Sarah Visits and Banya 5
July 31st, 2005More Jam
This time, the berries are from our own back yard: blackberries. Kim picked the blackberries and we made more jam. We got a different kind of pectin, supposedly more natural that allowed us to use less sugar. I don’t know if it’ll taste as good though. Boiling berries is kind of a weird thing to do, but I guess it works.
Aikido Again
Kim and I went to an Aikido class at the dojo near where I work. I can’t remember the name right now, but I’m sure I’ll mention it if I continue to go there. (more…)
Audioscrobbler and Yahoo Music Engine
I just found out about a new online service called Audioscrobbler that keeps track of what music you listen to. Most music players do this now, but I think it’s much more interesting when you can view the data on the web. (more…)
Makin Peanut Butter
Kim and I just made peanut butter with our new food processor. We made the healthy, needs to be refridgerated kind where you just use peanuts and a tiny bit of salt. You just throw the peanuts and salt into the food processor for about 5 minutes and it turns it to butter. We made it chunky by throwing a handful of peanuts in at the end and then just chopping them a little. Tasty.
Blogger to WordPress
I’ve been wanting some more features for my writing, like categorization, someplace to put extra pages like my resume, more security settings, and just being able to tinker with php. (more…)
Boating With Jacob and Climbing With Jessie
July 24th, 2005Berries!
Kim, Preston and I drove to an organic farm near Monroe on Sunday to pick berries. We only got a few blueberries, but we got a bunch of marionberries and raspberries, all for $1/lb. When Kim and I got home we made some really good jam. I can’t belive how much sugar is used to make jam.
Shakespeare In The Park
Kim and I went to Volunteer Park this Saturday to see some plays. We saw the Three Musketeers first. Fun sword fights. Then we stuck around for The Tempest. It was a really fun interpretation of a Shakespeare play. The weather was great too.
Ape Caves
Jake, Kim and I took off for another weekend adventure near Mount St Helens, this time to go caving. We left early Saturday morning and drove for around 4 hours to get to Ape Caves. There was a tour group leaving as we got there so we joined it. It started out with about 15 boy scouts on the tour but they left almost immediately to do their own thing, thankfully. We first hiked the lower caves section and had to crawl to get to the very end. Then we turned around and headed for the harder upper section hike. There were a lot fewer people doing this section, which was nice, but it still definitely wasn’t secluded. There was some scrambling over rocks and one tall rock wall that was probably the equivalent of a VB gym boulder route. It was fun to hike around three miles underground.
Once we hiked back to the car we drove up a forest service road and found a place to camp. It looks like it was a site that hunters had been using. They had even built their own outhouse out of tarps. We couldn’t get a fire started with all the wet wood, and it was cold for July! It was down in the upper 40′s that night. We fell asleep and heard rumblings from the distance that we were a little worried might be the volcano, but I didn’t see anything in the news about activity. It rained all night and was cold and wet the next morning so we headed back early Sunday.