Stay on Top of It!

"Stay on top of it!"
"I'm trying!"

Image and Star Wars courtesy of Lucasfilms (and now Disney, I guess?).

I have not been the best housekeeper. There were always stacks of papers on the end of the dining room table and toys scattered all over the floor. I'd do laundry weekly, but the clean clothes would take their time getting put away. Dishes were washed nightly (lately by Senpai while I'm nursing Poppy to sleep. Thank you, Love), but would pile up by the sink during the day. Our entire second story was the definition to the word "clutter."

Well, we're embarking on the adventure of trying to sell our house; the size and location don't work for us anymore. When it comes to home sales, one of the first things you must do after meeting with your realtor is to put pictures of your totally awesome house online. That way everybody and their mother can see just how desirable your house is and want to buy it right out from under you.

Uh oh.

We delayed the photographer: Can you come sometime next week? The END of the week? Late in the day? Later? Okay!

I had no idea where to start. I looked around at the mess feeling completely overwhelmed and unable to begin. Then one night, Senpai tackled the upstairs. He found hiding places for all of the crap, moved some furniture, did lots of cleaning, and suddenly, it was beautiful. That miraculous change inspired me to attack the main level. If he could work his voodoo magic on the second story, I could make the first story shine. And I did, with lots of elbow grease, and even more going up and down the stairs to the basement, hiding all of the toys.

Of course, on picture day, the realtor showed up much later than we had initially arranged and all of the pictures were taken with low lighting. Sigh. The listing isn't online yet so I don't know how the pictures turned out, but I really hope our cleaning efforts were worthwhile. Sparkle, baby, sparkle!

Now we get to wait for the house tours. I am trying to be better about keeping the house clean. We already put in all of that hard work to get it looking this nice, I can keep it up, right? No more slacking. You know that old adage, "Don't put off for tomorrow that which can be done today?" Yeah, I used to live by the "putting off for tomorrow" part. Well, no more. My new mantra is, "Do it now." Forget tomorrow, "Do it now."

I must observe everything with a keen eye. What is this doing here? Put it away. What is that doing there? Wash it and put it away. I find myself running around more and sitting less. I find ways to keep Poppy entertained without me and play with my kids slightly less. Am I a worse mother for shifting these priorities? Depends on who you ask.

But the house is clean.

Homemade Spaghetti Sauce

I tried my hand at canning this year. I had never done it myself, though I had watched my Mom make strawberry jam, spiced peach jam (my favorite!), and canned peach slices in the past. Our tomato plants had exploded this year (as they usually do, actually) with more tomatoes than we could use up at once, so I decided to try making homemade spaghetti sauce. I followed the instructions, including the seasoning recipe, found here, omitting the celery and salt.

The first time I tried making tomato sauce earlier in the season, we picked every tomato we could find, including the yellow variety, to try to get the 20 lbs required. I started right when R went to bed at 8 pm, and did not finish until 2 in the morning. I am not impressed with that batch. The texture was watery and stringy because the tomatoes would not boil down, and the 1/4 cup of lemon juice in addition to all of those yellow tomatoes made it taste incredibly tart. I canned it anyway and called it "Zesty Marinara."

I decided to try again. This time, I collected and froze the tomatoes as they ripened in batches. I had heard that freezing and thawing tomatoes was an easy way to remove the skin, and I thought it might cut down on the preparation time. Not at all. I started the process this morning at 9 am, and I'm writing this post as the jars are in the canning bath now at 2 pm. My back hurts from leaning over the sink trying to remove seeds for three hours, and my feet hurt from standing in front of the stove seasoning the sauce for the rest of the time. When I looked at the large pile of unusable skin, seeds, liquid, and other tomato parts, and compared it to the pile of usable tomato flesh that was HALF its size, I told myself, "Never again." This is far too much work. I would rather let tomatoes rot on the vine than try to do this again.

The plus side to today's aches and pains is that this batch can be properly labeled "Spaghetti Sauce." I didn't use a single yellow tomato, I only added two splashes of lemon juice instead of the 1/4 cup the recipe called for, and I blended the sauce to make it a better texture. Freezing and thawing the tomatoes removed far too much liquid, though, and I had to add 3 cups of water back into the sauce. I'm only getting 5 pint jars out of this batch, which is incredibly frustrating since only 4 jars fit in the canning bath at a time. I'll be waiting an extra 35 minutes just for one jar to process, grrr. But at least it tastes good.



My kitchen is a disaster, sigh. Next time I try canning, I think I'll stick with jams.