Memorial Day Events

Seth's franken-rotisserie worked well, as you can see from the photo. Those who ate it (Rick, Bob, Seth) said it tasted very good. We let Zach, Claire, and Hanna shoot the paintball gun, and they did pretty well for never having shot a gun. I think it's good for kids to learn how to handle firearms, and learning using a paintball gun could be a good way to start. As you can see with the photo of Zach, our garden is growing well, considering it only gets a couple hours of direct sunlight each day. Hannah ate our first raddish today.
It is getting pretty hot up here - it was above 90 today. So I guess summer is here. It was a very nice spring, though. I really enjoyed seeing the trees in bloom, then leaf out, and the constant parade of various flowers blooming one after the next.
There was something interesting we saw on tv the other night: the winning recipe for the Pilsbury Bake-Off was stuffing made out of toaster waffle sticks and a chicken glaze out of the syrup packets. I thought this didn't sound great, but it beat out lot of great-sounding recipes, so I guess I shouldn't judge a recipe before I taste it. Speaking of recipes, I made a black bean salsa that everyone seemed to really like today. The recipes usually call for corn, but since I don't like corn, I used canned rinsed black beans, diced orange bell pepper, tomato, onion, cilantro, garlic, salt, and olive oil. I should probably experiment with new recipes more.
After everyone left we went to the Boonsboro fair, it was small. I had a caramel apple and Seth had a funnel cake and Gyro(pictured). -Elli

Finally an Update

Here are some pictures from Adam&Casey's wedding, our garden (thats a radish), the quilt, and some other stuff. Family is coming over for the long Memorial day weekend, I am editing Adam and Casey's wedding video( it is very time consuming but I really like it). We went to an event called Wine in the Woods last weekend, it featured local maryland wineries. They were about 20 wineries, your ticket in allowed you twenty samples - most wineries have a few different wines. Anyway, some were good and some were so bad we could not imagine anyone liking them. Who wants watered down wine taste with a Dr.Pepper dirty sock finish!? This is how I would describe one of the wines. I have modified my old, working badly, George Foreman rottiserie to work over a real fire. Hello flavor! I hope to use it Monday. I'll be posting more often I hope. Thanks for reading.

Home Again

We will be going back to West Palm via Jacksonville for a few days. We will drive down wed/thurs the 10th/11th of May and leave for west palm after the wedding saturday night. We'll be in W.P. through Tues and then back up to West Virginia. The pictures are our garden and the quilt we are working on. The garden is just beggining to grow and the quilt is very vibrant. The quilt pattern will be the same as the one that all the bright colored strips are laying on. Short one today, see you on the flip side.

Quilting and Gardening

Elli and I have started our first quilt. I know what you're going to say, "Yea right, Elli's quilting and you're watching." But I really have done most of the cutting, she doesn't like cutting. She'll probably do more of the sowing since I have never used a sowing machine. But I'm going to learn! Our garden is begging to grow. So far the Bibb lettuce, mustard greens, radishes, and turnips have sprouted. They are planted in a raised bed we built from old wood scraps( grandma's old beches and other wood she had in the old block house) and then filled with potting soil from Wal-Mart. Eighty or more bags at fourty pounds a piece. I got a busted lip from a seven year old girl - I should have ducked, I knew she had a mean left. No, Hannah fell while I was bench pressing her on the floor and split my lip open. It's not bad though. Zach won his game, it was really a great game. We had a great time with CHuck and Chris and their kids and will most likely see them next weekend as well. Tootleu.