Andelin Adventures

Well we got a letter from our HOA like last week saying we need to clear the weeds from the west side of the house in 10 days from the date of the letter, or they will come out and do it for us, and charge us for it. 🙁 And today a man from the city came over to say we have till Oct 20th to clear the weeds from the entire backyard or we will fined $50/day. 🙁 So double pressure. Kyle is almost never home, so it’s pretty much up to me to get these weeds pulled! So I am feeling more than a little bit overwhelmed right now.

Like our jungle? You can almost picture a tiger hiding in here.

We put up our Halloween tree this week and just finished decorating it today. We tried looking around at the different stores to find another strand of purple lights, since the orange ones overpower them. But we couldn’t find purple lights that matched the ones we already have 🙁 Oh well, we’ll try again next year. But now it’s finished and has the cute little pumpkins on it, and we even have a strand of yellow lights on the tree so when Halloween is over we can just unplug the purple ones and plug in the yellow and have a Thanksgiving tree with orange and yellow lights. How cool is that? 🙂 The kids had fun decorating the tree, and Jeremy is constantly trying to plug the yellow lights in because he really likes the color yellow. 😀

We went over to my mother’s house to finish raiding the peach tree and get as many apples off of her apple tree as possible. Since the Apple tree was so large (the tops were more than two stories up) and the branches were so scattered with twigs, it was difficult to get the ladder close to the main branches, so I spent most of my time bracing the ladder whilst Rebecca climbed it to get as many apples as she could reach. After clearing those apples out, she decided brave the tree and step off the ladder to reach those other groups of apples. Once we have pictures posted, I’ll be sure to add some of them. Pictures are now up! 🙂

She plans on making different jam and pie filling out of these apples, which sounds exciting!

I just love canning fruits (I’ve never done veggies) it’s so much fun. I love the sight of the boxes of fruit sitting there waiting to be turned into something yummy. I love feeling like I am making the fruit useable for all year long rather than eat it now or it goes bad. My two favorite parts of canning, are waiting for the jars to ‘pop’ indicating that they have sealed and standing back and seeing the fruits of my labors…..

Isn’t that just the most beautiful sight you’ve ever seen? 🙂 Peach pie filling, spiced peaches (which the kids call “Christmas peaches”), spiced peach syrup (yummy on pancakes), and spiced peach jam. Yummy.