OK, there's been so much discussion about canning salsa in quarts that I gave up and called my friend, the Extension Director. She tells me that they "used" to tell people to go ahead and can salsa in quarts, now they tell people not to. She doesn't know when they stopped suggesting canning in quarts, but that it was a definite change in the rules. She thinks it happened about the same time they stopped giving directions for canning rutabaga (a quality issue, not a safety issue, incidentally). So, according to the experts, DON'T CAN THE SALSA IN QUARTS. It's never been an issue for me, because I've never canned it in quarts, I can barely use up a pint before it spoils, but other people (maybe with big families?) apparently can use a quart of the stuff before it gets moldy. Anyway, in the interest of safety and consistency, I'm going to say right now that I no longer suggest anyone can salsa in quarts. It's a food that doesn't get reheated/boiled for the suggested time, and so it contains a bit more inherent risk. Annie

My wife has a beautiful garden with all kinds of lilies and hosta and many other types of flowers which I have no idea. She wins contests for our yard and we've spent a lot of money with irrigation, truckloads of mulch delivered by semi, trips far and wide to various garden stores to buy the elusive flowers... I say all that to make the point that our yard is her passion and she loves to garden. A couple years ago she went on a vacation with a girlfriend for a week or so. She left me in charge (mistake #1). I was given strict instructions on running the irrigation (we hadn't yet installed our final leg of irrigation that summer and it was hot and dry). Oh, and we have a real deer problem - they will eat her garden down to the ground if we don't spray the garden at least once a week with some "deer-away" stuff that smells like two month old horse urine. Soooo... she gave me instructions to spray all the flowers with the nasty urine smelling stuff she had kindly pre-mixed for me in the hand-pumped sprayer in the garage. Well I did my duties just as instructed, watered, and on the allotted day spent probably 30 minutes spraying the deer repellant onto all the flower beds. When I was done I brought the sprayer back into the garage and suddenly realized I hadn't smelled that horrible smell as I was spraying all the flowers. I then noticed that there were TWO sprayers in the garage. Hmm, i thought. I opened up the second one and PHEW what a smell - well that one is clearly deer repellant. So what I had I just sprayed all over the entire garden? Yes, you guessed it. Round-up. Oh my goodness. Panic set in. I ran out with a hose, but then thought, what if that makes it worse. I feverishly called the manufacturer and tried to get information on what I could do - the guy laughed and said pretty much I was screwed; once it was on the leaves there was nothing I could do. I went out and sprayed and sprayed anyway for hours. Ran the sprinkler for I think 2-3 days continuously. Wife came home. I said nothing. Flowers started looking bad in spots. Then worse. Eventually I had to fess up. And then I went out with a HUGE black permanent marker and LABELED the sprayers. Thankfully after her initial anger, she forgave me. And I wrote many checks that summer to replace flowers.

The Israelis and Arabs finally realized that, if they continued fighting, they would someday end up destroying the world. So they sat down and decided to settle the whole dispute with a dogfight. The negotiators agreed that each country would take five years to develop the best fighting dog they could. The dog that won the fight would earn its country the right to rule the middle east. The losing side would have to lay down its arms. The Arabs found the biggest, meanest Dobermans and Rottweilers in the world. They bred them together and then crossed their offspring with the meanest Siberian wolves. They selected only the biggest, strongest puppy from each litter and continued to breed them together. They used steroids and trainers in their quest for the perfect killing machine. After the five years were up, they had a dog that needed iron prison bars on its cage. Only the trainers could handle this beast. When the day of the big fight arrived, the Israelis showed up with a strange animal. It was a nine-foot-long Dachshund. Everyone felt sorry for the Israelis. No one else thought this weird animal stood a chance against the growling beast in the Arab camp. The bookies predicted the Arabs woul win in less than a minute. The cages were opened. The Dachshund waddled toward the center of the ring. The Arab dog leapt from his cage and charged the giant wiener-dog. As he got to within an inch of the Israeli dog, the Dachshund opened its jaws and swallowed the Arab beast in one bite. There was nothing left but a small of fur from the killer dog's tail. The Arabs approached the Israelis, shaking their heads in disbelief. "We do not understand. Our top scientists and breeders worked for five years with the meanest, biggest Dobermans and Rottweilers. They developed a killing machine." "Really?" the Israelis replied. "We had our top plastic surgeons working for five years to make an alligator look like a Dachshund!"

sabbath, my son wants to know if you named your black cat sabbath. I honestly can't remember. Cause he thought'd be cool for the cat to be "Black Sabbath". He's not a metalhead, but he does like some of it.