Why you should never play Guitar Hero when canning

This weekend, I was determined to start the fall "harvest" of preserved goods, and decided I'd make pear/apple butter. I headed over to the doctor's, who had plenty of homegrown, lovely looking apples. I picked some pears from her trees, and then we chopped up the lot along with apples for some fruit butter. I tended the batch carefully, following the recipe, and once it was cooked down enough to add the sugar, in went 4 lbs. (Sounds like a lot, but trust me - we had a lot of fruit!)

I stirred the batch around a bit, and thought the sugar was dissolved. And wouldn't you know it, the recipe called for cooking it all down for a couple of hours. So what better thing to do to while away the time than play Guitar Hero? I just had to get past a certain "medium" level challenge. Ah, the perils of heavy metal and the kitchen - I suddenly smelled something really wrong (but I was in the middle of a song!), and when I rushed into the kitchen, realized that the sugar was happily crusting on the bottom of the pot, and had now lent a certain caramelized  flavor. Read - burnt! Now, I had managed to go for a quick swim, but somehow, the intense challenges of Guitar Hero (medium!) had ruined my batch of carefully selected pears and apples. And I didn't even win my battle. Jammit all!

I'm only consoled by the fact that the doctor put too much cinnamon into the applesauce so we had to compensate by putting in more apples. Maybe there was something in that pool water today, or maybe it was because our political junkie mavens weren't with us (and thus, MSNBC was far too quiet)....

Oh well, at least the dog had a successful day in the country garden!