Carol, It is fairly hot, although the heat is moderated by the fact that so much of it is sweet peppers. It isn't so hot that I cannot eat it and I am a medium-hot pepper eater. I don't care for eating something like habaneros straight off the vine, though I love them in Habanero Gold. Much depends on how hot your hot peppers are. I grow a blend of jalapenos that have Scoville Heat Unit Ratings ranging from 2,000 or 3,000 SHU to 8,000 to 10,000 SHU. I can regulate, to some extent, how hot the pepper relish is just by choosing jalapenos with a higher or SHU rating. (Clearly this means that when I harvest, I have to harvest each variety separately, and it also explains why I label each and every jalapeno pepper plant.) Also, in a very hot and dry summer, you know, the heat can be much more intense in hot peppers. So, if you are trying to keep your pepper relish a little less hot, use peppers grown either in a cooler, milder summer or use the ones from the first harvest of the season. The jalapenos from my first harvest of any given year, which usually occurs soon after about June 10-15, usually are not as hot as the ones I harvest in July or August, since they formed, grew and matured in generally wetter, cooler weather. If I wanted to make a milder hot pepper relish, I'd use those....even if I had to chop them up and freeze them and wait for enough sweet bells to be ripe. Tim, for the record, generally doesn't think any pepper or pepper product is too hot, except for raw habaneros. I did make a triple-hot Habanero Gold pepper version once that is too hot for him and almost everyone else who tries it. A co-worker of his who is from a Caribbean nation where they love lots of hot, hot, hot stuff did think the Triple X Habanero Gold was wonderful, as did her son. Remember that all peppers are interchangeable in tested canning recipes that include peppers since they fall in a similar pH range so you could replace some of the hot peppers with an equivalent amount of sweet ones to reduce the heat. Because Pepper Relish requires 10 cups of peppers per batch, to me it seems like the perfect end-of-the-garden-season recipe. During the peak harvest/canning season in summer, I am using lots of peppers while making Annie's Salsa, Jalapeno Rings and Candied Jalapenos. So, in order to have enough peppers to make those routinely every week or so, I'd rather wait and make Jalapeno Relish at the end of the summer because that's normally when I have a huge bunch of sweet peppers available---when I strip the plants right before the first killing freeze. Last year I made a list of what I wanted to can. It included Annie's Salsa (needed to make at least 50 jars), Candied Jalapenos (needed to make at least 100 jars), and Zesty Bread and Butter Pickles (needed to make at least 100 jars). I achieved those goals, but most of those were given away as gifts, so in order to make me happy this year, I need to can twice as much. I also canned oodles of dill pickles as spears and slices, regular bread and butter pickles, sweet pickle relish and dill pepper relish. After all that, and with jars of canned goods hidden in every nook and cranny of the house, the last thing I needed to do was to make 5 batches of Pepper Relish......but you've got to use the harvest you produced, so I did. Someday Tim will retire and won't be carrying boxes and boxes of gift bags to work every Christmas, and I'll be able to can 25% of what I can now and it will be plenty. I think of our pantry as an endless pantry or a bottomless pantry because even when I think we've used up all Blueberry-Lime Jam, or Annie's Salsa, or Candied Jalapenos or whatever else, if I get in there and look long enough, I'll find some jars of what I need. We rarely run completely out of one item before I'm canning more of it. Still, I need a bigger pantry so I can store it all together. Lots of the stuff goes into plastic underbed storage boxes with snap-on lids. Those are the ones I pull out and carry downstairs when it is time to put together the gift bags. So, the holiday season doesn't empty out my regular pantry as much as I think it will---it just depletes my overflow storage area. I do go in and remove everything from the pantry and reorganize it once harvest time is approaching, so that the oldest canned food is moved to the front of the pantry where it will be used first. I also put the date on each jar so I know which jars are the older ones. Carson'smimi, Well, of course, a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do. Sounds to me like one girl needs to eat some Habanero Gold and cream cheese on crackers. I keep the Mrs. Wage's mix in the fridge too for a few days in between batches. I usually put it in plastic Ball Freezer Jam/Jelly Jars so my family knows what it is and leaves it alone. Moni, Yes, you use the lid wand with a magnet on the end of it to lift the lids out of the hot water and put them on top of the jars. I have three of them from various kits bought over the years. After we moved here, we stuck the box of canning stuff (unintentionally) up in the attic and then I had to buy a whole new set of canning utensils in order to can that year. When we got the Christmas decorations down out of the attic, we found the old canning utensils, so I had two sets. The one from the late 1980s or early 1990s is a sort of turquoise blue, the one from the late 1990s is red, and the third one (I don't remember why I bought it---or maybe it was a gift) is dark blue. My favorite one is the older one because the magnet in that set is super-strong. I need for us to add on a big canning pantry off the laundry room so I can store all my canning items together, along with all the canned goods. Unfortunately, our list of things 'to do' to the house is long and we are really slow about getting around to doing them. By the time we finally get around to adding a canning pantry, Tim will be retired and I'll be canning a lot less since he won't be sharing canned goods with all his coworkers after he retires, and we won't need a big canning pantry. The empty canning jars do pile up and I store them in the same underbed storage boxes after they have been emptied out at Christmas time. Sometimes I store the empty jars in Rubbermaid storage containers in the tornado shelter or in the garage....just wherever I can find a place to stash them. I also have 10 or 12 cases of jelly jars (new and unopened) stacked up in the guest room closet. There's barely a room in this house that doesn't have canning stuff stashed away in every spare corner of a closet, cabinet or shelf. Whenever I see canning supplies on clearance (and sometimes they pop up at odd times---like mixed in with Christmas clearance), I grab them. It is amazing how they'll discount last year's jars or lids merely because the new supply has arrived. MRS'S WAGES MIX ALERT: Yesterday I checked the canning aisle at our local Wal-Mart. They had just put out all the Mrs. Wage's Mixes. They had several kinds for pickles (but not the Zesty Bread and Butter Pickles), salsa, and spiced peaches, as well as pickling salt, pickling lime, pectin, etc. NEWBIE ALERT: If you've never canned before and you need canning salt, you will get a larger amount for a lower price if you buy it on the spice/baking aisle and not the canning aisle. It is the same canning salt, just from a different manufacturer. And, if you're going to make pickles, it is cheaper to buy your spices in bulk from someone like Pendery's instead of buying the pickling spice blend or Mrs. Wage's mixes. Sometimes in a big pickle year I do that. The best time to buy anything I need for canning is in spring because by summer, the stores stay sold out of almost everything. Now that we've discussed pickling and canning so much, I need to go back and look at my grow list, and make sure I included enough of the tomatoes and peppers needed to make lots of what we can every year on top of having all those veggies to eat fresh too. Dawn

My 3-y-o really liked the "grandma reading on tape" book. If you do that, leave a gap after the ringing of the bell for the kid to remember that it means to turn the page, get ahold of the page, actually turn it, etc. My mom kinda rushed that interval. I give my kids a box of cereal each Christmas--something sort of fun and out of the ordinary from what we normally buy. It goes away after they eat it!!!! As he gets older, maybe you can have some category of present like this that's slightly goofy, and only grandma and grandpa give it to him. That'll give him an expectation on a SMALL scale, and reinject some intimacy into the gifts. Each year he can wonder, what weird cereal, or what weird food, or what funny pasta shape, will G&G get me this year? (and get to know someone in Kenosha, WI, or some other test market, who can send you their test-market cereals!). Or what T-shirt w/ what funny saying or great picture? So he knows the category of gift, but not the humor and thought, etc., that went into it? My grandma made my bro's their flannel & cotton pajamas. My big brother hated to wear the shirt when he slept; it got in his way. But it was comfortable, so he took to wearing it to school. My grandma thought this was funny, so she took to making him 2 shirts for Christmas every year. She went all out to find the most goofy fabric imaginable--the most babyish, pajama-looking flannel she could find. The more infantile and obviously-sleepwear-looking the design, the better. It became a little joke between them. Same grandma loved choc.-covered cherries; my dad (her SIL) loved fruit cake. They always bought them for each other for Christmas. The funny thing is, boring and predictable though it was, it was a neat little bond between then. The rest of us shied away from buying those presents; we knew Grandma loved the cherries, but we wouldn't get them, bcs that was horning in on Dad's territory. Once my dad teased her by putting the cherries (a predictable box shape & size) inside a slightly larger box--she laughed and said she'd worried suddenly she wasn't going to get any cherries! My daughter once got all excited opening a present (the gift was $$) from an aunt, because the aunt had tossed in a bag of Teddy Grahams--"look, mom, FOOD!" she cried. I was tickled to open the gift from my aunt and find the Brach's Christmas Nougats I loved but couldn't find. Those are the gifts that are intimate, I think. They're fun, and they're not too serious. but they reflect a genuine interest in the other person, and an ongoing dialogue. True, they're fleeting, but the bond isn't, and the story isn't. And truly, ANY gift will eventually end up in the landfill! At 3 he's too young to get this idea particularly, but he can identify w/ food (or juice w/ Elmo's pic on it, etc.). Also, something he'll use daily might be better--aim low instead of high--a backpack, a stepstool, slippers, a shirt w/ a big old truck on it (C.W.D. has great pictures on boys' T-shirts), a plastic cup in his fave color, etc.

Friday was my birthday and it was so nice-got a ton of birthday greetings, went out for dinner with husband, daughter and MIL (son was working) and really appreciated the gifts of good health, my family, work I love, a home to shelter me and friends to wish me well. This afternoon my dad and stepmother are hosting a family pool party/barbecue to initiate the family birthday 'season'--in our large extended family between my birthday on August 31st and my son's on January 22 there are 16 birthdays! Today will also be the first time my sisters and I have seen each other in several weeks so that's always a party :). Can't wait for swimming, lounging, gossping and laughing with the people I love most in the world. Tomorrow I'm going out diving and lobster hunting with my husband. A boating day along is our special time, what a joy to be on that gorgeous blue ocean with the peace and calm of the day all around us. Ann

Oh your poor daughter - she must feel awful about the shopping cart damage. It's terrible when you can't even park your car safely in the parking lot. My previous car was hit while parked at the supermarket too and of course the driver took off. I hope the car only needs some paint and not a dent removed.