I was cleaning out the canning cupboard the other day and thought to take this picture. I didn't think, however, to write down what this all is, but I see some mango and strawberry jams, carrot pickles, chocolate sauce, pink grapefuit marmalade, cranberry chutney, dilly beans and maybe some key lime chutney. I also keep things like preserved lemons, applesauce, peaches and both pureed and diced tomatoes (although I'm currently out of all my tomato products). In the past I've made marinated mushrooms, which I'd like to make again, and am planning to start making ketchups.

This weekend I was planning to put in another supply of pickled carrots and make a first pass at jerk sauce. Instead, both the Little Diva and I got a bad case of the yucks. Neither of us has eaten much over the last couple days. This morning I graduated to toast and she's now nursing for just a minute or two at a time. Other than these little steps, food has not been popular around here.

So instead of talking about canning I want to tell you about our tent. You may not be surprised to hear that I'm not much of a camper. We live in the country and that's more or less enough for me. My husband and the Boy Wonder, however, are itching to pack up a tent and head off to the nearest park for some communing with even more nature (as long as said nature includes a playground, pool, showers and movie night, of course).

So after an exhaustive month of price and feature comparison we bought a tent. Specifically, we bought a $60 tent that's large enough for all of us and had a brand name that even I recognized. So I figured it would be serviceable and it would not be necessary to spend the hundreds of dollars that it's apparently possible to spend on tents (much better to spend that money on shoes, in my opinion).

Anyway, on Saturday afternoon the tent went up in the backyard and plans were made for the men in the family to sleep outside. Around 9 p.m. they went out armed with a flashlight and a bedtime book. Sometime around 4 a.m. it started to rain.

Turns out that the $60 tent leaks. A lot.

It's supposed to be leak proof. Or waterproof. Or whatever it is they say about tents that means you won't get wet when you sleep in one. So my husband says the tent is going back. I asked how much he thought a non-leaking tent might cost. "Don't know," he replied, "Maybe a hundred, hundred-fifty. Possibly more."

There is no way I'm going through the whole tent buying process again. We can buy a lot of seam sealer for the forty to ninety dollar difference between the tent we have in hand and some mythical leak-proof tent.