Well, on Thursday I said it to Jim. That statement that comes around every year:

“I don’t want to see another tomato again for quite awhile.”

By this point, we’ve converted thousands of tomatoes (Jim says over 1,700, plus my sister gave us some of hers) into salsa, juice, marinara — and Thursday, I canned 14 quarts of tomato basil soup. Oh, and all of those BLTs we ate for several months.

Peeling all of these takes hours, on my feet, nine gallon bags worth this morning.  I started to whine that I feel like a canning factory worker rather than a retiree. But … but … but …

This will all be mighty tasty all the long North Dakota winterlong, and I finished in time to take in this afternoon’s Cinema 100 matinee. It was, in my humble opinion, a boring movie, and I wish I had instead gone for a bike ride on such a beautiful day.

On Wednesday, I converted all the bacon fat we’d accumulated for the last year into suet for our feeder. Thank heavens for this beast, my trusty KitchenAid mixer.

It had been our plan to have tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches for supper, but we got a better offer, a night out with some of the best friends we could hope for in our revolutions around the sun. We are richly blessed.