Morning meerkats! I enjoy your natural curiosity. And your willingness to attack the youngsters if they are annoying you.

Pressed for time, and yet missing all ya’ll, I thought we’d play a game of lameball, wherein I rushed around the house snapping photos of my haphazard weekend projects. At 11 o’clock at night. Because I’m all about well-lit photography. Let’s get started. High points from my weekend…

1. Mother visits, forced into sweatshop-like working conditions and made to operate dangerous machinery with little training.

That’s right, my mom was in town for a little visit. I am currently working on a hairbrained project that involves making eight aprons. I call it the making-8-aprons project. Here is a pile of the skirts, very nicely hemmed by mom with my serger. She was fearless in the face of that quick-moving knife. That’s a pocket sitting on top of the stack. And NO THEY ARE NOT HALLOWEENIE APRONS. I just like orange and black.

2. Come perilously close to ruining an entire season’s crop of raspberries

Mr. Bug and I planted five raspberry bushes last year. Since we have a minuscule lot on which our house sits we cleverly made the best use of space by planting them in our neighbor’s yard. Don’t you wish we lived next door to you? Since there’s only FIVE bushes, there wasn’t enough raspberries ripe at once to do anything with except gobble greedily. We painstakingly picked our mini crop nearly every day and then laid the 15 berries out on a tray in the freezer. The next day we’d dump them into a gallon-sized ziplock and lay out the next batch to freeze. By the end of the summer (well, by yesterday. It’s still 80 degrees in Mpls because either it’s the end times or global warming is more of a thing than I thought it was.) Anyway – by yesterday we had one and a half gallons of frozen raspberries. Not too shabby. We made jam.

Not so shabby. Pretty. Nerve-wracking. The warnings regarding proper canning are terror inducing. Sorry about that botulism, folks. I tried two different methods. One worked, the other didn’t. The big jars are the Sure-Jell recipe with pectin and a giant amount of sugar. The little jars were my attempt at old fashioned jam/preserves. No pectin. Let’s just pretend I MEANT to make syrup, OK?

3. More pickles. That is all.

I crammed the last of our cucumber harvest into jars with some vinegar and dill. Into the fridge they went. Of course, now I have to shop daily because there’s only room enough for our pickle supply, A-1 sauce, my necessary gallon of half-and half and about one pound of ground beef. This is not a way to live.

4. In which she decides to purposefully allow food to rot. On her kitchen counter.

OK. I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m trying to not waste food. I bought a head of cabbage for a recipe last week. I used about a quarter of it. What do you do with 3/4 of a head of cabbage? I saw this link on Lifehacker showing how to make your own sauerkraut. Now, I have to say I HATE SAUERKRAUT, so why do I want to ferment cabbage on my countertop? I mean, part of the instructions are to set the jars on a plate because of the overflow from the fermentation process. Ewww. But I like kim chi (I know, right? I’m all up in sauerkraut’s grill, while admitting to liking a food that smells like 3 day old chicken scraps, sitting in the sun.) Anyway, there was something appealing about the ‘salty cabbage’ phrase, and there I was with a partial head of cabbage, extra mason jars and a box of sea salt. What’s a girl to do?

That is all meerkats. Continue attacking your young. Also, feel free to have a go at annoying human children that get too close to your cages.