Remember those number puzzles where the goal is to get all the numbered tiles - 15, of them, I think, in order by sliding them around one by one? I always enjoyed those when they showed up in birthday party goodie bags or in Halloween swag, they appealed to my OCD/Type A side (if I may grossly generalize for a moment), my enthusiasm for imposing order over chaos and the rush I feel in putting something all messed up to rights.

Lately I've come to realize that the things that make a childhood game fun and compelling are much less so when applied to real life.

In other words, we continue to make progress on The Things, inch by inch and tile by tile. Moving one issue closer to resolution requires making a mess of three or four (or more!) other issues, which then require their own triage to figure out what needs to be done with them which hopefully won't undo the progress we made on the first thing. Most frustrating.

One of the more regrettable side effects of all this is that I've put the canning kettle away for a bit. I've always taken the position that canning doesn't require all the huge blocks of time that people remember their great-aunt Sally taking to put up some tomatoes and I stand by that stance, so to speak. Aunt Sally was likely trying to put up enough to get her through the winter, with no Wegmans or other nifty market to fill-in for any shortfall she failed to consider. For most of us, canning and preserving is frugal on the one hand (I can put up four pints of bourbon marinated mushrooms for two-thirds the cost of buying them!) and fun on the other - but not quite as necessary for most as in by-gone years. So, theoretically and according to my own long-professed beliefs, I should be able to zip up six pints of cranberry chutney in an odd hour in between work on The Things.

And yet. We've had to think long and hard about what is dispensible for the time being, what can be set aside and packed up to make room for The Things and other activities. I confess that there's a part of me that is reliving childhood fingers-crossed/say the opposite wishcraft that says just writing about putting my kettle away will result in some kind of magically appearing hours here and there where I have nothing else to do and chutney, jam or pickle ingredients suddenly appear. Hope, as they say, springs eternal.