It's so caliente!

My garden has never produced in huge numbers. I've always had 1 or 2 tomatoes at a time and that was enough to keep me from buying tomatoes throughout the summer. This Spring, a friend told me to plant 2 tomato plants per cage. You get twice the tomatoes but not twice the foliage somehow. This summer, my tomato plants are going berserk and I felt inclined to make some salsa!

Maxine, my huge helper, is always ready to help in the kitchen. We put Jack and Juliet down for a nap and started working.

The bounty-I have lots of cherry tomatoes as well. I threw them in too. Is "threw" a word?? One green pepper came in from the garden too.

Since it's 105 outside and my A/C is always struggling to keep up, I decided to put the water bath canner outside on the grill's side burner. The sledge hammer was an essential support because the canner was HEAVY with all that water. All the heat stayed outside! I'm never canning inside again! That was the best!

The result: 4 pints of delicious salsa! I spent $.47 on another green bell pepper and $.32 on jalepenos. The onions and tomatoes came from the garden. I already had the lids so I think $.79 for 8 cups of salsa is pretty worth it!

This is my favorite canning book! Every recipe for canning you could ever dream of or imagine from spiced apple chutney to habanero jelly. If it can be preserved in a bottle, you'll find a recipe for it. Plus a complete guide to canning if you've never done it before. Can you believe it'll be August tomorrow????

A fun weekend...

We spent time at my parents cabin over the Pioneer Day weekend and had a great time! My parents have some fake deer in front of the cabin and my little kids love to ride them.

Maxine and her cousin were "fishing" off the deck.

This is my Aunt Maxine (right) and my Great Aunt Gwen (left). Gwen is the funniest lady you will ever meet and really reminds me of my deceased Grandma. It was great having her there.

We hung out and told stories.

But mostly we gabbed over a card game called pinochle (pronounced pee-knuckle). Don't worry if you've never heard of it before but my Mom's side of the family has been playing it since before I was born. I learned to play when I was 7 or 8 but haven't played for years. It was a great weekend!

And today, I got very ambitious and installed a ceiling fan!!

It took FoReVeR to get the ceiling fan ordered and shipped. I could've had a fan a month and a half ago but I wanted to it match the upstairs fans exactly. It's currently fanning me because it gets hot in the downstairs office. (No A/C just yet.) I'm pretty sure I installed it correctly but there's always the creepy feeling that one of those fan blades is gonna come whippin' off and hit me in the back of the head; or worse, poke another hole in the wall. Haa haa haaaaaa um yeah.

Productive streak...

I feel like I've been cleaning out closets and organizing a lot lately. Yesterday I bought 5 bicycle hooks for the garage and now my side of the garage is spotless. I've cleaned out under the fridge and the stove and cleaned out my linen/sewing closet. Why, you may ask? We've lost the DVD remote. By we, I mean the kids. At least I suspect the kids. I would just program the DVD player into our universal remote but it's old and their aren't any universal codes for it. I wish the player would just die so I could go get a new one but alas, it keeps on tickin'. So I've looked behind the TV, in boots in my closet, in all the cupboards in the kitchen, emptied all the toy boxes, searched under all the beds, felt down into all the cracker crumb regions of the couch but I just can't find it. Any suggestions?? :)

Alarming...

I rarely wake up with an alarm anymore. Jack is usually up by 7 or 7:30 a.m. and that's early enough for just about everything we need to get to. The other morning, my brother-in-law was graduating from Police Academy and we wanted to go. We needed to drive for a couple of hours to get to graduation so I needed to be up by 6:00 a.m. to get me and the kids ready. I DIDN'T SLEEP A WINK!! I know my alarm is going to go off, I just obsess constantly about the time. 2:36 a.m......3:04 a.m......3:17 a.m.........3:41 a.m. and so on. It's so annoying because I really need to be sleeping because I'll be getting up early. When I was waking up for school, I never had a problem sleeping all night long; I'm just out of practice. Next time I need to set my alarm, I'm going to have to do some serious Zen relaxation activities right before bed and visualize myself sleeping all night long. You are getting very sleeeeeepy......

Temple Open House...

Sunday after church, we drove to the South Jordan area of Utah so we could go to the Oquirrh (pronounced O-ker) Mountain Temple open house! Maxine was very excited.

Maxine has always wanted to go inside a temple and the open house provided a perfect opportunity. The temple was very pretty inside and Maxine's favorite part was the chandeliers. For more information about LDS temples, click here. If you haven't been yet, the open house only runs until August 1st. It's free but reservations are required and can be obtained here. There are free cookies and water afterwards too! :) This temple seemed significant to me because the city of South Jordan will have 2 temples. It's the only city in the world with 2 temples inside the city limits.

I wish I had more pictures but I forgot my camera and I forgot to take pictures with my phone. The only picture of the trip was of the kids in the back of the Tahoe. Merril's brother and his two girls came with us too so we used all 8 seat belts. I tried to get the picture off Merril's phone this morning but it didn't happen before he left for work. I'll try later!

Sparkles...

Fireworks always present a fun opportunity to mess with the settings on my camera. I wanted to capture the sparklers and in doing so, the kids came out fuzzy. I still think they look fun.

Juliet liked sparklers a lot.

Jack, not so much. He carried around a sparkler but didn't want it lit.
And a 4th of July first: no one was burned in any way this year!! Sweet!

AND...my hole in the wall has been sanded, textured and primed. I just need to paint it, and it'll be as good as new!

We hope you had fun too!

Weekend of camping and hole repair...

Last weekend, we drove about an hour to some sand dunes and camped. We took the 3-wheeler and Merril's dirt bike. The dirt bike broke down but the 3-wheeler ran like a champ! Maxine learned to ride by herself. (I know, I know. She's in flip flops, a skirt, with no helmet. Serious riding apparel. I promise we made her change later.)

Then the kids played in the fire. (We're starting a responsible parenting trend. Feel free to join in!)

And then Jack decided to be a moose.

Then the kids went to bed but some very nice people unloaded their 4-wheelers at 9:30 p.m. and continuted to buzz around until 2:00 a.m. Luckily, we are all heavy sleepers and they didn't drive over our tent.

The next morning, Merril was getting bored and decided to pull wheelies on the 3-wheeler.

This is the only picture I got of Juliet; she still has hot chocolate face.

Then we decided to go for a hike to see some Native American pictographs. The desert turned into lush forest for a bit and was a nice little hike. Only 1.5 miles round trip.

The pictographs were neat and then we headed for home.

On a side note, I'm finally starting the hole in the wall project. My colors are so awful in these next two pics but I'm tired and almost done.

Step 1: fix the hole.

Step 2: Spackle it. My spackle is pink. It dries white later but I feel like it's girl spackle because it starts pink. :)

Next...sand and texture. Happy 4th of July!!