The Great Canning Experiment No. 2

We mixed, we heated, we steeped, we plumped. Don't hide the kids; these are all jam-making terms.
And when canning day arrived, three of the four jars sealed properly. (That's 75 percent done right, compared to 57 sealed correctly on the first go-round with the peach jam.)
To see if your jar sealed correctly, you pull them from the boiling water and set them on a counter or other surface .... then you wait. You wait for the PING sound that is the center of the jar being pulled down by the vaccuum created by the canning process.
Four jars, you wait with bated breath for four pings. Three seemed pretty good this time around.
But I'd gotten too confident when I heard those pings.
To this day, when you turn the jars sideways, the contents merrily slide in the direction the jar goes.
I wanted gravity-defying gel, darnit.
Despite all of our "gel point" tests, these preserves were not to be. (My mom later told me my strawbs were probably too ripe to create enough pectin. She just knows these things.) So now we have preserved strawberries in syrup.
I've always hated that saying that if life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. But I had to bellyup to the Pollyanna-ism this time.
No gel, no problem. We had a lovely desert of strawberry shortcake the other day. Maybe the preserves slid out of the jar too quickly, but as strawberry shortcake topping, they were just the right consistency. Take that, lemonade.