Labor, Plans for More Labor, and an Announcement

This is how I started off my Labor Day weekend on Friday: canning 8 quarts of tomatoes (one is missing from the picture because I can only fit 7 in my canner, so the last one was processing all by its lonesome), 5 quarts and 1 pint of peaches in honeyed syrup, 9 jars of blueberry jam, 8 jars of raspberry jam, 10 jars of salsa, and 8 jars of crushed tomatoes. They join jars of strawberry jam, strawberry rhubarb jam, cherry jam, cherry jelly, and cherry chutney to form a pretty respectable store of preserved fruits and vegetables, all from local Michigan farmers. Once fall arrives and the apple harvest is in, I will put up applesauce and apple pie filling. I may even make mint jelly, not because I really have much use for it, but because I have mint.

A close look at this picture and you may notice a sort of watered-down-mustard colored door behind the shelves. You're not seeing things. It's there. You see, in our basement there are three rooms, but for some reason there are five doors within about a five-foot radius when you stand at the bottom of the steps. Zach turned this door into pantry shelves. Another door is our DVD shelving (which is a bit more stylish and completely full).

This morning I told Zach about my big plans for turning part of the backyard gardens into tiered raised beds in which to grow more of our own produce. He's on board. Excellent! Now I simply need to find the time to go price lumber and compost. It will be a lot of work moving plants and hundreds of large rocks, but I need the exercise anyway.

Now for my big announcement. No, I'm not pregnant (thank goodness). I had an epiphany Thursday while driving home from Grand Rapids. I get most of my best ideas while driving to and from my Grand Rapids office once a week. My muse was working overtime this past week, probably because she knew that come next week I will be carpooling with a friend and our conversation will likely drown her out a bit.

One of my many ideas involved my blog. I realized that when I started this blog, I envisioned it as a place where I could write shortish essays about things that interested me but would never warrant actually being published anywhere, partly because of their brevity and partly because they would largely be centered on me and my life. So I called the blog Stuff No One Would Publish. As I work in publishing, I thought this was sort of clever.

But over the past two years it has morphed into something slightly different. I do occasionally post a more thoughtful entry (and those are some of my favorites to look back to) but I also post a lot about things I do. Hobbies, mostly. And driving home from work Thursday I realized that my blog needed a new name. My lovely idea was The Consummate Amateur.

But just throwing a new header up top doesn't work, because the web address would have to remain the same. So I've started a new blog, which will really be this blog but under a new name and with a new address. I know this causes some annoyances. If I'm on your blog roll (which would make me super happy) you will have to change the address and name. If you follow me here (also makes me super happy) you'll have to start following the new blog.

I will keep Stuff No One Would Publish up and link to it on the new blog in case you ever want to look back at my old posts. But I think the new name really epitomizes what this blog is all about. And it's shorter.

I'm posting this exact same post on The Consummate Amateur to help smooth the transition. I really hope you will join me there!