totally normal girl canning

The subject of this post is actually a total lie! I still feel like such a super talented amazing grown up with my recent spat of big girl canning projects. Perhaps with a few more canning projects under my belt I'll finally feel as though using a proper water bath and sealing up jars is "totally normal girl canning" but until then I'll continue to revel in my feeling of happy, superior success!

This week I very successfully canned four pints of tomatoes. I got a pretty good deal on some locally grown tomatoes so I went ahead and bought enough of them that I felt an intense urgency to do something with them before they all went bad.

 I don't really know what I'm going to make with these home canned tomatoes that I couldn't make with store bought canned tomatoes, but while canning I recalled a memory of my grandfather insisting that he simply could not make his favorite goulash without a quart of home canned tomatoes. He said that store bought canned tomatoes did not give his favorite dish the proper flavor. That memory has always instilled in me the idea that home canned tomatoes are naturally far better than any other canned tomatoes. Whether that is true or not, who knows! I guess I'll find out this fall when I use these happy little jars of tomatoes.

Forgetting

Yesterday was the second time in the past couple weeks that I have forgotten that my grandfather died, it just happens for a second but it really knocks me for a bit of a loop. It's such an overwhelming surprise to be going along, thinking about him in the present and what I'll say to him the next time I see him, but then I remember that it isn't possible.

Since Matthew's parents are in town, they wanted to tour the Midway, so we went along(we'd never gone before). At one point while I was traveling through the corridors of Engineering I briefly thought, "I've got to tell Grandpa about going through the engineering section and tell him how difficult it looked to work in that section." I was a little worried that I'd become hysterical while wandering around a museum; the emotion was that strong.

It was enough to make the rest of the visit a bit less cheerful, well that and the fact that we were touring planes that were designed for and that had killed many people. I think the museum has a certain weight of darkness just by virtue of it's purpose.

All in all a very interesting opportunity to understand the military and to understand my grandfather from a totally different perspective, one I never would have been able to imagine. I kind of wish I'd done it while he was alive.