Saturday, October 16, 2010

Oct. 4 or 5, 2010

Steven took this picture of the sunrise from our porch.

"If I hide between the footstool and the couch they won't find me and disturb my nap!"
"I hope I don't look FAT laying in here!"

The windows in the uhaul.

Steven got the front window in now too!

The bed will be up over the cab.

Sunday, October 3, 2010

Sun. 10/03/10

Steven rode his motorcycle out to Sunday School this morning. While he was gone, we did some yard clean-up. Tristan helped me carry the picnic table back over by the swingset for the winter. The workshop roof has been leaking and it doesn't look like we're going to be able to fix it before winter, so we put a huge tarp over it. Now Steven's tools won't get ruined by rain or snowmelt. We have a pile of paneling Maria gave us a couple years ago, which we hope to use in the uhaul. The tarp over it was getting ratty, so we put a better tarp over it.
When Steven got home he worked on the back door, reversing it to open the other way, which meant moving the hinges and chipping out new places for the hinges to recess into the frame. Tristan went out to split firewood for a while.
"Bet I can get my hind food behind my ear!"

Emily makes the best pizza crust in the world, and the best homemade pizzas in the world! Unfortunately, I made this one, which meant the crust was too "bread"-like! I maxed out the toppings: Onions, tomatoes, and peppers from our garden, olives, ham, and pineapple. I put omre cheese on after this picture.

And there it is, cooked!
While we ate the pizza we watched the movie "Tora! Tora! Tora!", about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. I'd never seen it, though I've seen the newer movie, "Pearl Harbor". Very sad what happened, all those years ago.
It was a long movie with an intermission in it, so Steven made popcorn and hot chocolate during the intermission.
Most of the Aspen leaves have fluttered to the ground now, though the bushes still have at least half their leaves. After a sunny week we had clouds and occasional showers today. The temperature was nice.



Happy Birthday, Stephen!

Today is Stephen's birthday! He'll turn 20. He came up yesterday (Saturday) and we had cheesecake with cherry pie filling on top, which we didn't add until after the picture!
Happy birthday, Stephen!
May it be a wonderful year!
We didn't have enough candles, so those candles are crossed to be Roman numberals: two "x"s to make "20"!
Stephen and Tristan spent many hours playing "Dead Rising 2" on X-box, working on one quest, and after 3 hours they took a wrong turn and had to redo the whole 3 hours! Aughhh!
Amazing, these video games nowdays. I remember how cool we thought "Pong" was back in the 70's, and the Atari and Commodore games were just amazing to us. Now look at them!

Fri. 10/01/10 Pickle on the road

I spent a bit of time this morning getting dried foods into jars. In this picture I have a gallon jar and most of a half gallon jar full of dried huckleberries. They look like dried peas only they're purple. I like to joke that they're "Chinese Peas"!
I also jarred up dried raspberry leaves, oregano, calendula flowers, and a few other things that escape my mind right now.

The dog likes to take the things I have out to dry, so I got the idea to put them on top of the car. These are all kinds of things for the goat to eat this winter: Carrot tops and peels, squash peels, squash pulp & seeds, onion scraps, apple peels & cores.
See the pretty Fall colors around the car?

Steven finished fixing the motorcycle. He had to put new seals on the front shock, a new battery, and a new front tire. We waited all summer for the time and money to come together at the same time. I'm so grateful he can do the work himself, once we get the parts.

And there's the tire, mounted and ready to go back on the motorcycle.
Steven jokingly calls it his "motor-pickle", which amuses me!
He took it out for a ride Friday afternoon. I was going to go along but I couldn't find my helmet. I moved it when I cleaned out my old room to make it into a bathroom, and I can't find where I put it. I would have been concerned that the face shield not get crushed and crack, so I probably put it somewhere "safe"! Finally I told him to go ahead and go, that I'd get a ride another time!
The weather was perfect for the time of year, and he had a great ride.

Wed/Thur 9/29,9/30, 2010

"I'm dreaming that I'm dancing with little castanets on my paws!"


We had to run to Eureka to get more blades for the saber saw and more pop rivets for securing the windows into the walls of the uhaul.
On the way home we stopped so Steven could throw another bale of hay to the buffalo.


Odie watches from the car. She'd love to get out and play with the buffalo, but the buffalo don't have much of a sense of humor when it comes to dogs!

I picked the pinto beans and spread them on newspapers on the bathroom floor. When they're good and dry, I'll shell them.

I laid on the roof of the uhaul and held the window in place for Steven to trace the cut lines.

He used a file to take off the burrs and rough spots.

He makes sure it fits the hole.

Looking at it from the inside. I'm out there washing the windows!
The cooking area will be under the window on the left. That will include an RV propane stove with 3 burners and an oven (salvaged!) and a small double stainless-steel sink we found at the dump a few years ago.
The window to the right will be over our "easy" chairs with a small lamp table between them.
He still has to put in the front window over the cab where the bed will be. Then he's going to take off the double back doors and build a wall with a door in the middle. We still have to put insulation and paneling in, too.
I don't know how much we'll get done before we get snowed in.
Me...still washing the windows!

I made bean and vegetable soup today. This is a rare species of "octopus" carrot (ha ha!), which I broke apart, peeled and chopped, along with celery, onions, parsley, and squash from our garden.

Odie has to investigate and chew on everything, so I can't put the solar cooker on the picnic table any more! Instead, I put it on a lawn chair within the garden fence to keep it safe!
When the soup was done I thickened it into a stew and made "dumplings" and blopped them into the stew and let them cook.
I made iced tea with rose hips to drink with it. I've never made cold rose hip tea before, and it was quite good. I make it as a hot tea in the winter sometimes. Another one of those free and abundant foods around our cabin.
Plus, they're high in Vitamin C!

Tues. 9/28/2010 Starting on the uhaul

Today Steven started putting the windows in the uhaul. He used the circular saw (with a metal-cutting blade) on the first hole, then switched to the saber saw for the second hole. It was REALLY loud while he was sawing. The saw cutting the metal echoed throughout the truck and deafened everything within a quarter mile!

There was a mishap while Steven was cutting the second hole. I was going to put a picture on here but decided not to, it's too "gory"! While he was cutting, the ladder shifted and Steven automatically reached out to steady himself and the ladder...and he grabbed the sharp metal edge of the window hole he'd already cut. Ouch! He got 2 nasty cuts on the palm of his hand.
I got to play with our medical supplies and tend to them and bandage it.
Then he put a glove over it and went back out and finished the second hole and got those two windows put in!

This is looking at it from the inside.
Later on, the table will sit under the windows, and a chair on each side.

Sat/Sun/Mon 9/25 to 9/27, 2010

Barbara and Victor came up Saturday for a visit. Victor and Steven spent a little time on our shooting range, and Barbara and I stayed up by the cabin and talked. The weather was nice, for once! Usually when they come it's rainy and/or cold! We had spaghetti-type stuff for dinner, made with penne pasta instead of spaghetti pasta, mainly because that's what kind of pasta I had on hand! I made cornbread, too, which didn't come out as good as usual, which usually happens to me! When no one is here this stuff comes out great, but when it matters (like when we have company) it doesn't! I also had made zucchini brownies and frosted them, but we were so full from dinner that it was hard to eat them!
Sunday and Monday are mixed up in my head. The following pictures are from both days but I don't remember which are from which. That's what I get for blowing off keeping my blog updated!
"Mmmm, I love the smell of dirty laundry! They should make perfume with this scent! Do these dirty blue jeans make me look fat?"
Well, the frost finally crept in deep enough among the corn plants to kill the leaves on the pumpkin plant, even covered with a tarp. I read somewhere that they will continue to ripen, even after being harvested, so we'll find out. Under the towel are the spaghetti squash seen in a previous picture. That's one lone summer squash with the pumpkins.

"Oh, oh, she's looking again and she has that dratted camera! I'll look like I'm sleeping and maybe she won't realize I've been playing with the zucchini peels! Oops, there's one stuck to my leg!"

Morning hot chocolate finished, sudoku not finished! Must not leave anything undone!

"Sigh...now I know how the cat feels. That camera is everywhere."

One of those two days I chopped peppers and put them in the dehydrator. It's the third time I've dried peppers this year. There were starting to turn yellow and red.

I saved seed from the peppers. We'll see how they do next year.

More seed-saving in the works here, but not edibles! These are flowers. Cosmos on the left, Calendula on the right. Calendula is a useful medicinal herb and I dried over 100 flower heads this year. The plant bushes out and the more you pluck off the "done" flowers, the more flowers it produces, and they're such pretty bursts of sunshine! They're members of the Marigold family.

These red balls contain asparagus seeds. They are only produced on the female plants. The actual seeds are inside these balls. I have to crush them and then put them in water to clean the pulpy stuff off them. The little black seeds are then taken out of the water and spread to dry. I've never started asparagus from seed before, but I intend to try in the spring.
The apples started falling from the trees, and some had suffered freezing on the nights that dropped into the 20s, so I picked them all. We got 22 apples on one tree and 4 on another.
This is the first crop. The trees are 6 years old.