Frustrations Galore

Last night I had difficulty falling asleep. I was too busy with plans of what I wanted to accomplish today. The plans were ambitious, but very do-able. I took 8 yr old to school with high spirits and immediately headed over to dad's for some garden work. He had decided at the last moment that he wanted to enlarge the veggie patch since bro is going to be eating out of it this year, too. I figured that this morning I could remove the sod 2-3 feet in all directions around the garden, mix in compost over the whole thing, and get my raised beds planted too. Like I said, ambitious but do-able.

Yeah right. First, Dad comes out after the first 15 min and starts "commenting" that I am taking too much soil with the sod taking it out with a spade. So I switch to loosening the grass with a garden fork and then lifting out chunks of sod by hand and shaking all the dirt out (making sure all earthworms got back in the garden), finally dumping the sod on a tarp. When the tarp got full, I hauled it into the woods about 50 feet and dumped it. Evidently I didn't dump it where good old pops wanted it or something, because right away he starts asking where I put it and why there etc. Dad wanted to go to Menards to price roto-tillers. My fault; I had mentioned it might be nice to have one since he has planned several projects around the yard where we expect to use one this year. He wanted me to go with, and would not take no for an answer. He actually started packing baby in the truck while I was still saying "no"! So I ended up wasting about an hour at Menards. I say wasted because we did not like the tillers there and ended up pricing but not buying all sorts of things. Well, dad did buy me a new weeding hoe so it wasn't a total waste. Then of course he had to take me out to eat. By the time we got back it was nearly 12:30, and I had only lifted sod from about a 4' by 2' area. I was getting a little upset at this point. Baby needed to be fed and changed--that took about 45 min before she was settled enough I could get back to work. Dad wanted to help, so I told him to bust up the sod and I would pull and shake it. That didn't go well, either, since he didn't break it up well enough for me to pull it up. I ended up going over everything he had done. Finally he went inside to get ready for work and I heaved a sigh of relief. I had an hour to work before picking up 8 yr old that I could work in, and then I could get the majority of the rest finished in the evening.

Ha! Not 5 min after dad pulled out of the driveway, I was accosted by 2 Jehovah's Witnesses. They were very nice, and I am not one of those people who is cruel to them just for fun, but by this time I was ready to hang someone by their toenails! They left just in time for me to go get 8 yr old, and after talking to the neighbor about her upcoming move for 20 min I just did not have the juice to go back and start all over.

So here I am at 5:20pm, and I have accomplished approximately 1/5 of what I had hoped to. I am rather upset.

On the other hand, my pressure canner came yesterday. Visions of beautiful canned veggies, salsas, pickles and more are dancing in my head. I have been searching for canning recipes that sound good all over the web, and have amassed quite a few. I suppose I won't try them all this year, but it is so fun to look through them and imagine how good all that will taste.