Saturdays in the Fall

I'll bet you were all wondering where all the pictures of my garden are this fall, weren't you???!! Not here.  There are too many weeds out there and it's way too messy INside for photos.

Well, no pictures, but lots of hard work.

I suppose many people go to football games, or hiking and enjoy the fall that way. I stand around in the kitchen most Saturdays.  And I really love. it.  I don't particularly like the backache that comes with standing for such a long period of time.  I know I do not do nearly as much as most other women do now or have done.  But it is enough for me.

Yesterday (my Saturday in the Fall)  I picked produce from our garden and from the neighbor's yard.

I got corn, cucumbers, squash, green beans, tomatoes, bell peppers, cantaloupe, more tomatoes, more peppers, raspberries, more squash, onions.  It was a bounteous harvest over a couple of days.  I left the beets and the Swiss chard and cabbage out there.  Mike picked some pears off the neighbor's tree, too.  All together, over the two days of picking and harvesting, I think there were about 3 full Avon boxes of stuff, plus a bag or so.  It was a a lot.  For us.  From two little back yard gardens.

So, with that bounteous harvest, I bottled 5 quarts of tomatoes.  I cooked another pot full of tomatoes with peppers, onions, and some squash and made a nice sauce for "whatever"and froze some and took some to one of the sisters in the ward I visit teach.  She also got squash, tomatoes, cucumbers, corn and green beans.  She is pregnant and weary and needed a break from shopping for food.

I made my first batch ever of freezer jam (raspberry).  It did take several days of picking to get enough  berries for that one batch.  But, boy, is it good!!  Yummy.  What's not to like?  It's sugar! ha.

I washed and sorted all the cucumbers and peppers and tomatoes and beans.  I stuffed 8 of the big bell peppers and baked them with a meatloaf mixture and put them in the freezer for a future meal.  I stuffed half the HUGE zucchini with the rest of the meatloaf mixture and baked them, too, for our dinner on Sunday.  I used the rest of the tomato "sauce" with veggies and added pasta and turned it into "Hamburger Helper" with the bit of meatloaf mixture that was leftover from the stuffed peppers and zucchini.  That was our Saturday night dinner.

I grated the other half of the HUGE zucchini and put it into a large pan and a half of zucchini brownies. I actually took a plate of those to church with me to share with my Primary class after we were done in our class today.  They sang their little hearts out for the Primary Children's Sacrament Meeting presentation, so I actually brought a treat to Church (I seldom do).  They did not like the brownies.  ? huh?  Well, all the more for us.  Must have been the nuts I added, cuz I sure didn't tell them there was squash in it. ha.

I made a batch of pumpkin soup and got it ready in individual containers for my lunches this week (and Eric, too, if he wants.).

I have enough tomatoes left that are sorted, washed, ripe and ready to fill about 5 to 7 more quarts of bottled tomatoes.

Oh, and I cleaned my kitchen about three or four times.  So, yeah.  Tired.  Fulfilled.  Feeling self-reliant physically.  Read a chapter in a book at bedtime, too.  Feeling a little more self-reliant spiritually, too.

Did I mention I squeezed in a couple of batches of laundry and a lesson preparation?  No?  Well, I am mentioning it now because I like to just brag.  Because, you know, if I was HUMBLE, too, well, that would just mean I was too near to perfect, yes?

HA!!!  Long ways from there, but it's fun to make a list of stuff and then mark it all off at the end of the day, isn't it?  I marked all those off AND Mike got the swamp cooler in our bedroom window put away. Just in the nick of time, as it is REALLY cooler today and will probably continue to get that way.

I will not bore you with the list of things that did NOT get done on this particular Saturday. Happy Fall!

Apricots

A hard day's work.  3 batches of apricot jam, 10 pints of whole fruit, 20 quarts of juice.  Mike brought back many boxes of apricots from his trip to Vernal last week.  He brought home fish, too!  I did these apricots on  Saturday the 10th, had a nice visit with Suz and family. And hostessed at Shakespeare that evening.   I really needed that rest to just sit and chat for an hour with the Sumidas.  I did two more batches of jam on Monday as well as 6 more quarts of whole fruit.  We don't really like to eat bottled apricots, but we love the juice.  And I hope to make some of the puree/juice into fruit leather.  That's more of a winter-time project, though.  And Mike likes to cook a special Dutch Oven meat dish called pineapple apricot lamb. Or elk.  It's good.  But jam is basically all sugar, so what's not to like?

Adventures in Primary

I teach a class of young ones in our Primary.  The class is for 6 to 8 year olds--we have two classes combined since the numbers of enrolled were rather small.  Initially, that is. Right now there are 7 on my roll.

A few weeks ago, I had seventeen children in the class.  SEVENTEEN!  Wow.  I was so glad the secretary came along to lend support.

They are cute kids.  It's summer time right now and there are a lot of visitors.  I had ten children in my class today.  That's a lot.   Again, we had visitors--but only three!!  All seven of the children who are supposed to be in the class were actually there today.  One is ....well, SEVERAL are...kind of a handful.  They sometimes talk a lot.  Today, I did encourage them to take turns talking and they did fairly well.  Some like to sit strangely on chairs, kind of propping themselves up, etc. Always tipping, sometimes tripping and kicking.    Others like to eat paper.  (No handouts for him!)

Today, the behavior issues were taken care of in a rather different way.  I managed to fit all the chairs in one long semi-circle, so they were kind of spread and in my peripheral vision I could tell Karter was not sitting on his chair properly (what’s new?), but I was going down the row, one by one, for a brief response from each and figured I would address his posture when I got to him.  In the meantime there was a loud “THWUMP!”  and there was Karter, lying on his back on the floor in front of his chair!.  He’d been kind of squatting on it, I guess, and fell off head first onto the floor!  He flipped forward, and he appeared to be hurt, was starting to cry (possibly), but when you are an 8 year old boy in front of peers, it’s a little hard to cry. ( Plus, in the end we figured he’d knocked the breath out of himself.  But I didn’t know that at the time.) I thought he’d landed straight on the top of his head, and figured he’d have a nasty head ache.  (The floor is carpeted over wood, in case you wondered.)  I asked him as he was lying there, not moving much and grimacing badly, if anything hurt other than his head, and he said, “My back,”  or maybe he said, “My neck.”  In either case, that was more cause for alarm, so I cautioned him to just lie still and I’d go get his mom.

You can imagine what all the other kids were doing at this time—sitting in their chairs, staring wide-eyed.   Luckily.  I mean, they could have been laughing at him or mimicking him, or any number of awful things, but they were all nice and very concerned.

In the hall I found the meeting house librarian and she’s a first – grade teacher.  I asked if she wouldn’t mind helping me with a little “situation” and we went back into evaluate him.  By then, he’d caught his breath, could move, wasn’t about to cry.  We asked if he could move his legs, and he could.  He got up and sat in his chair.  Jeannine evaluated his eyes (they were even-looking and focused ok) quickly, and we determined he’d just had the breath knocked out of him.

Guess who sat in his chair the rest of class and was very quiet 

and participated nicely?  Uh huh.  Karter.

Tour of Utah

Last week we had a really fun and exciting time in good ol' Cedar City.  The Tour of Utah Bike Race came through.  It actually started here, and the bikers were here for three days prior; one day prior was the team presentations in our Adams outdoor Shakespearean Theatre that afternoon.  I went to that.  People rang cow bells and knew the team members, the announcers were really knowledgeable on the sport, the teams, the individuals.  It's quite the thing.  The teams were housed on campus and the support teams and trailers and camp trailers were on the housing parking lot, so I rode my bike past them every day on my way to work.

Campus closed early the day of the race.  They started around 11 am in Brian Head, Utah, then pedaled in a round-about way through the mountains and towns to finally arrive here in Cedar City around 3:30 p.m.

Just go look up Tour of Utah on the Internet.  I think it ends soon.  Or maybe it's already over.  Probably is.  It was certainly quite the party THAT day, though!

I had a miniature tail gate party outside the library after we closed the library.  MOST of the people were downtown at the finish line, but before the finish, the cycled around campus three times, so my fellow tail-gaters (all three of them) and I cheered them on as they passed.

I brought snacks, made a poster, had a cooler with drinks...and very few takers, sadly.

I wish I would have taken time to talk to the teams and support people I saw every day.  I have lots of questions about the sport.  I hope they come back in future years and stay on campus again!

Eye of the tiger

It's been kind of a lazy summer.  I should be cleaning more, weeding more, sorting more. But, nah.  Redbox keeps sending me free coupons for movies!  They always do, you know.  And usually I just delete the texts because I'm too busy.  However, this summer, we've managed to squeeze in a bunch of movies.  The basement is so much cooler, and it's so hot outside.  The dishes will wait--they always do!

Last night, we watched "Life of Pi."  I'd read the book a while ago and really enjoyed it.  Mike had not read the book, but we both enjoyed the movie.

After the movie, I left Mike in the basement to watch the ending of the news/sports shows.  I went to my bathroom to brush teeth, etc.  And I was waiting quietly to hear him come into the dark bedroom.  I heard him turn on the light.

I DID hear him chuckle.  Then laugh.  Then call out to me.  This is what greeted him on the bed when he came back (through the dark house, turning off lights and locking doors as he went) to our room to retire.

Well, not exactly that.  But I HAD placed our kids' rather large stuffed animal tiger on his side of the bed.  And it DID startle him--greatly.  I hadn't heard the *gasp* and didn't feel his quickened pulse.  We laughed, and laughed and laughed some more. It was hard to stop giggling long enough to say the prayer.

Now I live in fear of retaliation. :-)  But, hey!  It was a harmless prank and nobody was hurt, nothing was damaged.  It was good.  He agreed.  Still...I'm a little nervous...

Ours is a rather LARGE stuffed toy.  It was enough to creep me out while walking through the living room on MY way to bed, which is why I thought he needed a better location

!