Beginning of March

Yard Clean-Up

Spring clean-up on our street was the first week of March (when you can line the curb with your trimmings and the city will pick it up). We have this vine-type of plant with non-edible berries that we tried to clean out since it was threatening to take over a large portion of our yard. Ian and April worked on it for 3 days and only made this little bit of progress. Oh well...we'll add it to our list of ongoing projects and hack away a bit at a time.

Megan's 14th Birthday

Our teenager is growing older, and we celebrated her birthday on 6 March. She received a requested art book, DVD, and clothes from grandparents.

She also requested the same chocolate cake that Ian had for his b-day. The main difficulty was that her birthday fell on a Fast Sunday, so it was a challenge for Mom and Dad to make a cake without being able to lick out the bowls afterwards. (Next time this happens we'll have to make it the night before!) After frosting it, we realized that we lacked 14 cake candles, so we got creative with leftover tea candles.

Mud Pie Fun

Erin and Dallin have enjoyed making mud pies on a daily basis. This involves dumping dirt into Yuki's water bowl and stirring.

It also means that Dallin gets a daily bath and Mom has lots of laundry to do.

Gecko Mania

We have these cute visitors on our porch areas, who emerge after dark to catch insects. It has become a nightly ritual for the children to go outside and count how many geckos they can find. So far the record number has been 14!

Food Storage in Yuma, Part 2

We can only fit so much lemon juice and orange juice concentrate in our freezer, so we decided to try out bottling some excess citrus. Since we lack a gas stove and have one of those nasty ceramic-topped type of electric stoves, we had to make a few changes in how we bottle juice. We now have to use our Cache Cooker outside for canning projects, but it worked great. We bottled lemon juice and grapefruit juice (separately). As expected, the flavor did change somewhat during the heating process, so it didn't taste as good as the fresh juice (just as our apple juice doesn't taste the same as the freshly-squeezed cider). But it is still good.

And it looks pretty!