I don't think I'm a fan of water bath canning

as opposed to pressure canning. The hands-on part of pressure canning goes fairly quickly. Jars only have to be clean and hot. Things have to be at over 170 degrees before the lids go on and the canning begins. All of your attention is on making sure things don't cool down and the pressure and timing are right. The canning process does the sterilization.

For hot water bath canning, you can't even get started without sterilizing the jars. Not just hot, boiled hard for 20 minutes. Everything needs to be as close to sterile as you can get. And I'm a bug about food safety. When I started curing meat, I got the kind of scale to measure the 'cure' that made the internet decide that I was either a jeweler or a drug dealer, and send me ads accordingly. I don't mess around.

I lucked into a sale on hard-ripe small pears and decided to can some. Hot water bath, the works. Make and sterilize the light syrup. Sterilize the jars. Boil the water to dissolve the ascorbic acid in to keep the fruit from darkening. It would dissolve just fine in cold tap water, but it wouldn't be sterile. It was a full hour before I could start loading up the jars.

After all that, I think I'm going to have three pints of mushy pears.

And all this with the interruptions that come from a husband, three cats and a dog. It is my firm belief that once you eliminate the holidays, most household murders occur during canning season.