locating comments. I've lost a couple just now and don't know where to look.

Thank you!

~Faith

.