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Actually, I hope they're not the last roses. I hope I get another week or so from them, but when the weather finally cools down, as it has this week, my roses revive. I call them my yard babies, because they are the one thing I really moniter carefully in the landscape. I've said before that I buy roses, not for the color, but for the fragrance. I just love a really nice, smelly rose. :)
And these certainly fill the bill. My whole kitchen smelled wonderful.
Mexican-type foods are not The Girl's favorite. Now that she's gone at school, we have been indulging fairly frequently in things that end up in tortillas of some kind. This is something that can make your whole house smell good, because it simmers for a long time on the stove.
Chili Verde
In a good-sized Dutch oven type pot, brown pork in oil. Sprinkle with flour and stir in. Add remaining ingredients, bring to a boil over medium heat, then reduce heat to simmer. Cover and let cook, stirring occasionally for 1- 1 1/2 hours, until meat is tender. Serve in flour tortillas with your favorite toppings. We like grated Jack or Colby Jack cheese, diced tomatoes, sour cream and salsa.
I've never tried this in a crock pot, but I don't know why it wouldn't work.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, there was some more canning this week.
The pears happened over last weekend and into the first part of the week. I am always glad to see the end of them...truly.
Like seeing them done on the shelves, but man are they ever just a bunch of work.
Paper stuff this week ran the gamut of a Project Life page. Week 38 documented, wow...canning, baking, a special church program, moonrise photos, more canning, how talking like a pirate garnered 39 donuts and PB's hunting excursion.
With DH and PB out of town in the hills again, there were even a couple of honest to goodness regular layouts. I grabbed a Scrapbook Generation kit and just got them done. This one was an afternoon with the grandbabies 2 1/2 years ago, right after we got the very thankfully new, pretty carpet. Since all the SG sketches are 12x12, I always have to adapt them, but usually I can figure out a way to make it work. I added a few embellishments as well to the design.
This one is a story that I've wanted to get down on paper for a long time and documents my then-76 year old mother trying out a bike at the cabin because, "she used to ride all over the place as a teenager..." It's just like riding a bike....except when it isn't. You can make these bigger if you want, by clicking on them.
Used scraps from the layouts for some cards.
I am still playing catch up with several classes. This layout was from the Cathy Zielske Clean and Simple hybrid scrapbooking class. The assignment I did was comparing 2 photos across a span of time and involved working with a computer template, recoloring elements, making drop caps and wrapping text and breaking the whole thing apart for printing. It was also an exercise in minimalistic design style. That cracks me up, because it took me 2 hours just to get through the tutorial. Somehow I thought that minimalism might transfer to time involved.
I also did another 4 weeks worth of prompts from the Kerri Bradford childhood history class. These dealt with a poignant moment I remembered, imaginative play as a child, jobs I held as a teen and historical events that occurred during my childhood. Now I'm only 8 weeks behind.
First off, a happy birthday to my baby brother.
He's celebrating his special day by having surgery on his arm. Yep, happy birthday to him. Love you!
I was with my church girls last night for our mid-week activity. One of the girls suggested this...that we take magazines and cut out pictures, then glue stick them to the front of notebooks/composition books/binders and cover them with packing tape. She's done this every year she'd been in Jr. High and High school. They actually turned out really cute, and it was really interesting to see the girls' personalities come out in what they chose to cut out. I was able to contribute a 3" stack of Cabela's catalogs for their perusal. Not surprisingly, there weren't a whole lot of pictures cut out of those....I can't imagine why. Although the "cabin and home" issue was a little better received than the waterfowl and archery ones.
I got a phone call from LBoy last week. He works with the teenage boys in his ward (congregation) and he was down in the canyon canoeing with them for their Wednesday night activity. He notcied that as the evening progressed, the full moon appeared to rise over the edge of the canyon and right under the bridge. He suggested we take our cameras the next night and see if we could get some artsy looking pictures.
So about 7:30, we drove down into the canyon and set up our tripods on some rocks to wait for the moon. My DDIL took a picture of us taking pictures. :)
As we waited, we took pictures of the surroundings. This is one of several small waterfalls in the canyon.
The bridge as the sun went down.
Then we saw a glow above the canyon rim and the edge of the moon peeked over.
I had my zoom lens on and took advantage of it, but the moon actually moved so fast, it was hard to get a picture that wasn't blurry as it rose with the slower shutter speeds.
I'm not sure I really gelled in my mind anything profound about taking pictures like this. It was mostly trial and error.
But I really liked some of the results, so I guess that's all that matters, right?
It's been a while since I posted my thoughts about stuff I've figured out in my 50+ years. Because I don't do this very often, I'll review with you that these thoughts are my own opinions and are meant mostly for my kids. If others get something from them, that's a bonus, but I'm really not trying to tell anyone....well, anyone other than my kids, what to do.
Moving on, I have struggled a little bit to try to condense this into a concise idea and the best I can come up with is, Stuff I Know #5--Life is What You Make of It. That's not quite how I wanted to put it really, because I know you can't often control outside circumstances or the effects of other people's choices, but what you can choose your reaction to them. A couple of my favorite quotes center around this theme and they are:
#1--"The truth is--there's no better time to be happy than right now."
#2--"The single most significant decision I can make on a day-to-day basis, is my choice of attitude."
So you can listen to the whisper campaign, either real or in your head, that says:
...that makes you second guess your own worth, or makes you compare yourself to someone else, or makes you think someone deliberately has it in for you. You can listen to those voices, or you can make the choice to just be the best YOU can be. It's all about choices, people. Life is just all about them. My kids have heard me say this time and time again over the years. Life is made up of a series of choices. There are a few big ones thrown in to make everything interesting, but mostly it's made up of small, everyday choices that are either leading you toward or away from where you eventually want to end up.
The bottom line is that you can choose to think that people are out to get you, or have ulterior motives, or are picking on you personally, or whatever...OR you can choose to think that people are basically well-intentioned and are really just doing the best they can. You can take the "nobody likes me, everybody hates me, guess I'll go eat worms" approach and pout your way through, or you can make your way through it without ascribing ulterior motives to everyone's actions or words. It's your choice.
This is something I've occasionally struggled with over the years, the second guessing, the wondering if what someone says is what they really mean, the hurtful comments people inadvertently, but inevitably say. I've been on both the giving and receiving end. If I'm going to get in trouble, it's almost always because of something I've said that is taken the wrong way, but it's always unintentional, and I've been grateful for friends and family who've chosen to have forgiving hearts.
So if you're taking offense often at things people say or do....stop it. Look beyond what you think they mean and make a choice to give them the benefit of the doubt. It will serve you well when you are the one who needs that same benefit. You cannot control the words or actions of others. You can only control your response to them. Choose to enjoy the journey and learn from your experiences, because life, in large part, is what you make of it.
Today is my eldest son's birthday. As always when this day rolls around, I'm a little taken aback by the passage of time.
I always wonder how in the world we got from this stage of life
...to this one, (and you'll notice there are certain things that just stay the same). Not that I'm complaining, really, because I am enjoying this stage, when I get to watch my children go through the same things my husband and I have gone through...watching them interact with their own children and getting to spend time with these sweet grandbabies.
But every once in a while, just on occasion, I think back to this boy who started it all and I get just a hint of wistfulness for times gone by. But then I think of diapers and sleepless nights and I think maybe I'm OK with now. :)
So happy birthday to my oldest son. He is determined, persistent, dedicated, focused, just as he was when he was little. Love you! Have a wonderful day!
When I make pies for the holidays, this one is always requested and it's always the first one to disappear. This is the one I made for the Young Women activity on Wednesday.
Caramel Apple Pie
Crumb Topping:
In a large bowl, stir together the sugar, 3 Tablespoons flour, cinnamon and salt. Add the apple slices and gently toss until coated. Transfer apple mixture to a pastry-lined pie pan.
For Crumb Topping: Stir together brown sugar, flour and oats. Using a pastry blender, cut in butter until mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Sprinkle topping over apples.
To prevent over-browning, when you put the pie in the oven, lay a piece of foil on top of the pie. Bake at 375 for 25 minutes. Remove foil and bake another 25-30 minutes, until top is golden. Remove from oven and drizzle with caramel ice cream topping. This is delicious served warm with ice cream. Makes a 9" pie.
The Sixth Season marches on. What? You didn't know there were 6 seasons in the year? Well, at my house there are. As I have mentioned before, there's spring, summer, fall and winter, but in my household you have to add hunting, and canning. Most of the projects this week revolved around that sixth one.
My sister very kindly brought me some grapes when she came up last weekend. I had three, 5 gallon paint buckets full of purple grapes and one of green grapes. They make wonderful juice, and when I was done I had a total of 38 quarts. We are set for a while.
That was Monday and Tuesday's activity.
On Wednesday I had a large church program for the girls I teach. They have 2 major program evenings a year that we as leaders plan and execute. This one was centered around family history. Each of the girls had been asked to tell a short story about one of her ancestors and what it was about that person that impressed them. We decided to decorate with old-fashioned items from our homes and have pie for refreshments, so it was a decorating/baking day.
I was in charge of apple pie, so I made our family favorite Caramel Apple pie (recipe coming).
It was great to hear the stories the girls told, and I discovered that my DH is related to one family, and that he has another ancestor that worked closely with one of my girl's great-great-great grandfathers in the building of the Nauvoo LDS temple in the mid-1800's. It's a small world when you come right down to it.
Thursday I had a bit of a break, since the pears weren't quite ready to start on and I worked on last week's Project Life page.
Week 37 documents, wow....canning. Yep, that's a surprise, but there are also photos of the cookie making for the weekend company, the double rainbow, picking onions, working with paper and some sweater boxes that I ordered that just made me happy. You can click on that thumbnail to make it bigger if you want.
Rounding out the week was the onset of the pears. Pears are not my favorite fruit to do. They are labor-intensive and with people gone in the hills, Ollie was my only helper and really, he wasn't much help, but he looks at me sympathetically and that makes me feel marginally better. Pears will continue through the weekend and early next week and then maybe a bit of a break until DH is ready to either pick the tomatoes or help with applesauce, because I refuse to do applesauce by myself. So if he wants some to slather on his ducks, he's going to have to make it happen.
Just in case you were wondering, The Girl is adjusting quickly and well to college life. Yesterday I got a text from her, along with a couple of pictures. It seems that the local Krispie Kreme donut place was running a promotion for Talk Like a Pirate Day. Did you know that yesterday was Talk Like A Pirate Day? Yah, neither did I, but I live in southern Idaho and don't get out much. If you came in dressed like a pirate, you could get free donuts.
So here she is, and instead of a parrot on the shoulder, she brought along a dead puffer fish. I kid you not, she has a DDT in her college apartment...and it's not hers. It belongs to one of her roommates. Makes a good prop, though.
And a couple of her friends who went along with her. They raked in 39 donuts. I have no idea if they ate them all...perhaps she'll share that bit of information in the comments. I love that not only did she drag along the fish, but her roommate actually fashioned a hook and blacked out one of her teeth. Yep, having way too much fun.
