Ordinary Time

J. took four children camping this weekend (H., R., L., and G.). Y. stayed home to work and I stayed home to see clients, take care of animals, and drive Y. The camping group met B. and HC at Apple Canyon State Park in NW Illinois. They had a great time, though Friday night, with its freeze advisory, was a bit chilly. Here are some photos various people took. 

Today is H.'s 24th birthday if you can believe it. She chose a dumpling stir fry for dinner and chocolate mayonnaise cake for dessert.  Grammy sent her a pink sweater and a graphic novel from one of her favorite series.  I am having a little difficulty with the idea of H. being 24 if I'm honest. 

K. has been spending some time at W.'s and MC's house. Since they have a lot of fish, K. has been taking a lot of fish pictures. I think he has taken some really good pictures. Want to see?

Cue music: dum-dum-dumdum... Your mission should you choose to accept it (as if we had a choice): Figure out a driving schedule which delivers three teens to and from work while accommodating parents' work, appointments, and other schedules. There is also a teen's volunteer commitment and H.'s Friday morning activity. Places of work and volunteering are not close to each other, varying from 8 minutes from home to 30 minutes from home.  The second half of dinner was spent figuring out who was going to take whom to work when. There were so many moving parts we needed to keep notes. (This is the quickly scrawled version and the author did not know I was going to post it on the blog.) It will get rewritten so we can understand it because no one can keep all this in their head.  Weekends are not currently terribly relaxing.  And one other thing to share that is only related to the above by it dealing with dinner, have you seen this new cookbook? I checked it out on a whim last...

When J. goes to work he takes whichever children have classes that day with him. They go to class, do homework, roam the school until their father is done for the day and then they all come home. It's a great system with no extra driving needed. It's a great system that is until J. needs to be at a meeting off campus two hours away all day.  While there is a shuttle bus that goes between the end of the Metra line in our little town and the NIU campus in DeKalb, there is no additional transportation from NIU to the community college in a small town three miles further west from DeKalb. (For selfish reasons, I really think there should be a regular shuttle between NIU and the community college.)  This meant I found myself driving children too and from school today. It was a lot of driving especially since I added in a bunch of errands on each return trip... Getting gas, Costco, farm store, equine vet (to pick up prescriptions, and the library all told. The library was the last s...

We had been wanting to ride on the boat that L. works on all summer. Finally today we were free, L. was working, and the weather cooperative. It was more than cooperative, it was pretty much the perfect day to take a boat ride.  That's L. at the end of the gang plank. I didn't take any pictures while we were on the boat, but we spent some time walking around the park the boat leaves from, so you can still enjoy views of the Fox River.

It sounds so good to find some good deals on produce to can and freeze, the trouble is it's only a good deal if you actually do the canning and freezing. Which is what I did today. All day. All day standing in the kitchen chopping vegetables. It is worth it in the end, but I'm beat.  The totals for today?  7 pints of sweet pickle relish (canned) 6 cups of frozen green pepper strips 20 cups of frozen mixed color bell pepper strips 4 dehydrator trays of bell peppers (they're still dehydrating so I don't know how many cups) Two dinner's worth of frozen sliced okra (to be fried) 5 pounds of ground cornmeal - we had run out and I needed it for the okra so needed to grind more I still need to prep and freeze the extra lemongrass that I bought yesterday. Plus there are still cucumbers which I need to turn into bread and butter pickles. I'm also guessing there will be enough cucumbers to make a couple jars of dill pickles. I'm hoping I'll be done with it all by ...

Do these give you some clues? That's a half bushel of sweet peppers. Pickling cucumbers  If you guessed making and canning sweet pickle relish you'd be correct. I will probably also make bread and butter pickles because we go through them quickly and they're not something you can dobuy in the store. If I still have cucumbers left over, I'll probably make some dill pickles as well. They're actually the quickest of the pickles I make. And maybe I'll decide we need a lot more dill pickles, in which case I'll have to go buy more cucumbers.  The relish is not going to use up all those peppers, but the price was far too good to pass up. I'll slice/chop and freeze them in recipe sized amounts. Did you know you can do that? Freeze them as is then put them in recipes where they'll be cooked? The same goes for onions. Neither would be good to eat raw, but they're fine in things. Plus, it's super easy to just take pre-chopped peppers or onions out of yo...

We did indeed have apple fritters for breakfast.  G. made them with our own apples and the glaze has cider and bits of apple in it. They were delicious. It was very nice to come in from cleaning the barn in very wet weather and be able to enjoy a freshly made apple fritter. Teaching your children to cook pays off. 

The other day, while I was driving Y. to do the onboarding for her new job , we passed by a pond that often has birds of various sorts in it. It was a jackpot day. Y., who is always on the lookout for birds, noticed that there were four egrets. We paused to admire them and moved on. Coming home, I paused to see if they were still there. They were, but they had been joined by a blue heron. So I took a picture.  You can see them if you enlarge the picture, but I'll make it a little easier. Take time to notice the bits of wonder around you. K. is here for the night, so he got in some picture taking. Here are a few of them. And my favorite.

The boats L. works on go up and down the Fox River and there is a recorded narration of what the passengers are seeing. L. has now heard this commentary a lot. When we were wondering what we should do today, L. said she would like to go wander around the fen she passes in the river. This seemed like as good a plan as any, plus I am always up for visiting a new to us forest preserve. So those who were interested hopped in the car and we headed towards Person Creek Forest Preserve and fen.  A fen is like a bog , but with a lower pH. (I had to look it up.) It turned out to be a little rainy, but more sprinkling and not downpours.  I had never seen a plant like this so I looked it up. It is Clematis Virginia a; a vine in the ranunculus family. L. wasn't in it, but it was fun to get to see one of the boats she does work on pass by. The Fox River  Do you see that house through the trees? According to L., our resident expert on this section of the river, it was a stop on the Und...