It's a cruel, cruel summer...

Summer is done and fall's chill is in the air. The days are markedly shorter; mornings are later to have the sky fully lit, evenings are sooner to make the sun disappear. The cold wind is blowing the sunshine right out of the sky.

It's cruelly ironic that, all summer long, the weather was so cool that the tomatoes didn't produce flowers like the should so they didn't fruit well. About three weeks of very warm temps finally pushed them into production, but most of the new fruit that has set will never mature and ripen since temperatures are back down into the 60s at night.

So, two weeks ago I gave up on the fact that I was going to get any appreciable crop of tomatoes and went to the farmer's market down the street. I bought a large box of ripe tomatoes and slaved away an entire Sunday making 19 pints of salsa.

In the past week, though, some of the biggest tomatoes in my crop began ripening at a very speedy pace, and today, there are 18 very large tomatoes sitting on the counter. Had I only waited, I could have made the salsa from my own tomatoes. But now that I've made it, I'm loathe to run through the whole process again, because it is an onerous task. And by onerous I mean that I was so put off by making this year's batch that I said I wasn't going to make it next year. And here I'm thinking about making it again THIS year. Of course, if I do make it again this year, I'm almost certain to never make it again it after that. And if I don't make it, all these tomatoes I've slaved over go to waste. It's infuriating.