A little family history

My dad (who turned 91 in July) just sent a short email around to the family:

"70 years ago today (18Aug56) I was sworn in to the USAF."

I thought this was amazing and worth sharing.

What a way to make a living

It's been a year and a half since my job layoff in February of 2025. Since that time, we have made our living exclusively through freelance writing (supplemented by Don's modest Social Security).

In many respects, it's a dream come true. Yes, our income dropped significantly and we had to tighten our belts (something to which we're well accustomed over the course of our marriage); but in other ways we feel like we're living the dream.

I thought it might be useful to describe the last couple of weeks in terms of what our daily schedule is like to give you an idea of how we're earning our income.

• My Harlequin editor didn't like the latest proposal (synopsis + three chapters) I sent her, and had some specific ideas of the direction she wants the story to go. You never argue with your editor when she makes suggestions (ego has no place in the writing world!). I told her I'd have a revised synopsis to her within a few days, which I did.

• I haven't heard back from this editor yet about her thoughts on the revised synopsis, but I'm currently writing the story. My original deadline for the full manuscript is Sept. 15. My editor is perfectly happy to adjust the deadline based on her suggested revisions, but I'm still hoping to get the story done by the original deadline. To this end, I'm "NaNoWriMo'ing" my way through it, which means I write a minimum of 1665 words per day (roughly half a chapter) toward my  goal. Even if my editor has changes she wants in the revised synopsis, I don't see a problem getting the manuscript completed in time **IF** I don't goof off and get lazy.

• I pitched an article to a magazine about making strawberry preserves. It has – literally – come to the point where anytime Don and I do anything around here, we pitch it as an article somewhere. (Our philosophy is, all they can do is say "no"). Sure enough, the editor responded that while a short piece on strawberry preserves would be accepted, she'd rather have a longer piece on what different kinds of ways an abundance of strawberries can be used and/or preserved. So, for the last couple of weeks, I've been engaged in dehydrating strawberries, making syrup, making strawberry pie, etc. Shucky-darn.

• Last year, when we were buried in spaghetti squash, I made a similar pitch on the uses of, and preservation techniques for, this delicious veggie. I remember having a kitchen full of spaghetti squash that I was baking and said to Don, "What a way to make a living."

• I've been going back and forth with the editor of a different magazine about a variety of pitches appropriate to her editorial needs. This has been terrific fun because Don and I spend a lot of time bandying ideas back and forth, including things he can write and things I can write. Just this morning I sent off a lengthy pitch with at least 15 ideas. Even if she only wants a couple, those are still solid contracts. (Update: The editor got back to me and likes almost everything we pitched! – enough to keep Don and I writing for this editor for the next two years at least.)

• Writers track deadlines in different ways, but I use an old-fashioned wall calendar. I put the deadline, magazine, and subject on the calendar a few days ahead of when it's actually due (I hate missing deadlines), and it's an instant visual reminder to get my rear in gear if a deadline is approaching.

• Speaking of deadlines, one of the best ways to establish one's self as a freelance writer is to treat deadlines as gospel rather than a casual commitment. Editors work on tight deadlines themselves, and have no patience in dealing with writers who are not serious about their craft. Last fall when I was down visiting my parents, I received an email from an editor inquiring about the status of a piece I had promised her. The problem is, she and I each had different deadlines on our calendars. Her deadline was November, and my deadline was the following February (and I sent her emails supporting the February deadline). Long story short, she goofed up on her end, but now it meant she was stuck because she needed the article to get the issue to print. So I wrote all night long and got the article to her the next morning. Needless to say, this editor and I have an excellent working relationship.

• I was able to successfully "re-home" a couple of articles that got rejected by one editor by submitting them elsewhere. Different magazines have different editorial needs, and one person's trash is another person's treasure.

• It's always helpful to have "evergreen" subjects you can write about when you have down time. I have a series of ideas for short pieces on how Don constructed this or that convenience on our homestead. I just finished writing up two of these ideas, sent them to Don for clarity on any construction details I might have gotten wrong, and assembled the photos needed to illustrate the articles. For one of the articles, Don created a cartoonized "exploded" diagram from a photo I took to illustrate the process of building the item.

• Most of our writing takes place when we're not otherwise outside doing homestead chores and projects. Don, being a handy guy, works particularly hard on improvement projects. If it's something worth writing about, often he either uses my camera to photograph various steps, or I'll go out at intervals to photograph what he's doing. Then either he or I will write up the project as an article. Don tackles about one-third of our freelance writing pieces, and I do the other two-thirds. We also review each other's work for accuracy and copy editing before submitting anything.

• As a writer, it's crucial not to let setbacks discourage you. If you'll stop writing (or stubbornly dig your heels in) because an editor didn't like a proposal, then you won't make it as a freelancer. 

• Our hours are our own. On an ideal day, I knock off a half-chapter of fiction before I milk the cow. (This doesn't always happen. Sometimes I sleep too late, and other times I need to pick strawberries before sunrise before it gets too hot.)  Afterward, Don and I have our coffee/tea and scan the news, often reading bits of it out loud to each other. Then we walk the dog and come back for a second cup of coffee/tea, during which I work on emails or on article pitches. I make an early lunch (our big meal of the day) while Don starts a project. Since it's summer and the afternoons are uncomfortably hot, Don and I often skip the second cup of coffee/tea and get right to work outside, then work on writing in the afternoon.We also attend to livestock and garden chores in the early evenings, when the shadows provide heat relief.

And this, dear readers, is how we make a living. A day doesn't go by when I don't stop and thank the Good Lord Above for placing us in this position where we can do what we love and earn an income by it.

A dirty job

It's been a dry summer, and our pastures – already limited in size to begin with – are pretty much eaten down. As a result, we've been supplementing the cows morning and evening with oat hay.

We only started purchasing oat hay from a local farmer as a stopgap measure last year, and the cows adore it so much that now we prefer to buy it over any other feed source. In fact, we have eight tons being delivered this upcoming week.

But oat hay – or at least last year's batch – seems to pick up a fair amount of dirt clumps in the process of being baled.

When we put flakes of the hay into the feed box, these dirt clumps migrate to the bottom of the feeder and accumulate.

It was on my mind to clean out the feed box from this accumulated dirt. Yesterday afternoon I locked the cows out of the corral (so I wouldn't get any "help" from curious critters), collected a few tools, and got to work.

It became apparent within minutes that this was a far, far bigger task than I anticipated. I don't know why, but I had it in my head that there was maybe a few inches of accumulated dirt. What I'd forgotten is that the angled feed box actually extends to the barn floor. What I was seeing was an accumulation of dirt about 22 inches deep.

Conditions for removing the dirt were cramped. I had to bend over, put my head through the slats (like a cow!), and remove the dirt one-handed. This small broken-handled shovel proved perfect for the task since I could wield it with one hand. The three-pronged garden cultivator was helpful for breaking up packed-down material.

It was like digging a ditch, but a ditch that could only be tackled one-handed while bent over between slats. Because it was hard going, I ended up alternating sides – ten scoops with one arm, ten scoops with the other, etc. I scooped everything into the wheelbarrow.

When the wheelbarrow was full, I wheeled it out of the barn and dumped it on the pile of barn waste.

Progress. (I can still smell this photo.)

It took five full wheelbarrows and an hour's solid work to empty all that dirt. Then I filled another wheelbarrow with the material that had fallen on the barn floor between the feed box and the wheelbarrow.

Task finished.

And look how clean that feed box is!

After all was said and done, my skin was caked with dirt, and after my evening shower (which required the vigorous application of a washcloth) I consigned everything I was wearing to the dirty clothes basket. I woke up this morning with sore arms ... but hey, a dirty job is now finished.

Calling fall

This morning, standing in front of the open kitchen window, a zephyr breeze brought the scent of earth. "Hmm," I thought. "It's almost like fall." But I didn't say anything, because Don is the official "Calling fall" guy. He just has a good gut instinct for when summer is over.

Mid-morning, I was out picking blueberries. Don was up a ladder, painting a portion of the house siding. He was wearing his radio earphones and wasn't paying much attention to anything else. But something, too, caught his attention. He removed his earphones, sniffed the air, listened to the sound, and called fall.

He came out to where I was picking blueberries and told me. "I called fall at 10:05 this morning."

"Funny you should say that!" I exclaimed, and told him about that little zephyr breeze I felt earlier.

He leaned in and kissed me. "First kiss of fall," he said.

What determines his decision to call fall? The grasses whisper. The sound is sharper. Noises carry farther. Breezes rattle the leaves. The landscape looks tired.

And the birds are quieter. The day when birdsong is less common is one of the triggering events. The birds know.

Our work schedule will gradually shift over the next few weeks to begin battening down for winter. Putting up firewood. Harvesting the garden. Such are the seasons on a homestead.

So yeah ... fall is here.

Survival cookies

When I put up the recent post on making strawberry preserves, a reader asked why I canned it up in quart jars instead of pints.

Short answer: Just about the only thing we use strawberry preserves for is as a filling for so-called "survival cookies."

Back in our old home, these incredibly delicious filled oatmeal sandwich cookies made the rounds among our group of homeschooling moms. They became dubbed "survival cookies" because they require no fresh ingredients and can be made completely with dried or preserved ingredients.

Because I tend to make survival cookies in large (quadruple) batches at a time, using a quart of strawberry preserves is not unusual.

I thought I'd walk you through my latest batch of survival cookies. Here's the recipe:

Ingredients
• 1 1/2 cup shortening, lard, or butter (I prefer shortening)
• 1 1/2 cup brown sugar (or half brown, half white sugar)
• 1 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 1/2 teaspoon baking soda mixed with 6 tablespoons hot water
• 3 cups oatmeal (thick or thin cut)
• 3 cups flour (may use white or whole wheat – I use half-and-half)
• 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
• 1 1/2 teaspoon salt

• Filling (we use strawberry preserves, but use whatever your family enjoys)

Directions
Preheat oven to 350F. Blend shortening, sugar, and vanilla. Add baking soda (in water), nutmeg, and salt. Mix in the flour. Using a stout spoon, stir in the oatmeal by hand (do NOT try to use a mixer for this step, as the dough is too stiff). Stir the dough until it’s thoroughly mixed.

Flour a large breadboard or other surface. Roll the dough thin. Cut with a round cookie or biscuit cutter (I use a clean tuna can). Stack the round cutouts aside until the dough is used up.

Lay the rounds on a cookie sheet and place one teaspoon of the desired filling in the center (dollop it, don’t spread it). Lay another cutout over the top to make a “sandwich.” It is not necessary to seal the edges.

Bake at 350F for 10 to 15 minutes (depending on your oven) until lightly brown. Do not overbake.

Tips
• The cookies do not expand while baking, so they can be (reasonably) crowded on the baking sheet.

• The dough is sticky during the rolling and cutting process. Be very liberal with the use of flour on the breadboard, rolling pin, and dough surface.

• Use a spatula to lift the raw dough cutouts so they won’t tear.

• Because rolling and cutting the cookie dough can be labor intensive, I usually quadruple the recipe and make an enormous batch at once. The recipe multiplies well and surplus cookies freeze beautifully.

• If you’re feeling extra fancy, drizzle a little frosting (powdered sugar + milk) over the baked cookies.

Steps:

Rolling and cutting the dough:

Stacking the cut rounds aside:

Darcy parked under the table, hoping something drops:

All the rounds from a quadruple batch, cut and stacked:

By the time I finished cutting the rounds, it was too late in the day to bake, so I slid two-gallon Ziploc bags over the baking sheets for the night (to keep the dough from drying out);

Dollops of strawberry preserves on the lower layer of the cookies:

Cookies sandwiched and ready to bake:

Enjoy!

One of the (many) reasons I hate AI writing

I came across an article today about a wild animal encounter in Poland: "Wild Video Captures Giant Bison Flattening Tourist, Refusing to Let Him Escape."

As the title suggests, a tourist got too close to a European bison, which proceeded to knock him flat. Several nearby people acted to save the man from additional pummeling. But while reading the article, it soon became apparent it was written by AI.

I've touched on my gripes with AI writing before (most recently here), but it seems AI has "improved" in the sense that it seldom uses the identifying "trigger" words it once did (unwavering, intricate, commendable, innovative, meticulous, notable, and versatile).

So how did I know the above-linked article was AI?

A couple of things. First, AI loves to use similes (comparing two things using "like" or "as"). From the article: "Video shared on social media shows the bison looming over the fallen tourist like a living wall of muscle, making it painfully clear who controlled the situation."

No journalist worth his salt would ever use a simile in a news article, at least nothing that florid.

Second, AI tries to tell the reader how to feel about the subject in question through the use of over-the-top adjectives. Examples from the article:

• "A tourist learned a brutal lesson..."

• "The terrifying encounter was captured on video as stunned witnesses scrambled to save the man..."

• "Without much warning, the hulking creature surged toward the man..."

• "...making it painfully clear who controlled the situation..."

• "Nature photographer Grzegorz Ryński recorded the frightening scene..."

Et cetera ad nauseam.

Now I'll give this article one benefit of the doubt: It might well have been translated from Polish into English. Had AI not been available for this purpose, likely the subject would never have hit an American news site, so there's that.

But sadly, AI is taking over the written word in so many categories, including journalism. Aside from concerns about factual accuracy (and I have no way of know what, if anything, was factually inaccurate about the tourist/bison piece), AI writing is just ... bad. I know that as soon as I see similes and unnecessary adjectives in a so-called news article, I shut down.

Part of this aversion to AI writing is obvious. I'm a writer. I can see the handwriting on the wall for my beloved craft. I'm grateful beyond words that both my nonfiction editors (the various magazines I write for) as well as my fiction editors (Harlequin et al.) have no intention of using AI-generated content anytime soon.

I hope.

Wealth untold

This. This. This!

Here's a transcript of what the woman says:

"One of the greatest luxuries in life is being married to the handy guy. Not 'yacht or private jet' rich. I'm talking about a level of wealth that is way more realistic. The dryer starts making a weird noise, and your husband goes, 'Let me take a look at it.' That is wealth.

"Because you know what I do when something breaks? I immediately start calculating how much money it's gonna cost to fix it. My husband hears a strange noise and he gets excited. Excited like the appliance just challenged him to a dual. That man will spend $47 on parts, watch one YouTube video from a guy named Rick in Iowa, disappear into the garage for three hours, and somehow save us $1200. It's unbelievable.

"And handy husbands don't just fix things. They know things. Things that no normal person should know. This man knows the inner workings of every appliance, vehicle, outlet, pipe hinge, and mysterious thing in our house. The best part is the confidence, because I have never seen a handy husband look at a problem and think, 'Hmmm, maybe I should hire a professional.' No. He IS the professional.

"So marry the handy guy, because one day your house is gonna make a noise; and instead of panic, you'll hear the most comforting words a woman could hear: 'I know what's wrong.'"

Amen!!!! Preach it, sister!!!!

A garlic "Eureka"

When we lived in our last home, I spent years cultivating a beautiful German porcelain-neck variety of garlic. I routinely harvested cloves approaching eggs in size.

When we moved here to our current home in December of 2020, I brought several heads to plant in our future garden. For a variety of reasons (late in the season, no where proper to plant them, etc.), the garlic failed to thrive and my original line of garlic died out. Bummer.

The problem was, I couldn't remember what kind of garlic I had originally ordered so long ago. I do know the company was no longer in business. I ordered what I hoped was something similar online from a different company and was disappointed with the results. I mean sure, it was garlic, but it wasn't jumbo garlic, if you know what I mean. Still, last year's harvest was abundant (21 pounds) and I canned up a staggering 28 pints of chopped garlic. I put aside the largest cloves for replanting.... uh, wait a minute....

Jumbo garlic. That's the magic word I was looking for! I should have been looking for jumbo garlic to plant. (NOT elephant garlic. That's too mild for my taste.) So last fall, I ordered and planted one pound of jumbo garlic (which filled half a bed) and planted the remaining bed-and-a-half with the regular garlic I'd been growing.

Last week I harvested the garlic.

There was no question about the results. Eureka! I have my large cloves back!

It was pure joy to dig up these heads and see the size of the cloves.

It didn't take long to harvest both beds.

I ended up with two crates.

I set these near the back porch to cure for a couple of days.

Then I snipped off the stems.

Here's a better size comparison between the "regular" garlic and the jumbo stuff.

Once again, I have cloves approaching an egg in size. Woot!

I don't plan to mince and can this year's crop. I still have plenty of "jarlic" left over from last year. Instead, I'll store this and use it fresh, and probably give away a fair bit to friends and neighbors.

Oh, and just because I want a record of where I ordered this garlic, and what variety, here's photos of the invoice that came with it:

Right now the bowls of garlic are sitting on the kitchen table. Every time I catch a glimpse of those gigantic cloves, I grin.

Silly to be so thrilled over jumbo garlic, ain't it? I always knew I was weird.

Peach purée

Five years ago, we planted four peach trees.

Peaches are, hands down, my all-time favorite fruit, so I was anxious to get some trees established as early as possible here in our current home. We chose four different varieties that are resistant to peach curl.

Despite cages and fencing, it's been a battle against the deer, who want nothing more than to consume these poor little trees down to nubbins. As a result, they are misshapen and a few branches are dead from the times the deer won.

Despite that, these brave trees are producing fruit. Last year, I harvested about ten pounds. This year ... yowza. One tree in particular came into its own, and its branches were heavy with peaches.

It's the first time we've had anything akin to a decent crop, and I was giddy with delight.

A couple weeks ago, I went and cleaned out the one tree whose peaches were ready to pick. (The other trees, being different varieties, are lagging behind and will be ready to harvest in early September.)

I filled a 30-gallon tub about half-full of fruit just off this one tree.

Curious, I weighed them. Forty pounds. Forty. Pounds. Off one tree. Remember, last year I only got a combined harvest of ten pounds from all four trees.

The next step was to let them ripen. I put down a towel and spread the peaches out on the surface of the woodstove.

They didn't all fit, so I put overflow peaches on a couple of cookie sheets lined with dish towels.

I covered all the fruit with netting to keep the fruit flies off. That prevented a huge source of spoilage.

After a week, the peaches were ripe enough to process. I pulled aside a bowl of the best ones for fresh eating.

I decided to turn the rest into peach purée, since I still had plenty of sliced canned peaches in the pantry. I use peach purée a lot to flavor yogurt and ice cream.

The first step is to scald the peaches in hot water for a few minutes so the skins will slip easily. I completely forgot to get a photo of this step. By the time I remembered to document my progress, I was elbow-deep in the process. Cooling peaches on the left, debris (including small unripe peaches) on the right.

Since I was pureeing the bunch, I didn't bother trying to make tidy slices. I just gutted the peeled peaches and tossed them in a bowl.

As each batch  got processed, I ran the peaches through the blender.

Then I poured the purée into gallon jugs. By this point it was late enough in the day that canning would interfere with our evening chores. After all that work, the volume was reduced to two full gallons of purée. I put these in the refrigerator overnight.

Here's the debris, ready to go into the compost tumbler.

The next morning, I assembled lids, rings, and clean jars.

Filling the jars.

Final tally: 18 pints.

In a tremendously exciting turn of events, my birthday water-bath canners held all 18 pints at once! How wonderful is that? Honestly, why did I wait so many decades to get these canners?

I set two timers, one for each pot, for 35 minutes. I only started the timers when the pots reached a rolling boil.

Out of the canner. This is plenty of purée to last the entire year. And I can't forget, I have three other peach trees still to harvest!