Fall, Apples, Birthdays and Such

It's fall again, and a good apple year. I realized the other evening while pedaling my bike home from work that I have been a blogger for two years now. I think. I think it was two falls ago that I began blogging. I remember Falls. Falls are my favorite season.

So here is what it looks like, start to finish. Drying Apples. Without the mess, of course. First, we have our apples. These are still just the windfalls I'm dealing with. I've only picked one box, and we took that one to Gail and Mike's sister in SLC.

Then we have one filled dehydrator.

And ALL those apples (save few here and there that we snitched while bagging them)
end up filling just a little quart or less sized baggie. ridiculous. But they are good and we'll eat them.


Yeah, well. I'd almost rather be painting them, rather than peeling them. <<>>>

Anyway, it's been an eventful several weeks. I've mostly done fruit and food preps, it seems. I've not vacuumed or done laundry for quite some time. And I hardly even care at this point. I have more fruit to do! ha. And some sewing, which is a rare treat. I'm pre-washing the fabric now so I can make a white dress for Caroline's baptism. She'll be EIGHT this month! That's hard to believe.

Mike had a birthday this month. We spent his happy birthday, on the Road, driving up to Salt Lake to pick up his mom and sister from the airport. They had taken a trip to Pennsylvania together and had been gone a week with family back there. Mike's Mom took the four of us out to lunch after we picked them up. After dropping off Gayela, the three of us headed to Richfield. Gail had a nice dinner AND cake and ice cream to celebrate. I did have a camera with me, but forgot to take pictures. It wasn't your typical birthday, that's for sure. And we're old, so we're not so stuck on "typical" any more. ha!

I should have taken a picture of Gail's beautiful German chocolate cake. It's Mike's favorite, and it was so pretty. It said on the top of it, "Happy Bi ____________" blob. She had that much of the letters all spelled out so prettily, and then the bag burst and blopped a big glop of frosting on the cake. She said it was very representative of how her week and day and gone, so she didn't even try to fix it. The yummy frosting blob stayed and we ate it! Tasted fine to us! We knew what it was SUPPOSED to say, and that's what counts, right?

We've received two delightful letters from Eric via e-mail, plus one snail mail because he ran out of computer time and still had lots of things to ask us/tell us. He is a funny fellow. I know I'm really going to enjoy his letters!

We got to talk to Damian on the phone when he called for his Dad's birthday (he called on our anniversary, too!). He's doing well, building furniture, of all things. I guess those carpentry skills from all those years of child labor with Mike have finally paid off. ;-) Yes....well, we love it that he is not inundated with casualites and count it an answer to prayer.

Mike and I happened upon some bonus tickets to a Shakespeare festival play last week, and that was a nice treat. We saw "The Woman in Black," a ghost story. It was plenty creepy, thank you very much, but not excessively so. We hope to see a couple more plays this week. I have tickets for one, "Macbeth" and it's in the OUTSIDE theater. Brrr. It's a school production. Then we hope to be able to get tickets for "Complete works of William Shakespear, Abridged." It's a really funny one put on by the USF. We also have football ticket for later this month, lest you think we are too artsy-fartsy. (US! HA!)

We've had cold HARD frosts, so next we be working on cleaning up our weed-patch and raking leaves. Unless all the leaves fall and blow away while we travel to see Katie and Casey and Hayden over the Harvest Holiday weekend. I would like that very much. We are stretching the weekend to include October 15 through the 20th or so. Long drive, but they're DEFINITELY worth it! That Hayden is such a cutie pie. Katie and Casey are cute, too. ;-)

I think I'll do a separate post, which will show up above this one, but, Oh Well! I cannot figure out how to change orders of things.