Sue, the kids, and I took a walk on the beach by my Mom’s place yesterday. The waves were starting to pick up and the wind was gusting, but there was no rain. A key component to keeping the kids interested in continuing. Beaches are a great place to explore and we did find a lot of interesting things.
The start of our walk was the announcement from the eagle at the top of a very tall tree. It was one of the few times recently where I wished I had my DSLR instead of my phone, but I was still a very impressive sight.
We spent a couple nights on Saltspring Island at the cabin. One of the things we did was go for a dog walk at Duck Creek. This is a favourite activity of ours. The park is a gem to explore and there are always lots of interesting things to investigate no matter what time of year we go.
Fall is especially fun with all the leaves falling, and the park getting ready for winter.
We managed to get our walk in then headed back to the cabin before it started pouring rain again.
Last year our apple tree produced 12 apples. We were very disappointed. Every other year we had a huge crop and always managed to dehydrate, freeze, turn into apple sauce, eat, and share a lot of apples. Â We hoped the tree wasn’t on it’s last legs, but this year it was back to normal!
The last few weeks we have been picking a few apples here and there to test their ripeness. One evening the kids and I cored and peeled a large bowl of them and put them in the dehydrator. Here are Amy and Elliot helping me 🙂 A treat for them is to eat the peel as we work.
We decided a week ago they were ready, but I was away for the weekend, so we couldn’t harvest them. This weekend though, game on!
I pulled out all our containers, both ladders and set to work. I filled the below container in about 10 minutes.
These apples are a type of spartan we think, and are sweet, juicy, and very crispy. They are great in crumbles, pies, sauce, and just general eating.
As you can see, we ended up with a LOT of apples. Time to start handing them out!
Yesterday I had a couple errands to run and took the bus on the way home. Amy was with me since she was sick. We ended up on a double decker, upstairs in the very front seats. I decided to take a time lapse video of part of our trip.
The family went for a walk at Matheson Lake today. This was a place that Sue and I would occasionally go to with Yoshi back in the day. We haven’t taken Heart there, and I’m pretty sure we haven’t taken the kids there before.
It was a great hike and the kids did awesome. We had some good snacks for the walk and took breaks whenever they needed to. All in all a great family outing.
This weekend there was quite the storm that hit us. It was predicted to include high winds, and lots of rain. The rain never really happened, but the wind was pretty incredible.
At one point Elliot came downstairs and asked me if I took the tree down. I was confused and sure that he was trying to get me to look outside, but he insisted he wasn’t joking. When I looked outside I saw this.
I guess we have a bit of yard work to do some time soon.
Well now I’ve done it. I managed to convert this site to WordPress from Drupal. I’m sure that are some things that didn’t make the transition properly, but oh well. I’ll figure that out later.
