Need recommendations

DH has decided that we need to pay a website designer because he’s not getting any hits on his site. He’s asked around for references but the only people that seem to be happy with their web designers are the people who do it themselves. So I’m throwing this out to the Great Font of Knowledge - - Who can you wholeheartedly recommend as a web designer for a site that will allow DH to update his galleries and calendar himself (or let me do it for him), allow people to pay for classes or artwork online, have a blog (he calls it an essay section), and help him establish his image as “the wild man of large format photography.”?

Decisions, decisions...

Bellydancing classes start again on Monday. I find it a great way to exercise, a way to balance myself physically and mentally, and a lot of fun. I just don't know how I can justify another night away from the family though. I really do want to go but time is such a precious commodity right now.

Playing in the Netflix queue...

My kids told me the other day that they have never seen E.T. This shocked me almost as much as the day my daughter said in a group of her father’s friends, “Who’s Captain Kirk?” (We were soundly scolded for neglecting our children’s education over that). We haven’t worried about running into that issue with the boys since Netflix has the entire 3 year span of the original series but it did get me thinking about movies I loved as a kid that my children have never seen.
My daughter is deep into anime but she’s never seen Battle of the Planets which was our introduction to anime in the 1980’s. (It’s in the queue and I’ll subject her to it someday). She came home from her Art and Culture class talking about this great German film they watched and proceeded to tell me the plot of Dreamscape (another movie to Netflix). There are some films that I remember that I could care less about my kids seeing. That nasty one they showed every year in school about the handicapped boy with the pigeon and the one the school thought would enlighten us about poverty and war but the only scene I remember is the bloated body of the flood victim floating away. What sick ninny thought those were good movies for elementary kids?
I want my kids to know Tron, the movie, not just the Kingdom Hearts 2 character. But it wouldn’t hurt my feelings if they skipped NeverEnding Story or the horrid sequels that engendered. Or the movie I saw on my first date about the motorcycle racer who ends up a time traveler.
On the other hand, I’m glad my kids understand that ultimate evil comes out of a microwave, there are times to use the Force, it’s okay to be afraid of snakes, playing in mashed potatoes can be an obsession or the start of a food fight (2 movies there), don’t annoy the clerk when the parrot is dead, and Wolfman Jack is real. (Hmmm, seems to be a theme there).

A weekend of canning...

I found it relaxing this weekend to stand in front of the sink like generations before me did. Looking out over a yard with dying grass and pears ripening on the tree, the sounds of children playing while I slipped the peels from scalded tomatoes to make a family recipe which has no set recipe but differs from year to year based on the sweetness or tartness of the fruit.
DH would like it if I altered the sweet chili sauce recipe to be more of a spicy chili sauce instead of tomato chutney (using the chutney term as “jam for meat”). As it is though, it reminds me of Grandma’s pink kitchen and the times we would spoon it over baked potatoes. She was so excited that she could cook them in the microwave instead of having to bake them on her state of the art (when she bought it) push button range/stove. I love her range. It has buttons on the wall instead of knobs for the burners. It’s from that same age that gave us the push button automatic transmission.
I’m so glad that I took the time as a young married woman to go to my grandmothers and learn how to put up fruit, to make sweet chili sauce, and to make mustard pickles. Some things just don’t take right coming out of a can if they’re even made commercially.

Anyway, I have 48 pint jars of sweet chili sauce, 6 pint jars of salsa, and a case and a half of tomatoes left to do, along with finishing my Communications project and taking my final for the same class.

SCORE!!! and my weekend plans...

I just got 4 cases of grocery quality tomatoes for the farmers’ market price. These are pretty tomatoes, not the overripe, dark funky marked tomatoes that are in the cases at the market. These are pretty, could be sliced into a salad tomatoes. But I'm still going to heat and bottle them.
I've run out of my last batch of sweet chili sauce from my Grandma's recipe. The only reason that I got the secret family recipe is that I invited Grandma over to my house when I had tomatoes to bottle. She suggested that I make chili sauce and we ran to the store for the ingredients. She got me a canning notebook (which disappeared in my last move) and I’ve made chili sauce whenever I ran out ever since. I should add that when Grandma died, the most hotly contested items were the remaining bottles of chili sauce and the mustard pickles (I still have mustard pickles so I’m not making new this year). I suggested a family lottery for them.

Anyway, I’m out of chili sauce, and tomatoes are on sale this week. For kicks and giggles I decided to ask if I could buy cases from the grocery store. The manager at Macey’s was great, I got the tomatoes for about ½ of the sale price per pound which ended up being less than I would pay for a case of about the same weight at the farmers’ market and I didn’t have to get up at 7am to get the good ones before they were sold out.
Can you guess which grocery store I’m going to for peppers and onions and spices tomorrow?

Honey, Can I keep it?

I told my DH that this followed me home from the Fiber Fair at Wheeler Farm this weekend. Here's another view of it...



I really don't need another hobby right now but weaving and spinning are both things that I've wanted to do for a long time. My mother has several looms and I've been trying to get one from her (the one in pieces at her house) but this one is nice, it's smaller and already warped so I can play with it without really caring about making mistakes. I found a place in town that has classes but usually on Tuesday or Thursdays which means I can't go to them since those are the nights that I'm in school. If you know of any online weaving resources, links would be very much appreciated...