Some Days I'm Glad to See the End of!

Yesterday was one of those days! Wednesday night I picked up the phone and discovered we had no dial tone. I took the telephone outside and tried plugging it into the outside jack, and still nothing. We don't have a cell phone, so on Thursday my husband went to work and called Verizon.

Meanwhile, all day Thursday, I had no phone service, no internet, (internet withdrawal? who, me?) no way to call (ha ha) and find out what was going on. No way to make a blog post!

Thursday afternoon, just before time to leave and pick up our son from school, the Verizon van showed up and I showed the phone tech where the box was. At first he said it was testing like "phone off the hook", but then he took the box apart and got a puzzled look on his face. He said, "It's not in the house -- I'll be working on it."

(You don't want to call the phone company if the problem is in the house lines or your phone: they charge about a hundred bucks to come in your house and push the jack in tighter.)

When I drove down the road towards the school, I saw his van about a half a mile or so from my house. Later he told me the homeowner there said a pickup truck had hit the telephone cable access box. The impact tore the thick wooden fencepost that was next to it right out of the ground.

So finally I had phone service.

But the worst part of the day was yet to come!

In the evening, I had to go into town and run some errands, and buy some filter cloth to strain the "sugar sand" out of the maple syrup. There are enough minerals in maple sap that when you boil it down, you get a fine layer of what looks and tastes like white sand. My husband was watching the sap kettle.

You have to understand that my husband is the cook in our house. I make a mean apple dumpling and I bake bread. But he's the guy who does most of the meal planning. So this wasn't quite like leaving someone who never has anything to do with cooking in charge.

However, he had a couple of friends over. And (can you see this coming?) he FORGOT. When I got home, I got out of my car and smelled burned sugar! I ran to the door and yelled, "Burning maple syrup!" and he leaped out of his chair and went out the door by the boiling set-up.

Too late.

Anyone know a good way to get burned sugar off an enamel canning kettle?