Parentheticals

On Tuesday I found evidence that my mushroom log is definitely not (entirely) dead: Also on Tuesday I found  a book  by Tom Brown at the DI. It sounded interesting so I read a page of it. I liked it enough that I bought it. Since then I have read most of it in small chunks. Tom Brown writes in such a way that he makes me want to move back east where I can enjoy a non-arid landscape again. Alison and I continued our ongoing discussion of the merits of moving back to Michigan (or, for the first time the Appalachians). We are currently leaning toward moving close to Andy some place near the eastern seaboard. If we were to do that and Becky and Chauncy were to move to New England then we would have the majority of the Poulson clan living out east again (perhaps that would be enough to convince Craig and Julie to move out there as well). If we were to move out there we are talking about getting a few acres and building a small home and farming and foraging for most of...

This last week we dried more apples. We are getting very good at it. We are almost entirely done. I figure that we have five more batches, so probably we will have finished them all by next week. After that is done the next goal would be to process all these peppers that we have been given. We intend to make a lot of salsa this year, and with our new food processor it should be much easier than it usually is. We went down to the cabin over the last weekend. We had a fun time (though sleeping with kids in the room is always rough). we went to Twelfth Night at the Shakespeare Festival as well as the Ninja Japanese Steakhouse . I would recommend both highly. One of the great parts about the cabin that I didn't get as much of as I would have liked this time was seeing the milky way. When you are out at night in apple valley you can see way more stars than you can see anywhere else. We played some Avalon (card game), Bubble Bobble, and Rampage (NES games). We also helped weed th...

This week we dried more apples. We are working on filling up our second 5 gallon bucket of dried apples, but still have a decent amount of space left in it. Hopefully we can get through them some time soon, but until that happens the girls are enjoying immensely taking a single bite out of each individual apple and then grabbing a new one. We need to figure out how to stop them from doing that. They have also been enjoying the empty apple boxes. We finished up building our shoe bench this last weekend. It still needs to be painted and to have the cushion top attached more solidly to the body of the bench, but it is structurally complete. We also ate Indian food, went to the flower garden at Thanksgiving Point, and made some cheeses (paneer and mozzarella). We got a lot done and had a pretty relaxing time. On Sunday Alison gave a talk at church and I and taught a lesson. We had a family dinner at my parents house after church we mostly talked and ate food, though I did ta...

This week Rea started her preschool again (Tues/Thurs morning).  She goes back and forth saying she likes it or doesn't depending on her mood, so we'll see how this goes.  Sara really misses Rea and wants her at home, and if Alison plans fun things with Sara then Rea decides that she hates preschool and wants to stay home.  We hope things will get better as we get into the routine. On Wednesday, the Dalyais came over and visited for a while.  Alison really likes their visits; the Dalyai kids teach Rea how to play better with other kids and Sylvia is lots of fun to talk to.  They're looking to make it a weekly get-together. Wednesday afternoon Timmy went in for his two month checkup (two weeks late, oops).  He is a whopping 16 lbs already!  We're pretty sure Rea hit 16 lbs at around nine months and Sara at a year.  No wonder Alison gets so tired holding him!  He can wriggle his way across the floor already, so we're hoping he sits and craw...

The missionaries came over this week (like they always do (what with me being the ward mission leader and all)), and Sara was really excited about it. She later listed it as one of the best parts of the week. We have been discussing what to do with our front room for a while.  I (Alison) wanted a table with a corner bench, and a window seat.  We decided to combine the two and make a bench that wraps around two walls of the room.  We put five gallon buckets of food storage around the perimeter of the room, set a piece of plywood on top, and upholstered it with two inch foam and grey vinyl cloth.  Then we put white panelboard in front of it to hide the buckets.  For a little over a hundred dollars and a Saturday of work, we now have seating in our front room.  We're all enjoying it.  We also built a shoe rack into the part closest to the door, so it's very functional. We bought a six foot folding table this week, and with that, our benches, and our c...