Catching Up

I haven't written for so long-- two weeks! And I promised myself that I would write every four days! Well, I'm writing now.

Last Saturday, the 28th, our family went to the The Rebelution Tour, a conference by these twins, Alex and Brett Harris, who are challenging teens to rebel against the low things expected of them in this day and age. It lasted all day. We were challenged by it, and enjoyed going to it.

Afterwards we went to Braum's, our favorite local ice cream parlor. Both Melissa and I got Sicilian orange sherbet, so it's red (like Sicilians oranges). It was delicious.

We have been getting ready for the Renewing Your Passion conference that GFA is having soon. It is from July 11 to 13. I think Dad is going to be really busy.

Because we are going to re-do the kitchen soon, Dad took off one layer of the kitchen window. I guess you would call it the storm window? He and Mom did that on Sunday. And the new window we ordered is in at Lowes, and Dad is going to pick it up tonight.

And our garden is producing much foliage. We have gotten tomatoes, an eggplant, radishes, and herbs, but no peas or beans. The pea plants are dead-ish and dry, but the bean plants are doing well, but with no beans, only flowers. I hope that means that there will soon be beans.

Melissa planted beans along the fence here, and she didn't think they would actually grow. But they have been doing better than almost any of the other plants.

And we have been getting lots of morning glories, although recently we haven't had as many.

I suppose I should put a picture of an actual morning glory.

And here is evidence of some produce! A tomato that didn't get eaten by birds. Actually, the tomato in the 'protecting' cage was the only one that actually got eaten, I think because there were wires for the bird to stand on.

You can sort of see the eggplant in my hand. I look really excited about it. But it's not like my sisters and I hate eggplant, because Mom cooks it up a really good way, so it's delicious.

Later this month, from July 16 to 26, Melissa is going to go to Chicago for our church high school choir mission trip. So she is busy going to choir practice.

Tonight we are having 4 young adults over for dinner. Mom is going to make lasagne and I am going to make lemon bars.

This afternoon Mom had her friend over. Usually we sew together, but this time we talked and ate lunch together. It was nice to see her, because we haven't gotten together for a while.

Father's Day

On Sunday, Father's Day, Mom and I made cocoa applesauce muffins, with the homemade applesauce. They smelled like chocolate, but didn't really taste like it, so that was decieving. They tasted good though.
After we went to church, we came home and had chef's salad for lunch. Then we were just helping Amy get ready for the church camp she left for that afternoon. We took her to the church around 3:30, and after she got signed in, we hung around some, then said goodbye and left.
Around 6, some friends came over for dinner, and we ate shish kabobs. They were so good! We enjoyed spending time with the family. They have three boys, and I was playing with them in the backyard and it was really fun.

Mom got dad this skillet that you can cook vegetables and things in on the grill.
He was excited.

He did a great job grilling the shish kabobs.



These are them on the grill. There was meat, tomatoes, zucchini, yellow squash, onions, and mushrooms on the shish kabobs.

We had a nice time visiting together.

We also had a fun time.

From the applesauce making, we have 3 full quart jars that are in the fridge. We didn't can them, we just stored them in jars.
We have been going to the pool lots this week. Mom likes to go so she can swim laps, because it helps her back, and she also likes us to go so we can help pay off the passes, and so we can get exercise. When we went on Wednesday, we had a nice time swimming, but we also met a nice lady. It's always nice when we meet nice people or see people we know.

On Wednesday I found this really interesting morning glory. The seeds we bought were for royal blue flowers, but the one I found was white with purple and blue streaks. It was really different, and pretty.

Gardening season in Texas is so different from everywhere else. We have been getting tomatoes, but no beans yet. We have lots of morning glories; we had seven this morning, and lots of grass. Our apple season is finished because we have an early apple tree. We have a lot of zinnias growing in the beds around the mailbox.

This morning there were 7 morning glories.

There are also quite a few ripe tomatoes.

Clara has been completing lots of badges. She just finished the "Making" Hobbies one, and last week did the Wildlife one. Tomorrow night she and Mom are going to a Mother Daughter sleepover at the troop leader’s house. They will complete 4 badges there. The badges are "Looking Your Best," “Lets Get Cooking,” “Theater,” and a scrapbooking one.

Clara has completed 21 badges.

No More Apples :( But Applesauce!

We picked all of the apples off of the apple tree today. Or at least we think and hope that we did. The only ones left are really small ones, ones that are completely eaten out by birds, and two that are covered by netting that Clara is trying to grow really big. It's working, because they are pretty big.
We also made applesauce tonight. It is really delicious, especially when we eat it warm. We used the Victorio Strainer that Auntie Toni gave us. It's pretty awesome because you only have to quarter and boil the apples, then it separates the seeds and peel from the applesauce. When we eat the applesauce, we usually put cinnamon and sugar with it.
Today we went to the pool. It was fun.
Mom and Dad also went to Lowes and ordered a new countertop and a window and got a sink for the kitchen.

So here are some pictures about apples.

This was posed; Clara had already picked that apple. Oh well; it's a good picture.

This is a kind of far away one of Dad.

All the apples.

The empty apple tree. If you can see one there that we missed, you can come over and pick it and eat it, if the birds and squirrels didn't get it first.

These are pictures of applesauce making.

This is before we started doing it. You put the boiled apples in the big white hopper, mush them down, and continually turn the crank so the applesauce comes into the big bowl and the peelings go into the small bowl.

This is Clara putting cinnamon sugar on her applesauce.

The finished product.

This is Dad's mountain of applesauce-making dishes. Amazingingly, it hasn't fallen over,

as of yet.

Since tomorrow is Fathers Day, you might be wondering what we are going to do for Dad. Well, we are hoping to have another family over for an early dinner and have shish kabobs.

School is Out!!!

Well, school is out for public schools, but my sisters and I will all be finishing this year’s school through the summer. I have English, Biology, and Literature. It is actually my third literature this year, so I am doing it mostly because I like literature.
On Friday Clara led a badge for the Juniors in her Girl Scout troop at our house. And there was also a surprise. Girl Scout officials came, and brought balloons and cupcakes and congratulated all of them for selling the most cookies in the entire council. So that was pretty neat.

This is when the cookie sellers were posing for a picture.

The badge Clara led was called Art in 3-D. While they ate lunch, they made a list of 3-D art in the community. After lunch, they made origami cranes, then made abstract sculptures with legos. After building with the legos, they made a 3-D design with pipe cleaners by twisting, cutting, and coiling them. Following the activity with pipe cleaners, they made clay sculptures and did soap carvings. And all of the Juniors earned the Art in 3-D badge.

Making things with pipe cleaners.

In the fall Clara will be bridging to be a Cadette, to be in the next level up. But before doing that, she has been earning the Bronze Award. Her troop adopted an assisted living home, and they have been doing things with the residents. Clara has to do 15 hours of service to receive the award, so she can get those hours by spending time with the people at the home, or making things to give to them. So today she was doing that.

On Saturday several families came over to pick apples from our apple tree. It is an early apple tree, and it blooms and produces early, so that would explain why we are picking apples in May and June!

We had a nice time visiting with everyone, but one family stayed longer, and then their children stayed and watched a movie with us and ate popcorn for dinner. It was fun.

Picking apples from the alley way

Last night Dad and I cleaned the keyboard for our main computer. He had said that some of the keys were sticking. So I looked up how to clean a key board and printed off a whole bunch of stuff. We ended up popping of the keys, then vacuuming the inside, wiping down the keys and the inside, reassembling the keys on the counter using one of our other keyboards as a guide, then putting all the keys back on in hopefully the right places. Right now we are using an older keyboard so that we can make sure that the other one is dry.
Some of the search results that I came up with were pretty interesting. Some said to just vaccuum and wipedown the keys, and others said to stick the whole thing in the dishwasher. The balance we chose was to just take off the keys and clean it.





Our garden has really been growing well. I found the first morning glory today! It was beautiful and bright blue.


Here is another one next to it that was just starting to open.

When all the tendrils from the morning glories were short, they had nothing close enough to climb on so they were climbing on each other, then they grew long enough and could climb up the fence.

This is one of the first flowers on our bean plants. I hope they start producing soon.

We also have had some radishes. Here is Clara with one she picked.

On Thursday afternoon Clara and I babysat some kids while their mom worked at GFA. It was really fun. They are all really cute.

They all really like reading, so we read to them a lot. Clara is with Jenna and Rylee.

Asa is Jenna's twin. Here am I with him.

The Start of Summer Swimming and Other Things

Yesterday we went to the Rec Center to get our pool passes, having in mind that we would go to the pool afterwards. While we were there, we found out that the summer-long swimming started next Monday, not yesterday. So we got our passes anyway. We then took Melissa to someone's house so she could clean for them. After we went home, we went to a friend's apartment pool. It was nice, because no one was there, and also nice because it's a great pool, with a waterfall and both deep and shallow areas. And there was also a baby pool with a fountain. It was great to be able to still go to a pool, because Clara was disappointed at first that we wouldn't be able to swim.
So here are some pictures of us at the pool. You might be wondering how I got so close to them while they were in the water, but I'll confess that I 'borrowed' Melissa's camera and went in the water with it. Now Melissa is fine with it, but she said I should be careful. But it was safe and didn't get wet at all.

Clara coming up from the water.

Mom under the waterfall.

Amy wearing goggles.

A self-portrait of myself, not realizing it was on zoom.

Clara about to hit the water in a cannonball.


Clara's expression here is so funny, it's like she thinks she is about to get sprayed in the face.

Clara was happy that we were able to swim.

June 1 was Mom and Dad's 23rd anniversary of being married, so I thought it was fitting to put some pictures of them.

These were taken when Uncle David, Auntie Charlotte, and Jason were taking pictures with us.
For their anniversary they went out to dinner at an Indian restaurant called Ruchi Palace. I had Dad's leftovers for lunch today, Goat Biriyani, and it was really good, although it was spicy. But I guess that is to be expected.
I didn't make them a card, so I said that the apple pie I made was their gift.
We made quiche from a recipe that Melissa made up. It was really good. Since the pie crust recipe made two crusts, I had a crust left over. We were going to make a raspberry pie, but that needed two crusts and we had never made it before, and had nothing to top it with, like cream or something. So I made a French Apple Pie from the Betty Crocker cookbook. It only uses one crust, and there is a butter/flour/brown sugar topping on it. Because our oven cooks hot, I didn't need to cook it so long, so it was a little burnt. It was still good! (Delicious, says Mom!)

Amy had been working as a barista at the Starbucks in a Kroger, but was transferred to being a cashier at Kroger, but now is filling in at the Starbucks and is hopefully going to be transferred back to being at Starbucks. This is really an answer to prayer because cashiering is hard on her shoulders, and being a barista is really what she enjoys more.

Here are also some garden pictures.

Some tomatoes

The beans as they climb

Melissa's dill

a radish

A cucumber flower

Melissa smelling the basil she picked. We made pesto with it and it was really good.

On Friday Clara is leading a badge with some Juniors. It is Art in 3-D. So we made some abstract sculptures with legos, and she was making clay for them to mold. They will also make soap sculptures.

Wow, that was a really long post. I have been working on it for several days, and keep taking pictures I want to add, so maybe that's why.