Quince Adventures, and Lots of Rain

I have made 7 bottles (Fowlers size 27) of pickled quinces (plus a little jam jar of leftovers that I sent home with mum), and they look gratifyingly gorgeous sitting on the preserves shelf in the hallway.  They were also fantastically easy to produce, taste and smell wonderful (the sharp, sweet, spicey pickling liquor all bound up in the delicate perfumed lushness of quince...mmm...), and now I have pots of quince paste bubbling viciously away on the stove (boiling quince pulp, I have discovered to my dismay, sticks and burns like napalm) and I am enchanted, as always, by the way quince changes from pale yellow to deep bloody red as it cooks.  The paste is too sweet for my taste, so I'm cooking up some more unsweetened quince to add to the pot in the hopes of making it taste a bit less like jam.
But oh, the rain.  The penetrating, all-encompassing, soaking, icy, extraordinarily wet rain!  All of a sudden we've leapt forward from our unseasonably warm, dry autumn into finger-numbing, endlessly wet winter.  The clothes on the line blew off into the mud during the storm on Tuesday morning and are still there because I can't see the point in bringing them in and washing them again, because there's nowhere to hang them out to dry.  I think tomorrow will involve an excursion to the laundrette, and an extravagant number of dollar coins being fed into the dryers.