It’s not morning. It’s going on 7 PM and I currently have seven pints of homemade chicken vegetable soup in the pressure canner. I started with seven quarts of chicken stock. Spending time canning seems to have been the story of my life the last couple months, with that brief interlude of a jaunt off to England. A dear friend of mine made a comment last week when I told them about making and canning applesauce, “You’re always canning something around there. But, I bet it saves money.”  It sure does.

I haven’t tallied up how many kilograms of produce came from the garden yet – it’s all been written on the calendar, various days with various totals of various vegetables or berries. All except for the rhubarb; being a perennial, we really haven’t felt the need to track how much we harvest from it, but I can tell you that it was easily 30 pounds between us, friends and relatives.

So, while I’ve got time as I wait, I think I should share a few more favorite images from England. I love England. I was fascinated with it for many years because of books and movies and Monty Python. My interest grew after I made friends of people who live there; and then when I worked on my ancestry, learning that a big part of my family tree came from England, I was more intrigued. Toss in my love of history and the fact that England has centuries upon centuries of it – I’m all over it.

I want to go back. I want to travel to a lot of places around the globe, but I definitely want to go back to England. It oozes history and everywhere we went had something I wanted to see or a place I wanted to go. Now that I’ve been to Croatia and England, I can tell you both places had more history than I could take in during a short vacation. I like to think that all of Europe will be the same way so picking out where I want to travel to will be the hardest part.

But England? We’ll be back. We’ll be back more than once.

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