Fairbanks Trip

 Can you tell it's starting to look like Halloween here?

I walked into WalMart a few days ago and saw that they were selling their pie pumpkins already, so .....

I had to buy some!

I only bought three to start with.

to START with

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Last year I didn't do anything with Halloween, so I am excited to do it again this year.  I am going to do a Black Cat theme.  

More on that later as it progresses.  Right now I'm working on the menu, but it's still only in the beginning stages.

So last week we decided it was time to go visit Stephanie and Kristian again.  She moved from North Pole to Fairbanks so we wanted to see her house.  Plus we wanted give her a bed for her guest room.  Now that we are down to only one guest room, we had an extra bed that we weren't using, so we wanted her to have it.  Not only for her benefit, but for us as well, so we would have somewhere to sleep when we visit her.

Also, I wanted to unload some blueberries on her because we picked a LOT.

A couple weeks ago we made our third trip to the cabin to pick 5 more gallons.  So we picked roughly 15 gallons total.  That's a lot of blueberries.

When we got to Steph's house, it was good to see Shadow again.

Sitting on the piano  (MY piano!) seems to be one of her favorite spots, but mostly she just stays curled up on a chair in the guest room.  Sometimes she slept with us at night.

Koda, as usual, was excited to see us.

One of our priorities was to build a bed for the rhubarb that we brought with us.  We needed to thin ours out, so we took the opportunity to give some to Steph cuz she didn't have any.

She has a big garden bed in her back yard which hadn't been used in a while, but it had good dirt in it, so some of that dirt was shoveled out into the rhubarb bed.  When Chuck scraped the dirt out of the sides he said that the garden bed looks like it used to be a foundation for an old cabin or something, so that was interesting.  We know that Steph's house is "old",  so it's possible that there was an original cabin on that property before the house was built.  It would be interesting to find out more about it if we could.

                                           

After we got the rhubarb established in its new home, Steph found something else for Chuck to do:  fix her dishwasher.  So Chuck crawled underneath her sink to fix that problem.  The dishwasher wasn't working because it was clogged.  

It stunk REALLY BAD - it smelled like a really BAD case of gingivitis.

OOFTAH!!

He also replaced the lights in her bedroom, and attempted to fix her lawnmower, but he was defeated in that one, which left him frustrated.  So he kept pretty busy, but he likes it that way.  Sitting around and relaxing is not relaxing to him, so Steph knows it's a good idea to save something for him to do if she needs anything fixed.

On Monday the weather was really nice so we decided to go for a walk - Chuck's idea because he ran out of things to fix.  It turned out to be a 6-mile walk, which was long, but we all enjoyed the exercise.

On the way, we noticed that Koda was getting more excited.  She knew that we were close to the dog park, so we stopped and let her get some doggie socialization.

Then we came to Pioneer Park.  I have never been there before, so it was interesting to see some old cabins that they had there.

Then Tuesday came so it was time for us to make the drive back home.  Being a cooler rainy day, we couldn't start on the road without a cuppa joe from the Mocha Moose.

They even gave us some free chocolate covered coffee beans!

Yum!

Not exactly the scenic route, is it?

It got prettier when we got closer to Denali.

So now that we're back home, things are back to normal, but there are some things we're trying to take care of before winter sets in.  Chuck is still trying to finish the outside painting (on the front side of the house), and also we want to get our garden beds established.

So we had Barry come over with his tractor and hired him to scrape the grass off of the area where want to put our beds.  Chuck wants to lay gravel there so he doesn't have to mow the grass around the beds.  That would be a big pain in the butt.

So now we have a big square dirt patch in our back yard.  Lumber is kind of hard to find these days, so Chuck called a lumber mill somewhere in our area and ordered enough rough cut wood to make eight 4'x8' beds, but now Chuck is saying that there's enough room there to have ten beds.  So we will just start with eight for now and build two more next year if we want them.

And then, we also found a place that sells organic compost dirt.  It's supposed to be BEST garden soil in our area, so we are going to have that delivered next week.

I am really excited to have a garden again!!!!

Well, that's about all for now.

Outdoors Weekend

Another trip to Knik Glacier.  Last time we attempted it, we only went halfway, as you might remember, but this time we went all the way to Knik Glacier because we had a bigger group, and it was our INTENT to go all the way.  Especially since we had Bob and Jason with us.  They know how to get there and back without getting lost.  This time we made a convoy of 8 ATV's.  The bigger the group, the more fun you have, and the safer you are.

You've been "on this trip with me" in the past several times on this blog so, even though I took a ton of pictures, I don't feel the need to post a lot of them.

The weather was so gorgeous that day, so it was hard not to take a ton of pictures with all that gorgeous scenery all around me.

This part was really steep!  Chuck got mad at me when I was screaming.  I got scared because I thought we were gonna tip over.  After some of us got through it okay, we waited for everyone else, but they weren't coming, so Bob got out and walked back there to check and see if everyone was okay.  They were okay, they were just being very cautious and analyzing how they wanted to maneuver through there.  We must've taken a different path this time, cuz I certainly don't remember going through this part before.  Yes, this time we did take different paths cuz there was a lot more mud this time, and Jason wanted to avoid getting stuck, so we took our chances on different paths.

I've been waiting for Jason and Bob to choose somewhere else to go for an ATV adventure, but I am glad we went to Knik Glacier again because we got a nice surprise when we got there.

The glacier was evidently going through a lot of calving because the lake was FULL of big ice bergs floating around.  It was so COOOOOOOOL!!!

Everyone always brings their own lunch, but everyone also always ends up sharing what they bring.  We brought a pack of brats and roasted them over the fire.  We gave one to Gary, but he dropped his in the fire, which was funny cuz he's such a goofball anyway.  So we had to give him another one.

We stayed there for quite a while, longer than usual because the lake was gorgeous, the weather was gorgeous, and our group was big enough to make conversation fun and interesting.  But eventually, we knew we needed to start heading back because it takes at LEAST an hour and a half to ride back to the parking lot, and that's if you don't get stuck in the mud.

At one point, Dave tipped over so Bob helped get him out.  This is why you go on these trips in a group - not by yourself! You can see in this picture how deep the ruts can get.  If your tire gets caught in them, you can tip over pretty easily.  This is why I get scared and Chuck gets mad at me.  As long as I keep my arms in, I won't get hurt, but it still scares me.

I liked this tree, so I took a picture of it.

So that was that.

Then on Saturday we went back to the cabin and picked 5 more gallons of blueberries.  We were gone ALL DAY, a lot longer than I had wanted to be there, because some friends of ours went there too, and of course we ended up visiting, so after they left, we were able to finish our mission.  We didn't get home until 7:00, by that time the chicken that I had put in the crockpot was getting overcooked, but at least we had some dinner waiting for us when we got home.

So this week is another week of cleaning, sorting, and freezing blueberries.  I want to make at least one more trip to pick 5 more gallons, but last week we noticed that some of the blueberries were already past their peak, so maybe I won't pick as many as 5 gallons next time.  We'll just have to wait and see how they look when we get there.  Even if I don't pick very many, I still have plenty already, even if I give some away.  But if the berries are still good to pick - WHY NOT?!  I hate letting all those good berries rot!

Hm.... now that Fall is practically here, I do wish I had some pumpkins.  Hopefully next year I will be harvesting from my own garden again.  Chuck better get on the ball and start building some beds!!!

We are planning to go to Fairbanks in a couple weeks to visit Steph, so I probably won't post anything between now and then because well,......it's just too boring to write about my normal humdrum.

Until then........!

Blueberry Bounty

I don't know what happened to my last post, but I hope it doesn't look all goofy on your screen like it did on mine.  The blog people (whoever that is) changed the format of blogging, so I probably wasn't doing something right.  Why do they always have to change the format on technology every time I get comfortable using it?  Grrr..........Hopefully this post will turn out right.

 So last week we went to the cabin again, this time for the sole purpose of picking blueberries.  We got there on Friday night so Chuck could mow the lawn.  That way we could get right into picking after breakfast on Saturday.

So after breakfast, Chuck went outside and took care of that fallen tree that was blocking our winter snowmachine path, while I washed the dishes.

    

After the dishes were all washed, we got busy!

We started in some smaller patches that were hidden away from the big obvious patches.  We decided to save those two common patches for later, or for our friends if they come to pick, cuz those two patches are easy to find and easy to get to.

   

So we walked through the woods until we came to a patch and it took us about an hour and half to clean it out.  We were going to keep going to another patch that we knew about, but when I walked back to the bins to empty out my berry picker, I took a wrong turn and stopped dead in my tracks.  I looked down and there was another patch that we didn't know was there, just loaded with berries begging to be picked.  We spent another two hours cleaning out that patch.  And then our bins were full, so we had to quit.  We didn't even touch any of the patches that we knew about.  These two patches were just accidentally found.  So, we are telling our friends at church to please go there and pick some, cuz we can't pick them all, and I know that I will be picking more than I can use.

I also picked some rose hips as I saw them, because they make a great tea!

After about 4 hours or so of picking, we ended up with about 5 gallons, with some rose hips mixed in there.  So this week I am busy sorting and cleaning them so I can get them in the freezer.  I am already going to give some away today - to the guy that's remodeling our bathrooms for us.  Next week we are going to go and pick 5 more gallons.  And after that we'll probably make one last trip to pick more before they get overripe.  I will be giving away a lot of berries.

In my last post I told you that I was trying to get the curtains the right length.  Well, I lengthened them, and they are still a tad shorter than we would like, but they are at least below the bottom of the window, so I am going to just leave them.  The main thing is that we don't want any peeping toms coming along trying to peep in our windows while we're not there.  We know that some cabins get broken into, and thankfully so far we have been pretty lucky as far as that goes.

While we were there, the weather was absolutely PERFECT for berry picking!  It was at least 75 degrees out, and sunny.  We actually felt hot, so we were glad that it was also kinda "windy".  There was actually a burn ban because of the dry weather and the wind.  As much as we relished  that perfect weather, so did the flies!

When I went back into the cabin to get lunch ready, I walked in the door and all I could hear was a buzzing noise.  Flies everywhere!  Especially on the windows!

I've never seen them that bad and it was too much for me.  I emptied out the used water bin, cleaned up a little, gathered all my stuff and took it outside and told Chuck "I am not going back in there."  Chuck tried to vacuum them up, but it was like shoveling your driveway in the middle of a snowstorm.

After we ate, we hopped into the ATV and went for a ride on some paths.  Good thing Chuck had his chainsaw along cuz we came to a fallen tree that had fallen across the path.  After Chuck cleared it out, we kept going, and there was a moose in front of us running along the path.  It was interesting watching his long spindly legs running from behind.  I didn't have time to take a picture cuz he veered off the path and disappeared into the trees.  And then a minute later, we came to another block in the path - this time two birch trees.  So we got out and Chuck sawed it up into manageable pieces, and it took both of us about an hour to get it all off the path.

Anyhoo, about 5:00 we decided we should probably head back home.  So we went back to the cabin and Chuck went in there and did everything we normally do before we lock up.

I wasn't gonna go back in there!

So next week we are planning another ATV trip to Knik Glacier, and then more blueberry picking the day after that.  So next weekend will be fun and busy!