Jammin!

Canning combines some of my favorite hobbies, including cooking, couponing, and gardening.

Since it's March, I'm not doing much gardening these days. I'm dreaming of days when my tomatoes are growing like crazy and taking over my yard.

Until then, I have to watch sale prices at the store if I want to can. When I went to the store the other day, blackberries were on sale for 99 cents. Jalapenos are crazy cheap, and are under $1 per pound.

Blackberry jalapeno jam, here I come!

I started following one recipe, then I scratched that and followed another. I added some of my own touches in the middle, because I thought it'd taste better and I'm a rebel like that.

Namely: The recipes told me to mash the blackberries with a potato masher. I tried that, but nothing really happened. Maybe the blackberries weren't quite ripe enough for that?

You can't really stop canning in the middle of a canning session, so I improvised. I pulled out my blender and stuck the piping hot mixture in it. That's stupid dangerous, but I made do. Plus, I still have all of my fingers and toes. (Score.)

This jam is the most gorgeous color of red I've ever seen. It's my favorite color of red, that deep, dark red wine color.

I made two recipes. I spent $5 on blackberries, 79 cents on jalapenos, and around $1 on lemons. I already had the sugar, pectin, jars and lids.

For a grand total of around $7, I made 17 cans of jam.

...you could say I'm jammin!

One of my favorite things to do is to stay in my kitchen after I take the cars out of the water bath. Those sweet 'dings' are music to my ears.

Pure happiness.

Don't judge a book by its movie.

The book is always better than the movie.

I finally got the chance to watch Gone Girl. I didn't get the chance to see it theaters, so I was pretty excited to see it.

I was kind of disappointed. The book follows the movie pretty closely, but there are a few subtle things different.

I won't spoil anything for those of you who haven't read the book or watched the movie.

I left with a 'meh' feeling.

Speaking of that feeling, I finished reading Dark Places, which is another book by Gillian Flynn.

It started off slow. I usually read a book cover to cover within a day, but this one took me a few days (on the beach, might I add).

I had about 50 pages left to read, but I put it off for a couple weeks. Again, that 'meh' feeling was there.

The other night I picked it up and read the rest of it.

I had the same reaction to the end of Gone Girl.

Um, what just happened? No way! Shut up! Get out of here!

I like it.

I also have Sharp Objects, Gillian Flynn's other book, but I'm going to wait a while to read it.

Look for it.

One of my favorite things about photography is that you don't always have to know what you're doing.

This weekend I took up the task of taking photos of a race in my hometown. I'm not crazy enough to be on the racetrack, people (seriously, do those photographers have a death wish?). I settled for taking photos in the pits and from a few areas in the stand instead.

I don't mean to toot my own horn, but I would describe myself as a pretty good photographer. I got my first camera in second grade, and I've had one ever since.

One of my favorite tricks in photography is to cheat. I tried for years to take photos of windmills at sunset, but it never really worked out.

Capturing motion with the sun going down is hard, after all.

My favorite photo I've ever taken of wind mills was taken with a cheap point-and-shoot camera. It was December in western Kansas six years ago. And, I cheated.

What was the cheating part, you ask? The wind farm I was taking photos of was still under construction, and those long blades that are tricky to photograph moving were not moving.

Ha! I showed that wind farm who's boss that day.

I think there's a perception that you have to go exotic places to take good photos. I learned growing up that that isn't true. There's beauty everywhere, you just have to look for it.

Anyway, I'm getting off topic here. So Saturday night I knew I was going to take photos of cars going something like 90 mph at night.

To be honest, I didn't have high hopes. That's a lot to expect out of me. Like I said above, capturing motion with lights is hard enough, but to add total darkness into the equation?

Yikes. What a challenge.

I had an idea of what I was doing, so I wasn't completely clueless. Once the main race started, my mission was to keep an eye on my camera settings to see if there was enough light. Once I got that somewhat right, I didn't put my camera down.

I took around 400 photos. There's a string of them, about 50, that are perfectly in focus.

Success!

It also helps that the cars slow down during cautions. Like I said, sometimes photography involves cheating.

I'm okay with that.

I can honestly say that being a race photographer is something I officially don't want to do with my life. It's dangerous for the photographers on the track, it's hot, and it's dirty.

After the race was over I had dirt in places dirt should not be.

But I'm glad I owned up to the challenge and kind of succeeded. I don't think they're award winning photos, they may not even be a home run, but I think they're a solid base hit.

And now I'm getting my sports mixed up.