Parentheticals

 This last week the Brown family battled with a sickness that was not covid (Alison took a covid test to see if it was, and it came back negative, so though there is a possibility that it was a false negative, it doesn't seem likely). It is mostly characterized by coughing, phlegm, and headaches, but some of the kids also got super cranky. We also were given a whole bunch of tomatoes by a ward member and made 4.25 gallons of salsa. The recipe that we made it from is the normal family recipe, but we doubled the garlic, and added 8 different varieties of peppers (because we like a lot of different varieties of peppers - they add more flavor). The peppers included: jalapeno, habanero, serrano, poblano, chili, yellow chili, anaheim, and pasilla. We didn't add any thai peppers this year, but only because we didn't want to go to more stores than was necessary with all of the sickness going around. Timmy is proud to have helped can it (he made sure that we always had enough rings ...

Monday night Rea taught family night with flannel board people to act out the story of the brother of Jared.  She told it very well and remembered a lot more details than we expected.  The girls had fun moving the characters, although it was frustrating to try to keep Timmy out of them. Tuesday was Sara's date night, but Alison also had to be at a Stake Auxiliary Training meeting, so Mike took her to get ice cream right after dinner and then came home to be with all the kids while Alison was gone. Thursday evening we decided to have a fire and roast marshmallows.  We've had S'more supplies since June, so it was good to use some.  We all enjoyed the fire, and Timmy was pretty good about understanding that it was hot. On Friday, we went out to go to the park with the homeschooling group, and the car wouldn't start.  The kids had turned on the dome lights and Alison hadn't noticed to turn them off, so the battery was dead.  Our jump box battery was dead,...

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...