Weekends are work!

I'm ready for a nap! Yesterday was market day, so I hauled the family out bed at 6:30 to come with me to help set up at the market. Hannah slept in the car but the rest of us set up tents, hung banners, swept the street and generally got the market in shape for week 10. Then the girls went to help at the VEGA car wash fundraiser while Don and I toured yard sales looking for canning supplies (I found some great pickle jars and a funny gadget to sterilize lids, guess pickles will have to be on the menu come cucumber season). Then, back to the market to tear down and home to make jam. Turns out, 25 pounds of apricots becomes 12 quarts of canned, 8-1/2 pints of jam, one upside down cake, several days of snacking and some chicken food, in fairly short order. I also learned, that the faster you do the first things, the less chicken food you have in the end. My friend Carren came over this morning to help jar the apricots and to get a lesson in how to do it before she went home to her own fruit nightmare, 25 pounds of cherries. With her help, processing the fruit went fast. If I was a better friend, I probably would have offered to help her pit her cherries, but I did give the address of a little old lady who was selling a cherry pitter at a yard sale yesterday. It's cooler today, so I'm trying my first experiment from my Artisan Bread cookbook (even though I haven't yet acquired all the gear). Only problem is, mom gave us new measuring cups as a wedding present and I'm not used to them yet. When I went to clean up, I think I discovered that I used the 1 cup measuring cup when I thought I used the 1/2 cup measuring cup. I can't be sure, because I did lots of projects today, sometimes I wipe out the cup right away, sometimes I throw it in the pile for later. We'll find out when the first loaf of bread comes out either as a delicious artisan loaf or something for the rock collection.