As you can see, we are not the most frequent bloggers. Still, I was surprised to get on the blog and see that our honeymoon was the last post! Well, if anyone is still following us, you can catch up on the last chunk of our lives--we have great pre-New Years resolutions to be more consistent. Andrew's sister-in-law has taught us a thing or two about blogging--hers is updated daily with photos and videos of our 7 month old niece, Abigail. You won't be as interested in watching us sit or crawl or eat mashed bananas, but we can probably find enough stuff to keep our friends amused. :-) Here goes!!


Andrew and I came back east to speak at a couple churches and to spend US Thanksgiving with my family (dad,mom, two brothers, and a sister-in-law.) We drove down south where my brothers and cousins live. The thing to do around here on Thanksgiving is to get together with your neighbors and walk around the "hood" and, as Dan (my brother says), "eat donuts and feel good about ourselves." Here we are at the end of the walk doing just that.

I'm not very savvy with chronology on this thing yet. . . this is the "turkey trot" I mentioned above. The warm, sunny weather was a nice change from the cold, snowy north east and rainy, rainy northwest.

If you have to fly across the continent during the Thanksgiving holiday, it sure pays to fly through Canada because their Thanksgiving travel price hike ended a month ago. It is even better if you can stop and see family partway through the trip. We flew from BC to Toronto and spent a day playing with Abby (our niece) and hanging out with her parents. Andrew is coaxing her to crawl (her newest feat) by building a tower just outside her reach.

Prior to going to the east coast, we spent a weekend with our friends Paul and Lindsey at her parents' house in Washington. The creative placement of these pictures make the flow hard to follow, but what you see below is a snorkel stove. These stoves load from the top and have a special air vent that allows almost the entire stove to be submerged in water. The watering trough looking thing is really a watering trough cum hottub when mixed with a snorkel stove, garden hose, boat oars, and about 5 hours of heating time.

The hottub was our reward after a hard day of playing. We picked the remaining apples from the orchard and used some for conventional uses like pies, while others were used as. . .ummm. . . . . baseballs

Our friends' property. Beautiful!

Andrew's nature photography. These fall leaves are from his parents' backyard. I've really learned to appreciate the beauty of detail.

We had a ton of fun this autumn picking wild apples and making lots of cider, applesauce, and deserts. Andrew and his friend Dan got excited about making a cider press. The design wasn't completely successful, but we got almost 4 gallons of cider and a fun evening with friends.

The cider begins to flow into our optimistically-sized pale. So fresh and so tasty!!

This was not the original cider press idea, but we found that it was more effective at getting the most juice out of the pommace (I insisted it was pulp--what you get when you crush apples--but Andrew was right--the technical term is pommace. Thanks, Grandma for letting us commandeer your pillowcase!

The orginal design--very creative. Scrap wood, 4 ton hydraulic truck jack (the kind you use for changing flat tires), cheese cloth, and a little elbow grease.