Here are some things we’ve been up to so
far this year:
Our latest rural
programs team photo. I’m sure it was
Andy’s idea to sit on the toilets. But
really, toilets are our life, so it’s fitting.
A boy and his pick-up. Since we do more coordinating than physical
construction these days, we spend a lot of time driving
around in our shiny truck delivering materials and tools so that contractors
can keep working. Not bad work, if you
can get it.
On a recent campo visit, Andy saw this
lovely arrangement of campo accessories (machete, yarn, and a homemade broom)
and took this picture.
Since work continues to slow down, we have
more and more time to stop and smell the roses.
Fortunately, we don’t have to go far.
Some previous inhabitant of our house planted several rose bushes on our
patio, and we just have to step out of our bedroom door to sniff them.
Our friend and co-worker, Camille, came to visit us in April. We dragged her all over the countryside, and she took some nice pictures of us:
A lovely day for a visit to turtle rock,
Moro Moro’s tourist attraction.
Luke and Priscilla, friends who live and
work in Santa Cruz, visited Moro Moro in May. They were enthusiastic about bees, so we took
them to harvest a little honey from our hive.
Priscilla and me, ready for some
action. (Yes, my mask consists of a pillow
case with window screen sewn onto the front.
What of it?)
Success!
We removed just a few frames, but they were loaded with over 7 quarts of
honey. We lack the proper equipment for
extracting honey from the comb, so in this photo we’re rigging up a filter.
Our neighbor, Matilde, taught Andy to make
watilla, a sweet stringy mushy treat made from a squash that grows like a weed
around here.
Another season of cider making came and
went. Drought kept apple production low
this year, so we only got to make cider a few times. For those who have seen the cider press before, notice that Andy made some serious improvements to the machine this year. We used to have to catch the pulp in a bucket, and then transfer it to a separate machine for pressing. With a little inventiveness, a lot of sitting around staring at the thing, and some welding, he got the two steps into one machine, reducing the processing time by about half. In case you haven’t seen it before, here is
our cider-making process, step-by-step:
Get your apples ready. Cut out the bad parts. Wash and disinfect them.
Load the prepared apples into the grinder
and watch them turn to pulp.
Using a sophisticated machine called a car jack, apply pressure to
the pulp to squeeze out the juice.
Final steps: watch the cider flow. Drink.
And then this happened…
A couple months ago, a couple high school
kids stopped by our house and asked a question we have become accustomed to:
“We’re having a xxxxx (words we don’t understand) event at the high school, and
we were wondering if you could be judges.”
For once, we agreed. We figured
it was our civic duty. We later found
out that the event was called the “Crowning of the Buffa.” The closest translation we could find for the
word buffa was buffoon, so we were a
bit confused, until we arrived and discovered that we were to judge a
cross-dressing competition!
The three finalists.
Photo op with the winner: an awkward conclusion to an evening of awkwardness.
