a very cool product!

So, Michael shared this article with me. I'm not sure how he came across it, but since it's food related he sent it to me. The link is no longer working, sorry. But it was from some kind of Food Review thing sort of like the Cannes Film Festival, only for food.

Anyway, the product is pretty neat, especially since I've taken up tea drinking in a big way. I even bought this really cool travel tumbler that has a strainer so you can drink loose leaf tea straight out of it from Starbucks. I have also fallen in love with a local tea shop called Cornelia Bean. It's honey, but it's dried so that's hard kinda like a candy, but it's still 100% pure honey, individually packaged so that you can take it with you, and enjoy honey in your hot beverage without the mess of trying to stick honey in your purse!

I found mine at Sobey's, but the website lists other stores where you can purchase the stuff.

hey carrot pants! it's harvest time!

Michael cleaning carrots.

Already partly damaged by frost, I finally broke down and picked what was left and ripped up the plants.

One potato plant and we got this basket of potatoes. I thought this was pretty good (and more than enough since we don't really eat potatoes).

Mr Carrot Pants. Enough said.

My onions that didn't really grow. :( Next year hopefully we'll have more success on the onion front.

guest writer

I wrote something for Siloam, and it's up on their blog! Check it out!

http://siloamblog.tumblr.com/day/2010/10/18

catapult!

happy 13th!

Every month on the 13th Michael and I do a date night. We call it 'sacred' date night. We got married on November 13th, that's why we have date night on the 13th. We try not to let anything else interfere with this (except right now, Michael's classes have landed on sacred date night, then we plan a rain check date).

We're starting to run out of ideas...and I'm looking for suggestions from those of you who read this. We also tend to find a way to pick a fight over date night, so it'd be nice to use someone else's ideas, hopefully simple ones that we can pull off without too much planning and a small budget.

I can hardly believe that we will be married 6 years in a month. It's so exciting and amazing. I never imagined we'd be where we are today on our wedding day, I can only image where we'll be in another 6 years.

thanksgiving

We made our usual trip to Caribou Lake for Thanksgiving. The weather was amazing and we had a great time.

Michael also got things together for us to go geocaching, so we tried that out for the first time.

Just before we found our treasure we found this:

Me holding the canister we found.

There was all kinds of interesting things in it, of course I can't remember now what they were.

We ate well as always, got a lot of reading done and did some walking.

It was just what I needed, a well deserved rest!

canning

Our Garden did incredibly well this year! Manitoba had such a wet summer, that we really didn't have to work hard at it either (read: I can remember turning on the garden hose only a handful of times). This year, we decided to try something different with the hot peppers we grew (two years ago we dried them). We pickled them!

I wore latex gloves to do the chopping. By the end the gloves had holes in them. These were hot peppers! Habaneros, chilli, and banana peppers. We even got a few sweet bell peppers from our garden this year (first year we've had success with that).

Then according to what I read online, we blistered the bell peppers to get the skins off (apparently the skin gets really tough).

That's the completed bowl of chopped hot peppers.

The finished product!

Michael says that they are hot! The first time he ate them, his lips turned very red. I won't even try them. I've increased my tolerance of hot food quite a bit since I met Michael but I don't think I'll ever catch up to him!

farming

So last year I helped my boss Roger on the farm for harvest. I really enjoy working on the farm. It ends up being a lot of long hours because after I finish my regular duties in the office at 5 PM I change clothes and head to the field until about 10 to 11 PM on average. It depends on we are doing. We have to stop combining when the dew starts because the straw gets to tuff for the combine to thresh it efficiently. If I am doing field work, like cultivating I can go until I get tired or finish a field. So here are some pictures for you to see.

Roger mans the combine. And I or Travis run the grain cart.

We go out to meet the combine on the field when he needs to dump and travel along side the combine it dumps so the combine never has to stop. This grain cart hold approximately 1 semi load and can be off loaded in less that 3 minutes with the 16 inch auger.

Once the grain cart is close to full we unload it into the semi which takes it to the main yard where the grain is put in the bins.

  

*this is Esther: I can't handle leaving this unfinished and Michael doesn't always even remember we have a blog, never mind that I sometimes ask him to contribute to it, so I'm posting this as is. Yes that is his quad sitting precariously on farm equipment. He took it to the field that way.

VS Team Potluck

The new team has formed! Peggy and I are still there, but the other two members are new. So we had a potluck, and Peggy did a Meyers-Briggs personality assesment with us, and then we learned about each of the personalities.

The chart that maps out where we all fall.

We enjoyed an incredibly beautiful evening!

kijiji you make me happy!

so, i've been watching for ikea stuff on kijiji. (dangerous, i know). when the most perfect piece popped up. in the color that matches all the rest of our lovely furniture, a wardrobe was posted. i looked at it, and thought, i bet you with those dimensions it would fit in the corner of the kitchen!

see, since we have tenants again, i have given up my crafting space. i have to say i've not been too happy about that. my mind was thinking of the possibilities. all my crafting goodies stores right next to the table where i do them. what a fabulous idea. so, i showed it to michael, he figured it would fit and thought it was a good idea (i think it's just because it meant he could reclaim a couple of closets in our house).

so, we looked at it, bought it and michael set it up!

tada!

i still have to move in and get organized, but for now i just shoved stuff in. for such relatively small dimension 24" x 21" it feels downright cavernous!

when i buy bins and get it sorted out, i'll post it again.