Me and Mom, the Origianl Type-A

It's late and I've been making marinara sauce since about 10 am this morning - I'm about 13 hours in and will probably hit 14 total. But, I am almost done, just about 30 minutes more to boil down the last stockpot full of sauce to the right thickness, then it is ladeled into jars through the funnel, lids are put on, rings are screwed on and tightened and the jars go into the canning bath for about 25 minutes...this process I have repeated over and over again today. I bought three 20 lb. boxes of roma tomatoes from the couple that runs my favorite farm stand. They drive over to eastern Washington weekley to pick up produce. Last week I put in my order for the roma tomatoes and sure to their word, they had them ready for me to pick up on Wednesday morning. I gave the tomatoes a couple of days to ripen further, which made today my long day of sauce making in the kitchen. The thing about making marinara sauce is that it's lots of work all at once and then long waits. I try to use the long waits efficiently to have everything ready to go for the next round, onions chopped in the food processor, tomatoes cleaned, trimmed and ready to go through the food processer. But sometimes there's nothing really to do but wait while the sauce is boiling down. So today I've had the luxury of getting a few things done for my online job, but I've also been browsing facebook and internet news sights quite a bit. I don't normally get this much time online to just goof off, and to be honest, I'm glad. If I didn't have the tomato sauce to show for my time today, I'd feel a bit like a loser. I'm no Type-A, but I am also not really one for wasting large amounts of time, I like to be productive. I'm more a Type-B that has Type-A tendencies and I likes to surround myself with Type-A's, the husband for instance is a Type-A, as are several of the friends I've been closest to over the years. I like the influence that Type-A's have on me. The original Type-A in my life is my mom. She was queen of getting up early, even on the weekend. I remember many times as a child, waking up to the sound of the vacuum running in the hall outside my bedroom. She liked a clean house and never went to bed with dishes in the sink - something that I probably won't be able to say tonight, but now that I'm grown up, I generally feel the same way about going to bed with a clean kitchen. She would have liked for me to keep my bedroom cleaner as I was growing up, and I think it would have made her happy if I'd made my bed every morning - as a kid I did so sporadically, but this was a habit I didn't firmly form until my freshman year of college in the dorms. Luckily the bed-making habit was firmly in place before I got married, the husband is very faithful about tasks like this, for the most part he tolerates my "free-spirtedness", but it helps that I have a few standards.Well, like I said, I've had some time on my hands here and there today, so I decided to share a picture my mom sent me as an email attachment recently. She took an picture of the two of us - I don't know when it was taken, sometime probably in the last 5 years - and she photoshopped the heck out of it. That's another thing my mom likes to do, make adjustments to photos, it's kind of become her hobby. She's a good person, my mom, she's quirky and thoughtful and nice. Now it's time to get back to that marinara sauce!