RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

1) The other night I was home alone and watching something scary on TV when the power went off.  Sudden, unexpected darkness is always the darkest darkness, don't you think?  In the first few completely blind moments of panic, while trying to figure out what happened, I lay on the floor like a slug (it was my only defense.)

I managed to find some lights, thank goodness, but not until after I ran around my house for a minute and grabbed a  flashlight that wouldn't light up.  I texted a couple of people, you know, so if I was found dead then there would be a timeline in place and then I sat in the dark like a cave person.

I think it should be illegal for the lights to go off while you're watching or reading something scary, don't you?  I don't know how the electric company would keep up with that sort of thing, but I think hefty fines should be in place for such events.

As it turns out, it was just a transformer issue and the lights came back on about thirty minutes later, but I learned a couple of things about myself.  A) I will never remember that my cell phone can be used as a flashlight until I've tried and failed to turn on several actual flashlights. I'm just a simple cave person. Technology confuses me. B) When panicked, I can run through my house in the pitch black without tripping over anything or knocking anything over, which is something I am unable to do while not panicked and with bright lighting. C) I can come up with a quick plan to murder intruders and find the will to carry out that plan while sitting in the dark of my living room.

So if the power goes off and any of you need to come to my house for any reason, I expect you to know and use the Kelly-Isn't-Tall-Enough-To-See-Through-The-Window hand signal that I recognize or you might get creatively mauled in a "Home Alone" type scenario.  If you don't know the hand signal, call me and find out before you knock on my door or you'll be sorry.

2)  I saw my new doctor. who did a bunch of blood tests, and all of them back normal! Whatever happened to put me in the hospital is now officially a glitch.  I'm not complaining or anything, trust me.  I don't want anything to be wrong with me and I don't want to have to ever go to the emergency room again.  Ever.  If I'm ever in the hospital I want it to be something planned well in advance and agreed to by myself while in full control of my faculties.

So there you go.  The Case of the Palpitating Heart will remain a mystery.

My doctor did proscribe me a medicine because apparently I'm too acidic.  Whatever that means.  I think it is the polar opposite of being a basic bitch. Who knows? Maybe I should call Beyonce, because I'm not sure what the PH scale of bitches is.

3) I completely zoned out while getting gas this morning.  I don't even know where my mind was, but the automatic feed shut off and I wasn't paying attention to what I was doing and I put my finger back on the trigger and gas spewed everywhere.  I had to pay for gas that didn't even go to my tank. :(  Stellar way to start the day.  I need to quit daydreaming.

4) I tried, and failed, to make peach jam over the weekend.  It was a spectacular failure, too, even though it didn't cause a fire or anything!  I had a surplus of peaches from our farmer's market trip that were rapidly getting ripe, so I cut up a few and thought I'd make a small batch of jam to keep them from having to be thrown away. 

I cut up the fruit, put it in the pot, and then realized that I didn't have any proper sugar.  I thought I had sugar, but instead of buying sugar, I had bought flour.  Shut up, they come in similar packages and I didn't read it!  So instead of doing the smart thing and finding a no sugar recipe, I found a package of coconut sugar I'd bought from Trader Joe's a year and a half ago.  Coconut sugar is a lot like brown sugar without the molasses taste, but it still has a caramel-esque flavor.  I thought it would be alright.  The next thing I thought I didn't have (but as it turned out, I did have it and just forgot) was lemon juice.  You have to add lemon juice so that the peaches don't turn brown. I substituted straight up citric acid, since I had that on hand, but what I didn't know at the time was that those things aren't a 1:1 sort of thing.  Straight citric acid is MUCH more acidic than lemon juice, but I put in two tablespoons of it because that's how much lemon juice you're supposed to add.  So, I had peaches, coconut sugar, citric acid and water in my pot and started cooking.  A recipe for disaster, indeed.

As it cooked, I would occasionally taste it and it was so dang sour.  So sour that I couldn't taste the peaches. It was like sucking on a War Head instead of any kind of jam I'd ever had.  I added more sugar, but it didn't help.  I added strawberries to help balance it out, but that didn't help either.  By the time the stuff was done cooking, the (entire bag of) coconut sugar had caramelized, so not only was the jam sour, it was BLACK.  I still canned it and proofed it, because I didn't want it to go to waste, so I just crossed my fingers that the acidity would mellow out as it cooled down. 

Last night I took the container of jam that I'd put in the fridge and dipped my finger into it to taste and see if it had mellowed out, but it had not.  Not even a little bit.  In fact, I don't know how how citric acid works, but I think that letting it cool down only made it mad.  I had less than an 8th of a t-spoon of that jam, barely enough to even swallow and it burned me.  It burned my mouth and all the way down into my stomach. I had to go brush my teeth and my tongue to get the burning to stop!  I ended up going to to the kitchen and unsealing every jar of that jam and dumping it, just in case it fell into some innocent person's hands.

I know I'm not such a good cook, and I've had a lot of kitchen disasters, but I think that's the first time I've ever made anything that might have been dangerous.  I managed to weaponize jam.  That's a new one, even for me!