Intersession Week

My children know that Intersession Week out of school always means getting more things done around the house. This was true for this one also. Since I could not travel to see my wonderful grandchildren I had time to complete projects or do basic up keep.

Monday, Clifford and I scrubbed down the kitchen, ceiling, walls, floors, waxed wood cabinets.
It is amazing how dirty the area gets even when you think you are doing basic cleaning weekly. Tuesday I had a final in my California History class and studied but had time to cut out and make a baby blanket for Cindy Valenzuela who is expecting her first baby. She lives with her husband in Tulare. Her mother had a baby shower on Saturday evening and served us all a wonderful Mexican dinner home made tamales of course, beans, rice, salad, and cake.

Wednesday, I had a math final and really stressed out about this one. The instructor had given us a 3 page study sheet and I spent many hours doing each problem step by step and writing it out. I have a hard time with math so wanted to get some of this information to stay in the brain. When I went to class that evening the teacher gave us a test word for word, problem for problem from the study sheet. However, there are only 10 problems. I was able to go through all of them and do the test. One of the problems had huge numbers and my calculator could not do the work so I wrote him a note what the answer was and that I had done it on the worksheet using my computer to do the addition. Hope I will get partial credit for not showing all the work.

Thursday, Elder Shiveley and Elder Walker, did some service, with Cliff and I and went to Grandma Howell's and picked two ice chests full of pomegranates. Then we came home and took out all the seed. My children will remember this process. However, Clifford had researched on YouTube and found that if you cut the pomegranate into sections like an orange and then hit it with a wooden spoon all the seed just fall out. Really they FALL out in one handful. Really fast and easy. We than juiced them in our juicer and got 5 gallons of juice. That is a LOT. I than started making jelly. After using up all my pectin I canned 6 quarts of juice to make up into jelly next year when this jam is gone or give it to the kids and they can make their own jelly.

The Bunny Hop!

On Wednesday October 1st, we went to the vineyard north of Fresno to pick up raisans. The crop was huge this year. The largest ever. I drove the tracker and other high priests and Sister Hightower did the picking up. We were there about three hours and picked up eight bins of raisans. Each bin is 4' x 4' x 2' and each weighs about 500 lbs heaping full. There are 300 rows in the vineyard. We picked up four rows. Let's see two bins per row equals a 1,000 lbs per row times 300 rows. That's 300,000 lbs of raisans.

On the way home Brother Hightower said to come out to his place and get rid of all the rabbits. They have eaten their lawn down to nothing and converted it all to fertilizer. So, Mike Rogers and I went out Thursday evening and saw four rabbits and got one. Also, Mike shot a quail at 100 yds and I said let's go get it. We started out and a red tailed hawk swooped down a grabbed the quail before we went 10 feet. We went back out at dawn the following morning and got six rabbits and the hawk was waiting for us but he went without this time. So now I have six rabbits in the freezer and one in the bread basket. The missionaries ate rabbit for the first time Friday night.

We are starting to pick lettuce from our fall garden. It rained for the first time in six months last week. This week we got a good snow in the mountains. We hope it will be a wet year. Things are quite dry around here.