Baby Blessing -- times 2

Once they realized their babies would be only a few weeks apart in age, my girls have been planning to have their babies blessed on the same day. It certainly was more convenient for family who had to travel to attend. Then they found out they were both to have little girls.

Well...today was the big day, and you can see, they dressed up for the occasion.

Here is the older of the little girls.





Here she is with her family.





Her younger cousin was also blessed today. She had a nice visit with her great-grandma while she waited for her turn.








Here she is with her mom and dad.



It was fun to have matching dresses. We hope they will grow up to be best friends as well as cousins.



Time to go home, after a long but special day:

Apple Harvest

With reports of storms coming later in the week, I went out and tasted one of the apples today. When I've done it before, they have been pretty sour, but today the apple tasted wonderfully sweet and juicy, so we decided it was time to harvest the apples. We actually ended up with 2-3 bushels of apples from our little tree. No wonder the branches were hanging down so low!



The woodworker must have done a good job of thinning them. I think he must have pulled 2/3 of the apples off the tree, but it left the remaining apples to grow nice and large.



We look forward to some delicious eating now!

Hello, Hollywood!

After the reunion, rather than driving all the way home late at night, we decided to spend the rest of the weekend visiting with nearby family and watching General Conference. I just couldn't resist taking the picture of little Susanna.



We enjoyed visiting with grandchildren. In addition to watching conference, we also watched '17 Miracles' together. We had a pleasant ride back home on Sunday evening without all the game traffic.

A Perfect Storm...or is it a perfect traffic jam?

We thought it would be fun to attend a missionary reunion...but we had NO idea what we were getting in to! Ordinarily, it would take us maybe 2 1/2 hours to reach the reunion location. We were scheduled to work with the school groups until 2:30 which left us plenty of time to drive to the reunion which started at 6:30.

Then we started hearing on the radio that people living in our area who planned to travel to the reunion location should allow 4 hours of travel time! The perfect 'travel' storm was in place. It was a combination of road construction, Friday afternoon commuter traffic, and an in-state rivalry football game.

Fortunately we were able to leave work 20 half an hour earlier than we expected, so we were able to arrive in time, in spite of traffic moving at a crawl for many miles.

Watching the school flags flying from cars around us on the freeway reminded us of when we lived in West Virginia on days when WVU was playing. Cars would fly past us on the freeway going north to Morgantown with flags whipping in the wind. It was a good day to stay OFF the freeway actually.

In any case, we made it to our reunion and enjoyed visiting with old friends.













One of the highlights, other than the old friends, was a fancy cake that was on the refreshment table. We laughed when we saw it, because it just epitomized some of our West Virginia experiences.



We hope to be able to attend future reunions, but would not mind if it was not held in the same time and place as a big rivalry game creating a traffic jam.

Another Day of Service

Today we had an opportunity to give service again, though in a much different form than the last one. Today reminded me of that old episode of I Love Lucy where she is wrapping candy working from a conveyor belt, only instead of candy, our product of the day was turkey chunks, so the temptation to pop a bit in my mouth was non-existent.

The cannery where we volunteered produces canned goods meant to be given to folks who are having hard times. Some other products canned there include beef chunks, beef stew, salsa, spaghetti sauce and green beans. They have currently been canning turkey chunks for about 2 months and will finish that project tomorrow and move on to a different product.

We arrived for our 4 hour shift about 10:30 AM where we were given hairnets and smocks before watching a rather entertaining safety video. In fact, I'd say it was worth working there today just to see the video. I recommend it.

After the movie, we were taken to the floor of the cannery where we washed up and then donned gloves and aprons. Then we were each assigned a post.

Somewhere, someone must have grown MANY turkeys, which were then butchered and cleaned, cut into large pieces without any bones, then frozen in large boxes. We first saw the turkey as it was removed from the boxes and put on the conveyor belt. Then it traveled to a machine which made it into chunks of meat. The meat then fell onto a platform where workers pushed the chunks through holes which had cans underneath. The cans arrived there via another conveyor belt which brought them from the 2nd floor down to the first floor. Before the cans went to be filled with turkey, a salt pellet was placed in each can.

After the cans were filled, they proceeded down the belt where workers checked each can and added or subtracted meat as needed to fill the cans to the proper level. As the cans left that area, they were weighed and then sent down another belt where hot water was added to each can. Then they went on to the sealing area where lids were placed on them.

The next step was to put the cans into huge retorts to be pressure cooked. After cooking, labels were affixed and cans were put into cases of 24 cans.

The woodworker was back in the labeling area. I never saw him until we were finishing up. I was first assigned to the area where we were adding to or removing from cans to make them the correct weight. Later I was assigned to drop the pellets of salt into each can. One of the supervisors said we were filling about 53 cans a minute. That takes pretty nimble fingers!

When the last turkey was canned for the day, it was time to clean the room. It meant washing down all the equipment and the floors, etc. By the time we finished, we figured we canned 11,000-12,000 cans of turkey today...ready to be distributed to those in need. By the time the turkey project is finished, 9200 cases will be filled.

Whew! We rewarded ourselves on the way home by stopping at our favorite restaurant, and then getting some peaches..which I canned after we got home.

Day of Service 2011

Today was a day of service here in our community. We met early this morning at a nearby park to receive our assignment. There were large assignments such as cleaning a couple of the city parks and the cemetery, as well as projects at the homes of various people in the area who needed help with painting and yard projects.



We were assigned to go to the home of a man who needed help clearing brush from his yard. There are two homes on his lot...the one he lives in, and the one here in the picture, which needs to be torn down. The area around the older home was covered with very large trees which needed to be removed. The home itself has a caved in roof on one side. It was evident from the odor as we cleared around the foundation, that things live under that house. Things like skunks. The shingles on the roof are covered with moss. In some areas the shingles are gone, exposing the original cedar shakes. We hauled off a variety of metal pieces and tires. If you look closely you can see the stump of a tree that was growing right up by the side of the house which had entrapped an old metal barrel.



A large dumpster had been brought in to hold the branches and brush we collected but it was not nearly large enough. We also loaded several trailer loads of brush to be hauled to the green waste. When the dumpster got full, some folks climbed in to stomp the brush down so we could fit more in!



The woodworker was happy to find an occasion to dig his peavey out of the tool shed to use in helping to turn the logs while they were sawing them.





Some trees were already on the ground when we got there, but some still needed to come down.



Timber!



The logs were soon placed in a large pile to be used later for firewood. The woodworker and one of his friends were pretty excited to find that one of the downed trees was an apricot tree. Some of those pieces of apricot found their way into the back of the truck to be turned into wood projects someday.



At the end of the project, everyone met back at the park for pizza.

Honey Crisp Apple Tree Story

When we moved here, we wanted to plant some fruit trees, since that was something we couldn't really do much in Alaska where we lived before. Since we live in an area with cold winters, we were careful to buy trees suitable for our climate. We bought an apricot tree, 2 peach trees, a pear tree and two apple trees and were excited to have our own tiny orchard. It took the apple trees several years to mature enough to actually start getting fruit. It wasn't long after we got our first couple of apples that we moved away for 18 months, so were gone during 2 apple seasons. When we returned our housesitters commented that the apples were 'no good'. I didn't pay much attention, but maybe I should have.

The next spring, the apple trees bloomed normally, but soon the flowers dropped off and the trees looked sick. One of them never got any leaves. On the other the leaves turned black in areas. Our pear tree seemed to have a similar problem. Needless to say, no apples appeared. We were told that our trees were suffering from fire blight. We pruned off the sick branches and got rid of them, but in spite of our best efforts, one of the apple trees died. The other apple and pear looked pretty sick. Soon the pear tree also died. The one remaining apple tree had leaves but no apples. We still had to keep trimming blighted parts of the trees.

This spring, when it was time to prune our remaining fruit trees, we looked at the remaining apple tree and decided not to prune it since it seemed likely that it would soon be dead. Much to our surprise, the tree bloomed profusely. We waited for the blossoms to fall off and the tree to die, but soon little apples began to form. Lots of little apples. We waited for the little apples to shrivel up and turn black. They did not. They grew larger. Soon the woodworker decided he better start thinning out some of those apples. He probably removed 2/3 or more of the apples on the tree. The remaining apples did not shrivel and they did not die!







Then we noticed that it was difficult to get close to the tree because there were so many wasps or yellow jackets around the tree, so we hung wasp traps on the tree. That seemed to help a lot.



Now that the apples are starting to turn we are anticipating some delicious eating...and the poor tree is probably looking forward to getting some of the extra weight off its branches. I guess next year we had better prune it.