Why is it called "canning" when you are actually "jarring"?

Last weekend, my mother-in-law sent up a bunch of "goodies" There were Tamales, Molé, Tortillas, a sack full of tomatoes, and peppers from her garden, and some tomatillos. I didn't exactly know what to do with the tomatoes since I am the only one that really likes to eat them anyway, they were going bad faster than I could eat them. So I got an itch to make salsa...not just make the dang salsa, but to also can the salsa. There are firsts for everything and this my friends, was my first time ever canning. It was a real-tiring process trying to find the dang mason jars, Walmart, I managed to get to 3 different ones and to all my luck they were sold out. When we were in Caldwell on Saturday, I stopped at Albertsons and to my surprise they LOTS of them. I purchased 2/12 packs thinking I would be making a lot. So this morning when I woke up, I started first thing. Boiled the tomatoes, drained them, boiled the tomatillos, cut the onion and chopped the cilantro, and viola! I was ready to blend the heck out of all this fresh produce. After attempting the first batch, Manuel woke up, (thank heavens, b/c he is a salt lover and I am not, and I need to add salt to the mixture, my little shake just wasn't enough) any way he sampled almost all of the batches. after getting all the jars filled, (to my surprise, with everything I had, it only filled 7 jars, I was shocked from the looks of all the stuff we had, I thought we would have more) I put them in the pot to seal the deal. I let them boil in the water for a long time just because I wasn't keeping track of time and so every time I would check on them I would "plan" to give them just 20 more minutes, but then I never managed to look at the clock at this point in time. So I am pretty sure they were in the pot for well over an hour or so. (obviously, I don't exactly follow rules. It said not to disturbed the jars with in 12-24 hours of canning...but I had to get a picture and they had cooled by now, I don't (hopefully not) think I hurt anything)
Oh well, I don't think it hurt any thing. When you can, the lids are not suppose to pop back up when you push in the center of them. when I pulled the jars out only 2 popped back at me. But throughout the day, they have sealed and not a single one of the seven pop back and I think my results are pretty good for being a first timer. Now, I haven't tried the salsa since they have been sealed, it says to wait 12-24 hours before messing with them, possibly tomorrow I will have some. Hopefully it tastes good... I am pretty proud of my-self. Now if I could can peaches. I am sure I could but with what I hear, it gets pretty messy and I just don't know if I am ready to conquer that on my own, doing the salsa was messy enough :)

One last note: Sorry if this blog seems to over use the (,) comma, I just finished an assignment for my Business Communication class that was dealing with commas, so now that I have been doing that for the last 45 minutes, I think the comma usage is instilled in my head for the time being :)

One more item of business, I love that I can still spell correctly at 2 AM...Spell Checker is just trying to correctly spell words its not recognizing. SWEET