Friday, June 21

This is the first day of summer. I guess I should have gone outside and enjoyed the hot, humid weather, but I didn't. Spent the whole day indoors.

I was up at 7:30, and did stair stepping, resistance bands, and weights exercises. Hubbie accompanied Mother to our house around 9 a.m., and I set her up with a new jigsaw puzzle before I went upstairs to get ready for the day.

Once I was dressed, I went to the office computer and printed out a photo of my brother with his dog, and a copy of his obituary, both of which I will add to his scrapbook pages.

To do this, it was necessary to delete the computer history in order to eliminate Hubbie's social network page. Then, I shut the computer down and rebooted so I could enter my information and access my page. After I made the copies, I had to go through the whole process again to get Hubbie's page back.

By the time I finished fooling with all that, it was close to lunchtime. After lunch, I gathered ingredients for making jelly in the automatic jelly maker. This time we used our favorite pectin, rather than the one suggested by the jelly maker manufacturer.

Drat it, the jelly failed again. This time, the juice and sugar didn't even simmer (it didn't come to a full boil with the other batches, so I thought simmer was the appropriate heat), and the sugar didn't even dissolve.

I checked online to find out what others said about the product, and found that it got rave reviews from everyone but one, and that person had the same difficulty I've been having. So I decided the unit is defective and packed it up to be sent back for a replacement.

This whole jelly-making project has been laughable, if frustrating. Tomorrow, I plan to either re-process some of the jelly that has failed, or start anew by making a batch the old fashioned way, on the stove.

Mother went back to her puzzle after the jelly-making fiasco, and I settled in to catch up on reading newspapers, and playing on my e-tablet.

For supper, we had pancakes and scrambled egg substitute, using failed apple-peach jelly for syrup. It was pretty good.

Hubbie accompanied Mother to her house afterward, and then he and I watched TV, including a 2002 movie called "City of God," a subtitled feature about a couple of boys in Rio de Janeiro, who grow up to take different life paths. One becomes a drug dealing member of a violent gang, and the other eventually becomes a photographer. It's rated "R" for extreme violence. Based on a true story.