"Mysterious 2"

There were quite a few white apricots left over from the last food giveaway.  I took them home and canned them.  Since some people seem to hoard my pint-sized canning jars, I had to put the apricots in quarts.  I dislike doing quarts as it takes more hot water and everyone eating my bounty is a single person.  A quart of anything is a lot for 1 person.  Whatever.  The apricots went into the quarts and my single people snatched them up.

I also canned some papayas, but that meant I had to do 2 batches of canning.  When I took the jars of apricots out of the hot water, the water level dropped when I put in fewer jars of papaya.  Again, whatever.  I was hot and tired.  I just wanted to finish the steam bath I was getting on the hottest day of the year.  The jars looked sealed when I was done.  Since I'd run out of room in the kitchen, I put them in the outside sunroom to cool.

A couple of days later, I decided the sunroom was probably too hot for the jars.  I brought them inside and ignored them for a few days.  After a while, a not quite unpleasant and mysterious odor seemed to be in the kitchen and I couldn't find the source.  I also got invaded by carpenter ants.  Now, I'm betting you see the connections in this story.  I didn't.  I went on an increasingly frantic ant murdering spree until I picked up a jar of papaya and saw it was swarmed with ants.  The lid had popped off and there was an interesting, bubbling science experiment inside.

Stomp, stomp, stomp, compost fermenting papaya, wash everything... there were still ants.  I was losing my mind about then.  I finally found a second jar had exploded papaya all over the crowded table, the chair, the floor... There might've been some cussing.  Sooo, lesson for the week as stated by one of my apricot recipients, "Don't experiment with the rules of canning!"  Excellent lesson.  I'm hoping the ants died from botulism.

Properly canned papaya and apricots

On a happier note, I've been painting more flowers.  Bro2 said my other flower painting made him think of chakras, so I did this painting with that in mind.  Per Google, chakras are "(in Indian thought) each of the centers of spiritual power in the human body".  You can think of that as energy flowing through your body.  When all is healthy and good, it flows in a direct line bottom to top and you radiate joy.

You may have noticed some people aren't radiating joy.  They probably have a blocked chakra(s) and ought to meditate on the blockage.  Chakras are like Maslow's hierarchy of needs.  Each chakra is color coded.  From bottom to top:

root (red) - safety, stability

sacral (orange) - joy, sensuality, emotion

solar plexus (yellow) - will, power

heart (green) - relationship, love

throat (blue) - expression, communication

3rd eye (purple) - clarity, wisdom

crown (white) - transcendence

I have to wonder where black carpenter ants fit into the pretty chakra rainbow?  My flower has quite a bit of white in it though, so maybe I've transcended my cussing ant murdering spree?

Just in case