Put a Hamhock In It

As you know, I'm a big fan of Instacart.

I have not darkened the door of my grocery store since November of 2014. I have saved what I estimate to be thousands of dollars (even including the small fee I pay for delivery) because I only order what I need - there are no impulse buys. It has radically changed my purchasing patterns and my cooking patterns. AND I've reclaimed hours and hours each month I used to spend driving to the store, shopping, packing, driving home, unpacking, putting away my bags and crying and tearing my hair out.

I also think another REALLY cool thing about Instacart is the flexible career part - the microtasking for college students and others that they can pick up on their schedule - it's genius. I love that the economy is providing those opportunities for people who don't want to be cubicle prisoners.

Sometimes funny things happen when other people are shopping for you though.

We are having a BANNER jalapeno year here at Fiedler Backyard Farms, and so I decided to can some of my candied jalapenos and also make tomato jam. So I ordered 12 of the small canning jars.

They brought me 12 CASES of small canning jars.

Now accepting peaches and cherries by the boatload, by the way.

Then, the other day - there was this:

How is it possible to raise a human being who has had no experience with a ham hock ever? Or even heard of the ham hock in legends and stories?

I lit a candle for this poor person who has never had a decent helping of beans or a good split pea or navy been soup in his life.

Society failed him, miserably.

I wonder if he was raised by coyotes? (Not many wolves down this way.) I worry.

Anyway, I'm a wee bit late posting my card for Dina's Mix-Ability challenge from Friday. It's a cool challenge - to use a wax-based medium. Her challenge post is cool because it uses something I've never played with before - Judikins Micro Glaze. Look at her step by step instructions for doing a cool resist with it in her challenge post.

I decided to use my Derwent Artbars for this challenge. It's been REALLY hot here for a few weeks and I wanted to make a cool landscape to rest my eyes on. I mixed violet, blue and pink bars for the sky and used just a single yellow and a single olive for the ground. The way I do these is very simple - I just break off a piece of the bar, dip it in water and run it around the page, layering colors or mixing them on the page. You can create very quick abstract scenes this way and for me they are great for putting onto all occasion cards like this one. This is on watercolor paper.

Plain old ink was my second medium (you have to use at least two mediums for each Mix-Ability challenge, and the sentiment, which I love, is from Something To Say.

And as you know, I've always got something to say.

Teach your children about ham hocks people. The future depends on you!

Loveyameanitbye.