Friday we finally canned the pears that have been waiting in the queue for a week and a half. We have some friends in the ward that inherited a veritable pear orchard and they generously let us pick what we want. I went over with my friend Cody and all of our kids (on my birthday--a fitting celebration indeed) and we picked several buckets. I spread the pears out on the basement kitchen counters to ripen after we picked them, and the kids have been foraging openly and regularly on the harvest ever since. They'd consumed so many, I was thinking that I might need to go pick some more, but we cranked out plenty of pear sauce with the remains of the first picking.
Since I bottled a huge load of tomatoes last week, I was running low on canning jars. My Mom came to the rescue by rooting out two big boxes of mason jars from Grandma Olsen's garage for me. Grandma Olsen was a canning queen, and I was feeling good about cycling her bottles into our collection. She's happy they are being used again, I'm sure. It was my Grandma Olsen that gave me my first lessons in canning. When Mary and I lived at her house for a year (right after I got back from Brazil), she schooled us in the art and put us to work on her grapes, which became an annual tradition until she passed away.
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| Yummy pears! |
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| Casey, Hallee, and Sophie all helped. My Mom distracted Mr. Zeke, which helped too! |
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| Little Hallee threw all of her weight into the operation and cranked through one entire batch of the pears single-handedly |
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| Hallee carefully filling up the bottles. |
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| Our bounty of pear sauce |
Friday afternoon, I picked up two bushels of peaches to can as well. Casey's parents have a neighbor in South Jordan who is related to a grower in Brigham City who takes orders and brings them down. They are beautiful, but I decided to let them ripen just a bit more. Last year I canned them in their own juice (no sugar added) and they were SO good. I'm planning a repeat this year.
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| Loads of peached from Brigham City, spread out in my basement |
Saturday morning, Casey and I headed to Provo for a mega-date. First we went to the Provo Temple to do some initiatory. Next was pizza, then up Provo Canyon to tube the mighty Provo River. My sister, Mary, was the impetus for the tubing. She saw some people floating the river a couple of months back and she and her husband Phil, along with Eric (Phil's brother) and his wife Kim, and John (Phil's Dad) signed on along with Casey and I. For a measly 10 bucks, we were outfitted with a life jacket and a jumbo tube, rode a shuttle up canyon 6 miles, and floated back to where we started. I was wondering how the adventure would turn out, since when Casey and I arrived in Provo that morning it was raining and I could see lightening striking the nearby mountain peaks, but by the time we drove up to Vivian Park, the rain had subsided and it had warmed up to a balmy 74 degrees (the coldest day in the last several months to be certain). The day was mostly overcast, but warm enough to make the float on the river pleasant. We had a whole lot of fun riding the little rapids in our vessels, ramming into rocks, and getting caught in trees and bushes riverside. I was amazed, though, that there is such a good flow of water down the river. I had envisioned needing to pick up our tubes and walk through shallow sections, but there was plenty of depth for a good solid ride. My favorite moment was watching Casey break off a large branch of a current bush, then proceed to float down the river while foraging on it.
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| John, Kim, Eric, Mary, Phil, Casey, and ME |
Tonight we went to a triple Eagle Court of Honor for three boys in our ward. Being the Young Men's president for the past 7 years, Casey (and I) know these boys so well that they are like part of our family.
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| Jimmy, Blake, and Eli, motivating Zeke to get his Eagle someday |
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