Yeesh

I asked Scott to help me with the layout on this page but he is *not* responsible for the mess that has resulted. I'd like a nice background image and that led to trying to adjust the various element boxes and, yeesh, the results are pretty horrendous. But I'm tired to death of fussing with it so I'm leaving it as it is for now.

It does, however, occur to me that I could likely add a widget column, similar to the "books" list (a work in progress) and use it to keep track of birds. Which likely is no more useful than keeping track of them in the lab book as I am currently.

For posterity, however, I'll update on jam. We got to the Farmers Market too late to buy raspberries today so, instead, we picked some blackberries on the way home. Popular opinion seems to be that blackberry jam is too seedy so, after cooking them for 15 minutes, we strained the berries. This left us with a fair bit of juice and a lot of sadly discarded pulp and seed. We need to get a proper sieve, possibly. But the pot of juice seemed to put us into the business of making jelly more than jam which in turn made deciding whether the stuff to which we added sugar and lemon and put back on the stove was "done" even more of a mystery than usual. We decided it seemed right and started ladling the results into jars but then I noticed that the consistency seemed uneven so we dumped the contents of the jars back into the pot to cook a little longer. This led  to a lot of shrinkage, what with some jelly/jam/whatever being left behind at each stage. We ended up with less than three half-pint jars of jam at the end of a somewhat hot and sticky afternoon. On the bright side, what blackberry spread there is is seed-free. We've not yet decided if we're making more blackberry jam next time out or just getting to the market earlier. Happily, there were cocktails.