Because it's always feast or famine, people!
No, sorry; it's actually because I tend to put things off and then throw everything into the pot...or the blog post.
So, let's rush through our Vancouver trip. Luckily for you, unlike some of my friends who are good about taking a million photos each time they go on vacation, I think we (the kids, hubby, and I) took a total of maybe 30 pictures. And I'm not sharing all of them - you'll be grateful to know that, for example, I'm not sharing the photo of the dead caterpillar ds#1 found in his salad or his stunning photos of various slugs they found while hiking.
Speaking of hiking, no trip to Vancouver is complete without a trek to Lynn Headwaters in North Vancouver:
Now that ds#1 is feeling more confident with birding by ear (and is really good with IDing by sight), we're doing more and more birding outings. We went to Whytecliff Park, which we hadn't been to in years, and were rewarded with lovely views and some unusual birds.
Hubby likes to bring the boys to wholesome places for birding too (click to see larger photo):
That place (Wreck Beach, in case anyone wants to know) is pretty gorgeous though:
We also went to check out my mom's headstone at her grave site. My sister and I helped our dad order the tombstone back in November. It arrived in February when I was already back home, so this was the first time I've seen it. Dad wrote out the Chinese characters that they used to make lettering with. I think it looks pretty nice. And I think it's pretty generous of dad, who is an atheist, to honor mom, who was Catholic, by putting religious symbols on the stone.
Besides Lynn Headwaters, a trip to Vancouver would not be complete without eating authentic Chinese food...and lots of it. My kids have gotten really fond of chicken feet now, so we order it at every dim sum:
This next item was a first for the boys (and hubby) - and a warning to the squeamish: you might want to skip down to the garden photos - care to guess what it is?
If you guessed "duck tongue", you are absolutely right! Most older cultures still adhere to the "waste not, want not" ideal.
The funky thing is that inside of a duck tongue is some sort of bone or cartilage which makes the tongue stiff. Consider this is your anatomy lesson for the day. Traveling is very enlightening.
We're back home now, in not-as-exotic southern Indiana. But, we have fresh food back home, so even if we don't have anything unusual, it is all tasty. Here's hubby between the broccoli and corn:
And what was hubby doing with a pitchfork, besides posing as model for an American Gothic revival? Digging potatoes, of course!
A few more random garden photos...summer squash that got too big while we were away in Vancouver enjoying the duck tongue:
More corn because we can never get enough:
The frisee, gone to seed...but look at how pretty the flowers are!
Not as pretty as the frisee flowers, but lovely in its own way is the asparagus forest:
Hubby put our indoor banana tree out in the garden where it's been enjoying the killer heat and humidity. I'm glad something is.
Aren't the cherry tomatoes adorable?
Well, enough of my babbling for one post. I plan to post shorter, less gross posts more regularly. (Was that confusing to use less and more within 2 words of each other?)
If I've not already visited your blog, tell me about your vacation/summer/garden, and I'll swing by for a look-see!
"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams
Our favorite way to eat horseradish sauce is to put it on top of fried eggs, but it also makes an incredible veggie dip when mixed with sour cream (our horseradish sauce is pure horseradish roots and organic vinegar). Jars of the stuff:
We keep the jars in the fridge and freezer and don't can them. I'm not sure that they can be canned, if you know that they can, please let me know!
He also started some stuff in the greenhouse, but darned if I can remember what. *sigh* And because these are totally not enough, he also stopped by Mays Greenhouse for more seedlings and White River Co-op for seed potatoes. 
and, because Firefly Mom can't tire of looking at photos of our tomatoes, here's another basketful:
Multiply that by 8 and that means we canned 7 quarts and 14 pints of tomato sauce yesterday.
You lift the leaf lid and the trunk of the tree is a cavity in which you can store jewelry or whatever treasure you want!
Ds#1 decided to make a stylized earth star bowl. For those of you not mycologically-inclined, earth stars are a type of fungus (puff balls, in fact).
Not to be out-done by us, dh cooked up some wild Alaskan salmon for dinner on Saturday. He made his own charmoula sauce, and whipped up his usual yummy Greek salad:
I know you never get tired of looking at our tomato photos...hah!
And from these tomatoes, we canned another 14 quarts of sauce.
What else have I been working on? Well, after seeing the cutest post at Lorie's Be Different Act Normal blog, I decided to whip up a bandana apron myself. Haven't gotten too far yet. I put some pleats in the black bandana for the bodice and attached it to bottom half. I am a messy person in the kitchen, and if I didn't have a bodice on my apron, I may as well not wear one at all.
And speaking of aprons, go check out and enter Amber's Ambry's 200th post giveaway!
I hope those of you who have Labor Day off today are having a wonderful holiday weekend! Are you doing something fun and out-of-the-ordinary?
Yesterday was canning day. The pile o' tomatoes in front of dh was just 1/3 of what we ended up processing. We got a total of 18 3/4 quarts of sauce! The 3/4 quart we didn't can, but will use for borani or something this coming week. Never leave more than a small head-space in your canning jar.
All the tomatoes in 4 big pots:
Did I mention that they were in FOUR big pots?
We watched a bit of Mad City Chickens last night. We'd first seen it written up in a paper in Vancouver, and requested that our library get a copy of it. Being the generally agreeable library it is, our wish was granted. It's a cute little film, a bit silly and humorous. What struck me as sad though, was, at the beginning of the film, someone in Madison, WI, who had been raising chickens illegally, said that one of her neighbors complained to the city about her chickens...not because of the noise or the smell, but because this neighbor was afraid this woman might eat the chickens. I'm boggled as to where this neighbor thinks the supermarket chickens come from? Rained down from the sky in a pristine shrink-wrapped form?? It's disturbing how some people are so removed from their food (and ancestral roots of merely a couple of generations ago) that they think it's unnatural to raise and process one's own meat. 