Clean up! Clean up! Everybody, Everywhere!!!!

You know something isn't right when you've got a hot chocolate mug in the middle of something rather mechanical looking....

Today we spent the afternoon cleaning out 'winter' from the apple shed.  We are expecting a fieldtrip of teens this next week that are taking a horticulture class at the community college during the summer and they want to see what happens at our place.  I promised them that there wasn't a lot to see since there wasn't anything but a bunch of little apples hanging around in the trees.  They were still OK with that.  Which was fine with me, since it got a nice little fire burning under our feathers to get us moving early on our list of chores before apple season!

The challenge of the day was to move the snowmobile from the apple shed, to the trailer.  After it was loaded on the trailer we needed to move it to the machine shed on the north side of the farm.  Easy peasy lemon squeazy, right?  Wrong!  We live on a farm, and therefore, equipment must always be in need of some sort of repair!  Hence, the cup under the lid of the snowmobile...

and the battery charger on the blazer...

And everyone dragging the beastly bear cat out of his corner because he has no intention of coming out of hibernation...

Aha!  Signs of life!

Up!  Up!  Up!

Turns out, it wasn't a very simple matter to park the trailer in the machine shed.  Since someone stacked a whole green house inside, and parked a couple of tractors inside as well, the machine had to be unloaded and parked back in the farthest corner it could get to!

But hey!  We did manage to make some progress in the apple shed after all of that!

First 5K This Morning

So I did it!  I finally ran my first 5K.  Thats me behind the stroller lady in the pink and gray.  This is the beginning of the race.  You can tell that because I'm not crawling yet...

Well, I never actually crawled, but I certainly wasn't in the shape that I should have been to run!  After nursing foot and back problems, I went to girls camp.  I got a morning of running in there, but was pretty much sleep deprived the rest of the week and into the following with the Attorney's trip to the ER and stitches, and her Royal Highness kicking me all night in my own bed. 

This picture is proof that I finished.  My time was 38:11.  Yay!  I did it under 40 minutes!!!!  Not a bad time for me with several gradual inclines and a couple of niced declines.

This is my friend Chris.  She is really cool because she signed up for the 5K and then ran the route for a second time to get her 10K time.  Go Ultra Mommy!!

Of course, this is her Royal Higness.  She's got to have a drama all her own!  She's a little miffed because we disturbed her beauty rest and woke her up at 6:20 AM to run into town for the Gooseberry Race.

And here I am with my personal fan section... Except Richard and Chris J. aren't in this photo!  They showed up to cheer for us too!  That was such a fun suprise to see you all hollering at the finish line!!  Thanks!  Just in case you were wondering, I'm the sweaty one in the picture.... in the pink and gray...

A Chicken-Tale

Once upon a time, in a flower garden full of flowers,

and weeds,

and flowers,

there was a lost little chick-lette.

She was scared and frightened because she had been found pecking happily away in the tall weeds, AND flowers, of the great and distant garden. 

After she was found, and swept off of her feet by a handsome prince and brought back to the chicken coop to live happily ever after,

The handsome prince promised to cover up little openings in the chicken coop gate so little peepers wouldn't get out and get lost in the giant garden fraught with dangerous weeds.

Then end!

Trade

Today, my neighbor Emma, traded me this beautiful produce from her garden for a bunch of pie cherries from my garden!  Yummmmmmy!

Father/Son Overnighter = Mother/Daughter Overnighter...

Hooray for Father and Son overnighters!  They are so fun because there aren't any Mommies there to nag at little boys  to stay away from the fire, to remind them they've eaten too much sugar and to demand that they wash their teeth before they jump into their sleeping bags!

Bigger hooray for Father and Sons overnighters because that means girlie girl time and no boys to whine and complain about eating out, shopping, chick flicks and late breakfast...  Or so I envisioned!  But my delusional thoughts were looked to be reality until Her Royal Highness finished her banatsticks class.

We walked into the Mexican restaurant and then I remembered who my little girlie girl really truly is!  The host seated us.  Except her little Royal Hiney wasn't about to seat itself because she didn't want to sit where the host seated us.  She wanted to sit in a completely different booth on the other side of the restaurant dining area...  I'm not a fan of reinforcing naughty-ness, but before her screams got us kicked out I had to do something!  Bribery!  And it worked.  We were in a happy place again, until she started shoving chips into my mouth, one right after the other.

I survived dinner and off we went to our upscale shopping mall, Walle' Marte' where we intended to pick up some beads for a new bracelet.  But before we got to the bead section and after we left the dog food section, we found ourselves in the middle of another temper tantrum.  This time over not wanting to ride in the cart.  The next tantrum was over riding in the basket of the cart and the following tantrum was over riding under the cart.  This was turning out to be such a fun evening that I couldn't contain myself anymore!  We skipped the bead department and hurried home to watch our chick flick... Up.  Cute show.  I liked the snipe!  I don't know if my peanut did or not because she crashed.  She looked so sweet and angelic that I decided I'd let her sleep in my bed.  I know better than this!  Arg!  Delusions!  She tossed and turned and kicked me all night long! 

So the Father and Son overnighter was fun I hear.  They got themselves packed up just before this happened! 

Rained so hard that the water puddled up this deep in a matter of just a few minutes!

And you might wonder why my spirited child isn't in this picture.  Well, she was sleeping like a log... in my bed!

Grandfather Leo Howard Oswald

I'm in the final stages of designing a photo book of my Grandfather's WWII photos.  I am so in love with this book!!  When my Grandfather took these photographs and wrote their significance on the photo backs before sending them home, I don't think he ever imagined that he would, in the year 2010, have written his own book!  This photo book is penned in his own hand.

There was minimal photo editing involved.  I didn't want to do any restoration.  The distress of the photos helps to tell Grandfather's story of long ago!  Unfortunately, the deckle edges of most of the photographs had to be cropped out.  I tried to work with them, but no matter what I tried, the bed of the scanner was impossible to minimize against the black background.  The handwriting on the back of the photographs required quite a bit of editing.  Magic eraser made it a breeze, but still, it was necessary to enlarge to the point of pixels in order to remove as much of the photo paper as possible to allow the handwriting to overlay the photographs and black background and still maintain legibility.  There is no added text, other than the text that my Grandfather wrote on the back of his photographs.

The title of the book came into being while I was working with a spread of two photographs of my Grandfather.  On the backs of these photographs he wrote  "Just me." and signed his name "Curlie."  On the back of the second, he wrote "Just me again." and signed his name "Howard."  As I tried to imagine how he must have felt while entitling the photos, in the middle of a war so far away from family and his "honey," with all of his thoughts towards home, I was struck by his modest proclamation of "Just me."  I imagined the excitement of loved ones getting his letters with the photographs and how they must have been shown to everyone back home!  And I began to imagine all of his posterity today who will soon be able to own his book, and how excited we will be, and how we will likely show these photos to everyone who will care to see!!  So my Grandfather's modest "Just Me" is what it is to be entitled, as this is just his story!

As I've gone through these photographs, I feel like I know my Grandfather a little bit more!  I'm especially in awe and grateful to him for his sacrifice in serving our country. 

So Many Cherries, So Little Time!

My sour cherry trees produced well, and of course, since the strawberries were two weeks early, the pie cherries came during girls camp!!

The boys all pick and froze a few bags, so when I made it home it was time to get serious with them!  Since I still have jars of cherries for pies and crisps, I decided to take the sour cherry jam route!  I LOVE sour cherry jam.  I LOVE to eat it on ice cream and waffles!  So I made a bunch.  And I didn't put it in the pretty jelly jars that I have.  I chose to put them in quarts, or else we'd be pulling out a jar of jam a day!  And that sure gets old fast.

I used my steam canner instead of a hot bath.  It is more manageable on a cook top because you boil a much smaller amount of water, and steam is hotter than boiling water which equals shorter processing time!  Thanks to my wonderful mother-in-law for such a perfect birthday gift last year!!!