June 5, 2016

• Checking In

  I was checking my last few posts and realized it's been over a month since I posted anything on Xanga.  I'm a bad blogger.

  Life has been busy, mostly in good ways. Brett is off in Delaware/New Jersey doing his contract work. He'll be there for several months. He made it home last weekend for a 36 hour visit. In that time, he fixed the toilet, weeded the garden, filled the bird feeder, bought a weed-eater, helped me find my 1,979th - 2,000th geocaches, grilled steaks, grilled hamburgers, gave me a birthday gift and assembled it, moved a dresser to the basement, gave Boo a bath, loaded his truck with boxes of stuff I'd packed for his apartment in Delaware, and forgot his pillow when he left. It was a full day-and-a-half. We tried to take a family selfie before Brett headed back east.

  

  The weekend before last, I was in Arkansas for a mini-family reunion at Devil's Den State Park. I'd intended to go geocaching in the park and find enough caches that when Brett came home, we'd only need to find two or three to get me to my milestone. Instead, I found zero. All that family made it a little too chaotic for geocaching.

  

  After the reunion, I went down to Fort Smith to see my mom before heading home to Michigan. I don't think she ever figured out who I was, but we still had a good visit. Mom's been eating better and has put on a little weight, so my sister bought her about ten pairs of pants that were labeled "petite" but were more than four inches too long. So my older sister brought all the new pants home and pinned all the legs up, I hand hemmed two pairs of pants and my younger sister hemmed the rest with her sewing machine. It was fun to work on a project for Mom with both of my sisters.

  

  This past week, I went geocaching with murisopsis. We'd planned to grab some caches in a nearby nature preserve, but that morning there were eight new caches published in another nature preserve so we went after them instead. We found seven of the eight new ones and got First To Find on those seven, and one older one. Then we came back to my place, ate lunch, rested and went to the nature preserve we'd planned to go to originally. We found five of the six caches there that I hadn't found before, plus murisopsis got four more that I'd previously found. All told, I got 12 finds and Val got 17. According to my phone app, I was active for 212 minutes and walked 22,829 steps, which it calculated at 11.3 miles. That night, I realized my big toes were swollen and numb. My right toe is still numb three days later.

  

  Other than all that, I've just been doing the usual; laundry, mowing, baking, cooking, barbershop chorus, learning French, water aerobics, painting, walking Boo, etc. It's about time for me and Boo to give up our walk through the woods. Last time we walked there, I discovered the giant hogweed has returned. Between that and the poison ivy and ticks, I think we'll have to admire the woods from outside their perimeter until sometime in the autumn.

  

  This week is the start of Jam Season. The strawberries are ripening at local farms, so I'll be checking my supplies, buying what I need and getting a flat of strawberries in the next day or two. It'll take me at least two days to do strawberry jam. Next up after that will probably be cherries. The fruit on our trees ripens early - mid to late June. By the time I'm done with the cherries, the raspberries will be ripe, then peaches... the entire summer will go this way. It won't end with the end of summer, either; there's still apple butter, apple jelly, grape jelly, salsa and maybe pumpkin butter. I'm always so happy to pull out my canning pot in June, and even happier to put it away in October.

  And that's what I've been up to lately. I'll try to be a better blogger this month.

   

  • 2:55 pm
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