Canning 101

Okay, so I copied that title from The Pioneer Woman. She had a lovely description of canning strawberry jam. I, too, have been busy canning. Last week, we canned the rest of the tomatoes. Of course, I didn't bother taking pictures. It was all I could do to manage the canning. If you want to see lovely pictures of canning, click on the title "Canning 101," but instead of strawberries and sugar imagine tomatoes and lemon juice.


The garden has pretty much come to an end for the year, so we let the chickens go into the garden to play and eat whatever they wanted, bugs mostly.


Here's an example of one of the bugs that the chickens enjoyed. We pulled this huge caterpillar off one of the tomato plants. The chickens loved it!



I'm glad we had the garden and have enjoyed the delicious vegetables, but I'm ready for a break.

Lizard poop and other thoughts.

Today's blog will be a mishmash of various events from this week.

Today while I was walking outside I found this lizard poop. It was about an inch long, so this was obviously from a large lizard. You can see a crack in the poop. I had already broken it open before I thought to get my camera. Anyway, this poop was near an ant hill. In the past, we have seen lizards just sitting by the trail of ants and picking them off one by one as they walk by.




And as you can see, the poop is full of ant carcasses.










I've been asked to post pictures of the dogs, but their normal pose is sleeping, which is not very interesting. I was able to get them playing a couple days ago, but every time I got the camera out they would stop what they were doing and come over to me.

So this is the best I could do from far away and the dogs moving around quite a bit. I thought this was interesting because Findlay is actually the one chewing on Chani (usually it's the other way around). Now, just imagine them chewing on each other and making the Wookie noise from Star Wars for the full effect.


Last, but not least, one of the chickens has started jumping on our shoulders whenever we squat down. When we stand up, she won't jump off. She just kind of arranges herself so that she can go for a ride while we walk around. It can be kind of painful when she digs her "talons" into your shoulders for balance, and you do have to either wear glasses or not look directly at her. She tends to want to peck at your eyes.

Family Reunion

I would have posted last night, but I was suffering from a near-comatose condition from having taken the "less drowsy" formula of Dramamine. I hate to think what would have happened had I taken the regular formula. Anyway, the plane rides were great since all I did was sleep from the time I sat in the chair until we landed.

The reunion was great! Paul has an interesting family genealogical chart. His grandmother, Theresa Sundal, married Henry G. Dybvig. Theresa's sister, Agnes Sundal, married Henry's cousin, Henry N. Dybvig. So 2 sisters married 2 cousins. The Henry G. family had 7 children, and the Henry N. family had 11 children, so that made for a lot of relatives. This reunion mostly consisted of the Henry G. family. Of these 7 children, all were there who are living except one who lives in a nursing home in Dayton, but many people were able to get over there and visit him.


In this picture is Eugene, Elaine, Talman's widow Carol, Philip, Roger, and Stanley (my father-in-law). Stan is the oldest at 89 years old.

Two sisters from the Henry N. side of the family were also there -- Rhoda and Ruth.

Many of Paul's cousins were also able to attend the reunion and even 2 of the their children. Below is a picture of the whole group.



The highlight of the reunion this year was not a bath and massage in the hot springs (another story for another blog) or anything nearly as funny. What we did do was a bus tour of the Dayton area to see many of the houses the Dybvig family had lived in over the years, some of the schools, and even the cemetery where family members are buried. Grandpa Dybvig was a patent attorney in Dayton, and apparently based upon his financial fortunes or misfortunes (the great depression, etc.) the family moved to a lot of different houses. We got a lot of history and interesting stories from the siblings as they revisited their old homes. Several of the siblings had also written up short memoirs that provided interesting anecdotes.

We also were able to sneak in a quick visit with Paul's cousin from his mom's side, Doug, and his family. We had not seen them for 8 years, and it was wonderful to get reconnected with that side of the family again and learn some family history.

A highlight of Friday morning was the trip to Dorothy Lane Market, which is a specialty market known for its "killer brownies." Of course, we had to sample one just to make sure they were as good as we remembered. They were! A "killer brownie" is made from multiple layers of chocolate brownie, rich caramel, and chopped pecans. That certainly is killer. Can you imagine the sugar content?!! It was very good, though.

One of the granddaughters who attended this reunion has volunteered to organize a reunion for next year. We will look forward to attending that reunion.

Hmmm... Am I Pregnant?

I knew that title would get your attention! This picture reminds me of the women who don't know they're pregnant and give birth in the toilet. I think one of the little chickens wondered what was going on and just squatted and plopped out the egg right there in the dirt. Perhaps next time she'll know what's going on and lay the egg in the coop.

R.I.P.

Today we mourn the death of one of our pet spiders. I'm sure all our family members will be happy about this since they only have one spider now to worry about crawling on them at night -- okay, one of the black spiders. There are still plenty of daddy longleg spiders to crawl on them at night.

I think we may have inadvertently led to the death of the spider. Here's what happened. A few days ago, we saw one of the spiders caught between the curtain and the lining of the curtain. Being the conscientious pet owners that we are, we rescued the spider and put it back up in the window track where it lives (on the same side we found it). For those who don't know about our spiders, one lives on the left side of the large window in our living room, and the other spider lives on the right side. I think perhaps we put the rescued spider back on the wrong side of the window, though, and into the home of the spider that already lives on that side. The reason I say this is because last night I saw a live spider come out at night, and the dead spider was unceremoniously plopped on the bottom window track just beneath it. I think maybe they had a fight to the death.

Ah well, it was probably some deadly species of spider anyway. Now if only I would vacuum up all the daddy longlegs.