One Busy Month

Although my last post was a mere 12 days ago, I feel that it's literally been weeks.... we have certainly kept busy these last two weeks, and it's been a lot of fun. Aunt Nicky from Australia arrived on June 27th and stayed for 10 days. Nicky has become part of the family since she arrived here in 1986 through a foreign exchange program where she lived with the Burns family for a year. Nicky and Stacey's family have kept in touch all these years. Nicky usually visits every 5 years. We spent some time with her by taking her to Kings Dominion, and took her Geocaching. We managed to squeeze in a bit of down time where she had the opportunity to play with the kids. It is always nice having her come to visit. Stacey and I have been talking about going to Australia for our 20th anniversary, which also happens to fall within the same year Jack and Caroline graduate from high school. Can you think of a better graduation gift?! LOL The weekend of June 29/30 we had a pretty powerful storm (called a Dereco) sweep through the area and wreck havoc. Mother Nature sure is pissed off at us! Millions of people were without power for a few days, winds were blowing trees over, heavy downpour caused flooding, etc. It was a wild and crazy storm. We had a great 4th of July as always. We started off our day by doing our annual community service at a local elderly assisted living care facility. We do this every year with the Twins club and sang a number of patriotic songs to them. They absolutely love seeing all the twins and enjoy our visits. We had a great time spending the 4th with our neighbors and friends of LSV. The evening started off with grilling pizzas and the congregating over at the green near the library for fireworks. Aside from all the activities, we also managed to endure the heatwave that came through. 90-100 degree temperatures. It was absolutely miserable. Even the pool wasn't refreshing! Unfortunately, based on what has been circulating in the news and what we have seen across the country, 2012 is turning out to the warmest year on record! Wildfires in the SW, extreme temperatures all over the place, drought over 60% of the US, and more. Climate change is happening and I fear it's happening at an unprecedented rate than we expected. My fear is wondering what the Earth is going to be like for our kids and their kids. I hope as a global community, we can come together sooner rather than later to address what is going on. This is the only planet we know of that sustains life, yet we trash it like yesterday's newspaper. It will come back to bite us bigtime if we don't do something about it. We have about 7 weeks left before the kids go back to school and have a few more things planned for the rest of the summer. Looking forward to some more fun times!

RELISH ME!

With our garden producing an abundance of vegetables, you can imagine how much we have given away, freezed, baked, cooked, etc.... Stacey and I were looking through our Canning Book (Ball's Guide to Preserving), we decided to take a stab at canning different types of relish. Two weeks ago, we made zucchini relish and it was a hit with our neighbors and friends. So, Stacey and I decided to try selling the relish at our neighborhood Farmer's Market. This past week we made 25 jars (15 Zucchini Relish; 5 Pepper-Onion Relish; and 5 Sweet Pickle Relish). Along with the relish, we sold zucchini-chocolate chip muffins and slices of Gigi's famous Apricot-Nectar Cake. For our first Farmer's Market, we did pretty well. We probably broke even this first time around, but we still have some left over ingredients that we can use to make more relishes, so at this point, anything we make should be pure profit. We will use our money toward our OBX trip in August! It's been fun and we really the whole canning thing. Now that we have a ton of tomatoes starting to ripen, we will look into how to make salsa and spaghetti sauce.