A few things I noticed

I will post a longer (probably too long) version of our trip to Alaska with lots of pictures but here are a few tidbits from the trip:

-Isabelle is so stinking grown up!  You can pretty much have a conversation about anything with her. She's not always logical, as a three year old, but she can talk about a lot of topics. It was so much fun seeing her little mind work.

Here's an example of a conversation I overheard between her and Amber:

You want to go to the Library?

Yes! The big library?

No, the big library is closed.  We'll have to go to the little library.

Oh.  {thinking} We need to get a key! We need to unlock it!

Get your shoes so we can go.

{getting her shoes} We're going to the big library?

No, the big library is closed.

We need the key! We need to unlock it!

We're going to the little library today.

Yeah, we're going to the little library today.  The big one is locked.

-Isabelle loves rocks.  I knew she liked dinosaurs so I came prepared with dinosaur books, but I had no idea how much this girl loves rocks.  She can play in a pile of rocks forever.  She likes big rocks that she can climb on as well as tiny pebbles that she can pretend with. We went to the zoo.  Her favorite thing?  The rock walkway and the pile of rocks in the parking lot.  We went to a carnival.  Her favorite thing?  Playing in the rocks on the sidewalk afterwards.  Hilarious.

-Kaylee just wants to do what Isabelle does.  She's not as talkative as Isabelle at this point, but she can get her point across and she knows whats going on.  If Isabelle is doing something fun, she wants in too.  She hasn't yet made her own preferences about some things known...so she goes along with liking Dinosaurs and Rocks for now.  She wants to eat at the same table as Isabelle.  If Isabelle has a fork, she needs one too etc. Isabelle copies Amber and then Kaylee copies Isabelle.  It's pretty cute.

-Kaylee took her first steps while we were there!  She was so proud and excited.  She now has a walker to assist her in walking and she can cruise pretty darn fast with it...but it won't be long until she can walk without it I think because she is trying out walking and standing more and more.  You can tell she is sometimes frustrated by her body that doesn't do what she wants it to do, but overall she's a really determined and happy kid.

I had trouble capturing the walking on my camera...she just went too fast.

But here she is after successfully taking 4 steps to Grandpa. So proud and happy!

-The "staying light all the time" thing just never gets old.  We stayed up way late every night because you just don't realize how late it is.  We were so tired the whole time! haha But I never get tired of the light.  Kids are out riding their bikes at 10 PM as if it was noon.  I think the people who live there just give up sleep for the summer.  There is a lovely sunset at about midnight or so but even after the sun goes down, it is never really super dark.

Sunset: 11:45 or so as we drove home

Taken from my hotel room window at about 3 a.m.

You can tell it's night, but there's still a bit of a glow to the sky.

Our Fabulous Fourth

The Fourth of July!

A wonderful day to celebrate this great country of ours.

A great day to get together with friends or family, maybe have a barbecue, and watch some fireworks.

also, a day off of work.

I'll be honest with you now...

I am a pretty lazy person at heart.

I am happy to be invited to someone else's barbecue (yes, I'll bring a side dish or dessert)
 and then to sit in their backyard and chat the day away.

I don't mind lounging in a hammock or on a picnic blanket for as long as you'll let me stay.
Movie afterwards? yes, please.

But this year, Frank and I were kind of excited about having this extra day off of work to get some things done that we've been wanting to do.
I mean, we did chuck the to-do list on Saturday, but it was still there, waiting for us.

And so we had a different kind of Fourth of July this year.

First, we went and picked raspberries at a friend's house

(Thanks Monica and Mark!)

This was an unexpected thing we added to our day because it turns out that shameless begging for berries on Facebook actually works sometimes.

Having all those fresh berries got me thinking that I should make jam asap.

I know, right?

I didn't put it off.

I'm so impressed with myself.

My grandma always had raspberry freezer jam and it was my absolute favorite thing.

So I thought about her today as I made 11 jars of jam as soon as we got home from picking.

I also froze a bunch of berries for future raspberry crisp!

In the meantime, Frank set up our first rain barrel.

We are both kind of excited to have rain barrels.
We are dorks like that.

I then tackled the much delayed job of canning 36 pints of chicken.

I bought the chicken some time ago when there was an amazing sale that my perfect sister told me about.

She, of course, dealt with hers immediately.

I threw the whole 40 lb box in the freezer and said I'd think about it later.

When I told her I'd done that she had a good laugh since I was going to have a big 40 lb block to unthaw...

I did finally put it in the refrigerator to thaw (which took about a week!), so I could not put off this task anymore.

As I canned chicken, Frank mowed the lawn and trimmed some trees and worked on the car a bit.

Then we had a little barbecue, just the two of us.

Followed by relaxing and reading on the lovely, temporarily bug-free, outdoor couch.

Frank is just not a guy that sits around.

He always has a project going on or chores that he's doing.

So, for him, this was probably a perfect Fourth of July.

I did enjoy getting so much done, for sure!

(though the bathrooms still need doing, there's a load of laundry getting wrinkled in the dryer, and my kitchen looks like a bomb went off even though I've done dishes TWICE already today...so there's certainly more I could do)

But, honestly, I would have been nearly as happy to sit on my sister's back porch and gab...

but that's just me.

And the chicken would still have been waiting for me, which would have been a bummer.
So its probably for the best that my siblings all had other plans already and I couldn't invite myself over.

I don't want to sound like I didn't enjoy today.
I totally did!
But I tend to say things like "we are project people" which makes me sound so darn active,
when the real truth is more like "Frank is a project person and I sometimes do things too"

Today, for example.
I don't think I saw Frank sit down once.
I, being the anxiety ridden canner that I am, had to babysit the canner as my chicken cooked.
Which meant that I had 75 minutes while it was processing that I just sat on the lovely, temporarily bug-free, outdoor couch and watched "Call the Midwives" on Netflix while watching and listening to my canner at the same time.
and Frank mowed and trimmed and pulled weeds right in front of me...occasionally sending me a nice smile as he went by...not once did I feel the urge to help him.
Ok, once I remember a twinge of guilty urge, but it passed.
I had to watch the canner after all!
And, well, I'm kinda lazy too.

We finished the awesome day by going out with Ryan for ice cream and then to a nearby park
(where we went last year with Branden, Amber and the girls...sniff, sniff)
to watch fireworks.

Then we drove around a little bit and ended up finding a couple of great spots to watch fireworks happening all through the valley.  

It was great!

A pretty nice Fourth of July if I do say so myself.

And I am 11 jars of jam, 36 jars of chicken, a mowed lawn, trimmed trees, and a water barrel richer for it!

It's good to have friends with a boat

We have some friends who have a boat and we will occasionally say things like "if you need someone to go on the boat, we are happy to go with you anytime" 

*wink wink*

and they will say "Yes! We should go sometime!"

But, you know...life.

So when they invited us last week, we were pretty excited!

and then it rained, so it got cancelled.

Saturday morning, Frank and I got up and started making a list of all the things we were going to accomplish. We have a lot of things we want to get done around here and we were motivated to get them all done in one day, gosh darn it!

Until I got this text:

"Hey, weather is good. Spontaneous.  We are going boating! Want to come?"
"Sure, when?"
"Now!"

So we chucked the list, threw on the swimsuits and went boating!

It was so much fun!

My original plan was to just enjoy being on the boat.
My neck was still a bit sore from my little bike accident so I didn't think I would attempt water skiing or tubing.
Of course, I am really bad about giving in to peer pressure, so when the teenagers and my husband and the owners of the boat were all heckling me to give it a go...I did.

The last time I went water skiing was with my friends in Arizona quite a few years ago...and it took me about 20 tries to get up on the skis.  That is not an exaggeration.

This time it took 2 tries!  I guess it really is like riding a bike
(which is what they all say but I didn't believe, until now I guess)

Then Frank and I also went on the tube, because...peer pressure.

It was really fun but I will show you how it ended:

Did I mention that my neck was hurting before?

But it was super fun!

We are hoping they keep us in mind for the next time they are feeling spontaneous...

because, you know we will happily chuck our to-do list again!

Bleeping Bugs

I imagined the beautiful sectional that I would have on my back, covered porch.

I would lounge there and read a book

or take a nice Sunday afternoon nap perhaps.

It took me a long time to find said sectional

but I did eventually purchase one.

Here it is, looking a bit disheveled but still comfy.

I quickly discovered that I have a flaw in my back, covered porch.

This skylight.

This skylight is located over my kitchen window and makes my kitchen lighter and brighter.

I have never hated this skylight.

But it turns out that something about this skylight, the pitch of the roof, and the light in my kitchen window perhaps...that all work together to attract bugs.

Bugs that fly up into the skylight each night and 

DIE.

They fall down onto the top of the window where their little corpses slide down and land right on my lovely couch!

Every. Single. Night

Some days are worse than others but there are always, always bug bodies on my couch.

I purchased a little hand held vacuum that I keep plugged in in the nearby garage so that I can suck up all the bleeping bug corpses before I sit and enjoy my couch, view and/or book.

Yes, I took a picture of my little hand vac because it has made the difference between me never ever sitting on my bug covered couch and getting to enjoy it.

The weird thing is that we used to have a little bar with stools in this spot and I never remember noticing any bugs...

but they must have been there, I just didn't see them on the dark wood or brown outdoor carpet.

Gross.

I guess I would rather see and remove them than unknowingly be stepping on or sitting on them.

Ew.

Bleeping Bugs!

Bike update

I went to the bike store yesterday for two reasons:

1-Frank got me a little bike computer that tells me how fast I'm going, how far I've gone etc.  He got me this for Christmas and I have never installed it.  Part of the gift was getting it installed at the store.  I kept telling him that part of the gift should also be that he would take it in (we don't have a bike rack so we have to get the bike into the car, which is a hassle so I didn't want to do it!)  He never took it in.  So finally my little crash is what pushed us both over the edge.  We loaded up the bike and took it in.

2- I decided to get normal pedals for my bike.  I mean, I can always go back to the clip ins later after I'm used to the bike.  This is the real reason we went to the bike store.  Getting the computer installed was just a perk.

Well, we got there and showed him the little computer and receipt and asked him to install it.  He did a little double take at the date of purchase but I pretended not to notice.  Then Frank picked out the normal pedals and brought them up.  The guy asked me why I was switching and I told him my whole story about how I do fine unless I'm in an "emergency stop" situation and then I just don't remember to do the little motion to get my foot out.  I might have mentioned that I'm too old to fall over on a bike anymore.

And....he talked me out of switching.

Here are the logical reasons for keeping the clip ins:
I haven't been riding that much since I got the bike.  I really haven't given myself a chance to learn how to use it.
According to him, if I switch to normal pedals I will never switch back. I think he might be right.
Clip in shoes/pedals are so much better for biking form and power.  And I have a bum knee that hurts if I don't use good form so the shoes help with that.

ugh.

I'm going to give it another go.
I'm going to believe that my brain will figure this thing out and remember to twist my heel outward when I need to have my foot free.

Please, brain! Please!

Exercise is dangerous

I tend to get really motivated every night just before bed.
I look back over my day and think "tomorrow I will do better!".
The motivation generally lasts until about lunch time but sometimes not even that long.
Last night my motivation hour happened to coincide with the same time that I was texting a neighbor and she asked me if I wanted to go for a bike ride the next morning.
I thought "NO. I  want to lay in bed and be lazy."
But I texted "Sure!" because sometimes I am able to overcome my worst self.
Sometimes.

So this morning we went for a bike ride.
Not a long or difficult ride, but it's a start, right?
And...
I fell.

I came to a sudden stop and couldn't get my foot out of the pedal and fell right over.
AGAIN!
I am way too old for this kind of crap.
I screamed as I went down, notifying my friend that something bad was happening right behind her.

A runner was behind me and was quite concerned, asking me over and over if I was ok and commenting on how good it was that I was wearing a helmet since I hit my head and the ground.
I was laying there, looking at my hand (which was scraped up and hurting) with my bike on top of me  just feeling stupid.
Somehow I had managed to release both of my feet as I fell though, so that's an improvement over the last time I fell.  Last time my foot was still attached to the bike and it twisted my knee and hip in a most painful and awkward way.

After I got home, I laid on the couch and iced my wrist.  It's hurting in earnest now.
I think it's just a bad bruise, nothing more serious than that, but it hurts to use it.

As I lay there, hubby comes in and asks what's wrong so I tell him.
He is confused and amused and sorry for me all at the same time.
He keeps going on about how he has had clip in shoes for his bike for a long time and doesn't remember having so much trouble.
He's worried that I won't ride my bike because I'll be too nervous.
He's brainstorming all kinds of ideas to help me get used to the bike.

Here is part of our conversation:

Frank: Well, this will make a good blog. Want me to take your picture of you icing your hand?
Debbie: I'm not going to blog about what an idiot I am!
F: Well, you do sometimes write those kind of blogs.
D: Good point.  Go ahead and take a picture, but I'm not using it if I look fat.
F: I'm not going to take your picture.  Don't blog about it!
D: That's why I blog! I want my grandkids to know that I was a normal person.  That I sometimes did dumb things. Wouldn't you like to know these things about your Grandma?
-pause-
F: I guess so.  But...well, I'm a normal person...but I don't fall off my bike.
_____

P.S. I looked fat. No picture. HAAA!

Is it "an apple a day..." or "an apple pie a day..."?

This week I canned a bunch of apple pie filling.

My friend gave me a whole box of gorgeous Granny Smith apples so I knew I had to do something with them.

Here is the lone apple that didn't make it into the pie filling

I've never canned apple pie filling before and it wasn't too hard...

it was a bit time consuming

and sticky

but not hard.

If you come to my house, just plan on a sticky floor because I've mopped it twice and it's still sticky.

And I greatly dislike mopping.

I learned that I hate my new apple peeler/slicer...it doesn't stick to the counter even though it says on the package that it will.

I learned that I can dirty every bowl and pan in my house in a very short period of time.

The first day I canned 7 quarts or one canner full.

I didn't start until the afternoon, after coming home from work, and the whole thing took less time that I imagined it would.

I used a water bath canner rather than my pressure canner.

I was home alone and didn't want to go to the trouble of setting up the outdoor stove which is what I usually do when I can. Instead I did it all right on my pathetic electric cooktop.

It worked out, although I had more pans than burners at one point

and there is now some of the syrup burned forever onto the stove.

The water bath canner spits and spurts water like crazy...at times I had a little lake on my cooktop that I was mopping up with a towel even though the burner was very hot.

It didn't seem right, but with no one here to tell me the right way, I just had to muddle through.

You see, I am fairly new to canning, or at least I feel like I am.

I can a few things every year but I try to can with my sister rather than by myself if given the chance.

I always feel like I'm winging it.

My sister cans a lot every year and has done so for many years.

She exudes competence and skill.

When I can with her, it feels so easy.

When I can alone, I am nervous and unsure of myself.  I am paranoid that I will do something wrong and waste the food or poison my family.

When I can with my sister, we chat and work and I don't think too much.

When I can alone, I double and triple check the recipe,  I babysit the canner and watch it like a hawk the whole time, I measure and remeasure my ingredients and the headspace in my jars.

It's exhausting canning alone when you are me.

The second day I decided to just finish up and use all of the apples that I had left...no sense dragging this thing out and those apples aren't getting any younger.

That meant that I had to use the pressure canner since it holds more jars.

Luckily Frank was home and set up the outdoor stove for me.

I ended up using my water bath canner as the pot to hold all of the apples and filling...It is a HUGE pot and it was about 3/4 full.

That's a lot of pie filling.

That pot on the left is a normal, large soup pot...just give an idea of the size of the canner I was using as a pot

Once again I didn't start until after a day of working, so I was mighty impressed with myself that I made all this pie filling rather than, say, laying on the couch and whining, which is my preferred way to spend an evening after working.

(Did you enjoy all those commas?)

Somehow when I pulled the jars out, several of them had obviously overflowed.

See the goo? It's hard to see but it's running down the side of the first jar in the picture

That's not supposed to happen.

There was sticky (delicious) goo running down the side of the jar and I was worried that they wouldn't seal.  But they sealed just fine.

It's weird looking at them now because the fruit goes all the way to the top of the jar!

There's supposed to be some space there.

Hmmm

It might be that I did something wrong with the pressure 

(not wrong as in "this will kill your family if you eat it" but wrong as in "a change in pressure too quickly can cause the food to overflow")

So, yeah, I either did something wrong or the apples just expanded or something.

The world may never know.

I did have a little bit leftover that didn't fit in the jars so we had it for a little dessert last night.

It tasted really delicious!

In the end, I had 18 quarts of apple pie filling in only two afternoons of work.

My friend who gave me the apples is planning to come down soon so we can make more...I think she sees me as the one who is competent in canning, which kind of makes me laugh.

But I'll just go with it.

There's no need to make her worry.