Fall Photo Shoot

Yesterday was a gorgeous day. It had been raining for a couple weeks almost continually, but it finally cleared up. The leaves are pretty, and Annetta, Jessica, and I decided to head out back to our woods and take some pictures. More pics on facebook...but the assumption is, if you care enough to see them, chances are pretty good that we're friends on facebook so you can just go find them yourself :)

So how is life going? I've been working on college stuff...looking into online classes from Empire State College. And trying to get a job. And still doing CAP and AWANA and so forth. So tell me about your life. What's new and exciting...or even old and boring?

Grape Pie

It's surprising to me how many people don't know what grape pie is, or have never had it, so I should probably begin by defining it. It should become fairly obvious as this blog post progresses. So you know those purple Concord grapes? Yeah...you take a lot of them, and you take them off the bunches. Then you squeeze the slippery insides out, and heat up the insides until they're smushy enough that you can strain them through a stainer to get rid of the seeds. Then you add the skins back in, as well as sugar and flour and anything else the filing calls for. Then you put the filing in the pie crusts and bake.

As you might have guessed (astute and intelligent you!), we recently made grape pies. Rachel, Annetta, and I went to the house of our friends, who have grapes growing on their property. We picked a lot of them, and then headed to our house, where Elizabeth joined us in the preparation.

First, we had to take them off the stem...

...and the squeeze the insides out.

A very cool pirate observed our work.


This is Annetta stirring the grape insides that are heating up.

Jessica made the crust.
And Elizabeth, Rachel, and I stirred and strained the grape insides.







...the finished pie crusts...


The streusel topping



Admiring the pies.


We ended up having our family plus 4 others joining us...we had more than enough pie. It was a fun day!

Camping

This summer, the younger kids and my mom have really enjoyed going camping. They got tents and sleeping bags and so forth, and set up a little camping area in a field about a half mile behind our house. So, one evening the end of August, we invited Dusty, his wife Morgan, and their three children, along with Dusty's sister Rachel, to go camping with us. We had a fun time, and it even involved sleeping. Rachel, Annetta, and I climbed trees, and then when Jessica joined us, we decided to walk back to the house to get her sleeping bag. Then we walked back...in the dark...and pretty much scared ourselves hearing noises of what we were sure were creatures stalking us with unfriendly motives. But we made it back safely.

Below...Rachel and I are dragging tarps out back...we slept on those to try to get off the dewy-ness.


Cool silhouettes...


These next few pictures are just some random scenery-type photos that didn't fit in anywhere else, so I thought I'd throw them in this post. They were taken about a week ago or so.

Houghton College

Towards the end of August, Jessica and I had the opportunity to visit this place

to see
We rode up with Jennifer's mom and sister Elizabeth, starting our epic journey early in the morning. It involved Tim Horton's.

My hot chocolate was good.
Then we arrived and located an unlocked door, and then the stairs, and then her room.
(below: Here we are, wondering if we can scale the walls.)
And then we found her!


We went to church with her, and then we had a picnic lunch in a cute pavilion near the road, which means that we kept tabs on the part of the Houghton community that drove by that particular intersection. One car in particular was painted and decorated and inhabited by what appeared to be a hippie.

We had a short-ish tour of the campus, and saw such staples of the college life as the cafeteria, chapel, offices, dorms, and gym. Then we had to leave, so we said our goodbyes and began the journey back home. The end :D