So, one day you find yourself with an extra 75 pounds of tomatoes and after four BLTs you find yourself overdosing on lycopene and wondering, what to do. I know, make ketchup! Google up the recipe, and another, and another – hmmm, this isn’t going to be easy, Heinz isn’t sharing what it knows. I start small, using 25 pounds of the tomatoes to make what should turn out to be a gallon of savory, thick-flowing ketchup. Washing, peeling, coring, and pureeing so many tomatoes takes nearly all day and my fingers are permanently stained orange. I cook the tomatoes, onions, and red bell pepper in two large pots. To strain the concoction, I should have used a food mill, but I don’t have one. After nearly four hours of cooking this down my ketchup isn’t thickening. Maybe I strained too much pulp, maybe I should have used a mill, maybe I should have deseeded and squeezed the extra water from the tomatoes while I was prepping them, maybe I should have used the full three cups of sugar the recipes called for? While millions talk online and download pictures of Paris Hilton, seemingly I am the only person in Google’s universe who is spending 15 hours over the course of a day trying to turn $65 of tomatoes into $15 worth of watery ketchup. Where are all the ketchup experts when you need one???

We were supposed to leave for Santa Barbara, California this afternoon but a severe wind warning and the threat of dust storms from Phoenix to Palm Springs, California put a damper on our travels. By 4:30 p.m. the winds were whipping the eucalyptus trees outside our door into a frenzy. Soon the skies were choked with dirt kicked up by the 50 mph gusts. Not until nearly 10:00 p.m. did the winds begin to settle, far too late to start the 500-mile drive to Santa Barbara.

Rated at 32 mpg city and 35 mpg highway we went from small and gutless, well……we continued the theme! This is our new Hyundai, a 2006 Accent. Another 100,000-mile warranty so we are comfortable that we can drive around the block a few times before the manufacturer pretends the vehicle was never really the responsibility of their engineers. I can’t wait for the Chinese to start bringing cars into America, if they offer a 250,000-mile warranty I’ll be the first in line to buy one. I have got to tell you though, I feel mighty strange being the only white American in the United States not driving an SUV. Many a person expressed their discomfort knowing one of their own was driving a four-cylinder Korean “Wok Racer” – not my words. For me, saving 200 gallons of gas a year worth $550 is worth the small amount of humiliation I have to endure for being a treehugger; my wife being a vegetarian doesn’t help our poor public image either. Just kidding, Caroline.

This is our Hyundai Elantra two and a half years after we bought it. Today it has 92,330 miles (149,500km) on it and the warranty will run out at 100,000 miles. The car has been a gem, perfect every day we’ve driven it. The brakes are still factory brakes, we changed the battery, the tires, and windshield wipers along with the oil on a regular basis. On average we got 29.4 mpg, But now it is time to retire this car for another. Tomorrow’s photo of the day will be that of our new putt-putt.