Yesterday was dominated by tomatoes. I started cutting up vegetables for the stock pots at 8 a.m., and we sat down for dinner just before 8 p.m. The job still isn't quite over--I need to ladle the finished sauce into freezer boxes--but the cooking/pureeing/cooking-again stages are done.

So that's one big late-summer chore completed. Now if I can finish moving firewood into the basement this weekend, I'll feel even better. I've do have one more week at home before we leave for Chicago, but it's speckled with meetings and events. In the meantime, T is shopping for a new front door. That has become his big pressing project. The casing is rotting away, and the sag and gaps have gotten extreme, but as usual with home repairs, side issues are complicating matters--in this case the rickety wooden front stoop that some previous terrible handyman built over an existing busted-up brick one. The whole thing is going to have to be removed before T can get the old door casing out and the new one in. Blah.

Anyway, that's the Alcott House update for Saturday, August 22, 2026. Tuesday marked our 9-year anniversary of owning this place, and it remains shabby and mostly unrenovated, but such is life with a carpenter who has to work full time for somebody else. Still, we are heading into winter with a brand-new furnace and a reliable car and a free foraged dishwasher, and plenty of firewood and tomato sauce and blueberries and wild mushrooms, and it looks like we might get a new front door as well. Plus, I cannot forget the fantastic daughter-in-law we're about to acquire. So do not think I am complaining.