Family Visit

On Sunday, July 12 (Mom’s Birthday), Neil, Ashley and their kids stopped by the house for a visit on their short drive from Indiana to Arizona. I fixed stir fried udon, with squash from the garden fried with the noodles. We also had green beans from the garden on the side. Dinner was tasty, but the company was better. We played and had a good time.
I made a batch of home made ice cream and served it with sliced strawberries from the garden. The ice cream must have been pretty good. They ate every bit. The green bib was the same one Neil wore when he was two.

We played until it was time to go to bed.

I had to leave early the next morning to go to scout camp and Neil and family left early to drive back to Arizona. Thank you for stoppping for a visit.

Eagle Lake

We went to Eagle Lake again this year. As uaual it wsa lots of fun. This is Joseph and Ryan Blank in kayaks.There was lots of frisbee throwing in camp. This is Bret and Sam involved in the Frisbee throw. Adam, Sam and Jack just loved Bret and couldn't get enough playing with Bret time.

In the lake, Bret towed the boys on tubes with a kayak. I went out to join the fun as a "pirate ship". I used my pirate kayak to attack at ramming speed and splash the boys.

Dallin came with his parents. He liked being outdoors a lot, which is good because there was lots of outdoors. There were also lots of people willing to hold him. Here he is with his grandma.

We had two large campsites that were a good distance from anyone else and we were still close to the restrooms. It was great. As usual, we were camped in the trees for intermittent shade.

Bret's "tent" was actually a hammock. Yes, he really is in there. There is about a 1 inch space between the white sheet and the blue sleeping bag that he breathed through.

This is the group photo before we left on Saturday. I think I speak for all of us in saying that we had a great time.

First Harvest from the Garden

Even though we have already had some "first harvests" from our yard, they have all been perennials. The asparagus comes up every year in the early spring and the strawberries were planted in previous years. Even the fruit on our fruit trees that the squirrels eat were from plantings many years ago.

I planted tomatoes, squash and green beans in the garden, but I timed the planting so they would not be ready for harvest until after we were back from Eagle Lake. The last few weeks have been wetter and warmer than normal. As a result, tomatoes are already getting ripe. I have picked one large one and about 10 cherry tomatoes and one grape tomato. They are really good. Especially the cherry tomatoes. The squash that is supposed to take 50 days from planting has started producing in a little over 40 days. I planted two kinds of yellow squash and two kinds of mid eastern light green squash similar to Kuta. I picked 4 yellow squash yesterday and Joseph and I had them cut up in fried rice. It was really good. Mom should be happy to have tons of squash to eat next week. It looks like the green beans are going to be a little ahead of schedule and there will be tons ready to pick when I get back next Monday. The abundant rain and nutrients have resulted in what looks like a really good green bean crop. There are thousands of little beans about 1/16 inch in diameter and about 1 to 1.5 inches long already growing and thousands of blossoms that will be beans next week. I might have to take a load to relief society again. No photos this time. The camera is in California.

Little Rock Canyon

Close to Bret’s house is a canyon called Little Rock Canyon. John, Neil, Bret, Joseph and Christian and I went for a hike up the canyon. We hiked up to this cave.
This is the view of the valley from the cave.
I used the timer to get a shot of all of us on the ridge of the canyon. We looked for a passer-by but found none, so the camera timer of 10 seconds was just enough time to get into the photo.
This is the view looking down into the canyon. The slide of loose rocks shown at the top of this photo is a great spot for sliding down the hill.
The next two videos (due to memory constraints, I put both videos in seperate blog entries you can see below) are the boys going down the slide of loose rocks. It is a lot like cross country skiing without the skis, but much slower due to the greater friction between shoes and rocks. I shot both videos from the same spot about two thirds of the way down the slope.

I also went down the rock slide, but not as quickly as the younger guys. With all of this climbing and sliding on rocks, you would think there would be a good chance an old guy like me would get hurt. I had no injuries in the canyon excursion. After a great picnic on the lawn, we went to Aspen Grove for family photos. While there I sprained my ankle on flat ground. Go figure.

Upper Rock Slide

Lower Rock Slide

Geocaching and playing in Provo

While in Utah for the blessing of my two new grandsons, on Friday morning, I went with John, Joseph and my two oldest grandchildren for a short hike to look for several geocaches that were close to the motel. We found five geocaches within a half of a mile. One of tricky ones was at the cougar in front of the stadium. Here are the geocache searchers hard at work .
We did not limit our activities to looking for geocaches. Some hid under trees.
Some rolled down fun hills. This is low resolution because it was captured from a short video clip.

We found sticks to play with.
And lots of bugs.

We had a very fun morning. After that, we went to Café Rio for lunch.