Sweet Hour of Prayer

I came across this You Tube, Instrumental Hymn Sweet Hour of Prayer, from another blog.  It fed me with sight, sound, and spiritually.

Couldn't help myself..........here are a few more.  To view each one, click on the titles highlighted in red.  Each You Tube lasts anywhere from 2 - 4 minutes.

Nearer My God To Thee

 Amazing Grace

Easy "Pea"sy

Today I spent a few hours on my feet shelling peas.  A tedious job but worth the effort.  Thanks to a good friend of mine, the process went much faster than in previous years.  She literally saved me hours of work by one simple process.  Here are the steps to successfully shelling peas...........
First off, I put my pea pods in the sink to wash them.

From the wash, they go into a pot of boiling water for three to four minutes.....get the water boiling first, put in the peas, then start your timer.

 

From the hot water bath, they go into a sink of cold water......it is supposed to be ice water but I didn't have any ice and it seemed to work fine.

For photo purposes and to show you how to shell the peas, I held the pod backwards so you could see how it was done.  Instead of shelling the peas into my hand, I held the pea pod the opposite direction and pushed the peas into another large pan.  First you grab the pea pod (with right hand) and pinch close to the top, holding the very top with your left hand, slide your fingers down the pod and out pop the peas.  You might have to inch your fingers down the pod to get them out but still.....the process goes very quickly.  Also, by doing it this way, you've killed two birds with one stone because you won't need to blanch them later (anyways, that's my way of thinking).

 

 I shelled two full containers of peas.  Each container is 10" around and 5" tall.  That's a lot of peas...Yum, yum.  I would have had a bit more but I kept getting a spoon and eating a few here and there.  Raw peas are totally delish.

After bagging all the peas, I ended up with 18 pint-sized bags of peas.

 I started out with 2 of these five gallon paint buckets and 2 ice cream buckets full of pea pods and after shelling them all, I ended up with 1 five gallon bucket of empty pods.  This was our second picking and the plants are still producing madly...............with this new process of shelling, all I can say is...bring em on.

Sky of Fire

My goodness!  I looked out my dining room window this morning and it looked like the sky was alive with fire.  It had brilliant hues of orange, yellow and pink.  Sometimes it's so nice just to stop, look and see with different eyes......not just to notice the sky because it was different, but to notice the sky and realize it was a different creation.

Mack's Inn Playhouse

This post has more pictures than I usually post but it was a very eventful weekend.  Every year, our family heads to Mack's Inn, up in the Island Park area.  It is so beautiful there and we really enjoy the dinner/theater they have at Mack's Inn Playhouse.  We have been going every year for many years and I don't think we have ever been disappointed.  Up the road about 5-10 miles is a place called Big Fish Springs.  From the view standing on a bridge, beauty totally surrounds you. 

The springs are also home to many birds and fish.

On this trip, we got to see a muskrat.  He swam under the bridge, came back and dove to the bottom where he yanked out some of the vegetation and then swam to the other side.

From the springs, we headed to Mack's Inn Playhouse.  At the play house, we had a prime rib dinner followed by the play "Home School Musical".  Totally had a good laugh!  After the play, we drove back to Rigby where we stayed the night at our daughter's home. 

The next morning I woke up to the sound of thunder and rain so I decided to get up and go outside to take some pictures.  You can see that the deck is wet and the sky is definitely not blue but my daughters yard is beautiful.    

The storm didn't last two long and before we knew it, the clouds started turning white and the skies were blue.  Ended up being a beautiful day.

Total Blow Out

Everything and anything was going wrong this morning.  One of my many things to go wrong was my right shoe.  It started off normal (it only looks normal in the picture because I was tucking it in everywhere) but a few hours into my day, it decided to have a little blow-out party.

I had on black socks but for photo purposes, I put on some grey socks so you could get the entire effect of what I meant when I said my shoe had a blow out. 

Both sides had major problems.

This is how it looked by the time I finally made it home to change into a different pair.  It was difficult even keeping it on my foot.  I was kind of doing a step 'n slide walk.  I wore it like this till noon, when I rushed home, changed shoes, and ate my lunch.  I guess I could look on the bright side of things and appreciate the coolness of it where it was an extremely hot day.

Where Did Odis Go?

Look who finally decided not to hide his head.  Saturday, as I was preparing to leave to spend the weekend with my daughter, I went to check on Odis and lo-and-behold, he didn't hide from me.  Usually when I come around, he tucks his little head in and hides.  It almost looked like he was showing off for me. 

When my husband and I returned home tonight from visiting our daughter, I looked in the little ice cream bucket only to see what.....no Odis.  I couldn't believe it.  How did Odis get out?  I've never seen him be able to climb up the bucket.  My husband's first words were "oh no....now we'll probably have little Odis's all over the house".  Too funny, huh!  I decided to pick up his little buck to look closer to see if maybe Odis was hiding.  Still, no Odis.  I started to look under the leafy spurge plant that I put in for him to eat and there he was.....Wahoo.....but, Odis was in a mass of what looked like goop.  Could he be forming his pupae (cocoon)?  If you look closely at the picture below,  you can kind of see the mass under the leaves at the top of the picture.  Hope little Odis is OK...I've kind of grown fond of the little critter.

Funny Little Creature

Whew, was it ever hot over at the Falls today.  Evan and I needed to go to Rexburg, Rigby, and Idaho Falls for a dental appointment and to pick up some supplies.  At one point, when I pushed the outside temp register in my car it read 96 degrees.  On the photo below, we were halfway across the desert on our way home when it read 92 degrees and I thought about taking a picture.  As you can see, the picture is a little blurry......not a safe way to get a picture while driving, but...................!  At 96 degrees, it is too hot for this red-head.  I don't know if you know this or not but red-heads totally melt when they are in temperatures this high, and no air conditioning in the car.  It was sure nice to get back home where the temperature was much cooler.  After getting home around 6pm, emptying out the car, then checking the temperature, it read 78 degrees on our house thermometer.  What a difference 18 degrees makes.  The melting process actually came to a stand still.

When we returned home, all was well with little Odis, too.  He is such a faker.  He was inching his way all around the ice cream bucket until he noticed I was standing there and then he does this "Let's Pretend I'm Asleep" thingy.  He tucks his head in and doesn't move a muscle, thus the picture with no head.  And, if you look at the picture I took yesterday, you will notice that he doesn't have a head in that picture, either.  In this picture, he had actually clung to the leafy spurge weed (pretending to be asleep or whatever he thinks he's doing) when I picked it up to clean out his bucket and to take a picture on the counter.  Through all that, he didn't move a muscle.  It wasn't until I put him back in his little ice cream bucket that he started inching his way around.  What a funny little creature.

 

Odis - Leafy Spurge Hawkmoth

Last night, the Young Women, Young Men, and their leaders were cleaning along the edges of the highway as a service project.  We have a 2 mile strip of highway that our youth are in charge of cleaning, twice-a-year.  Last night as we were cleaning, one of the boys found Odis (the name I gave him) hanging on a weed stem, eating.  He brought him over to me and I thought he would make a good Kinder, science project.  For now, I have him in an ice cream bucket with some leaves, a stalk of clover, and a little water.  School starts on Monday, May 22nd, and Odis will be my guest in the Kinder classroom.  We did this project a few years back with other caterpillars and the students really enjoyed it.  They went outside to gather leaves to feed the caterpillars and witnessed the process of the caterpillar turning into pupae (cocoon).  The caterpillars stayed in their pupae the entire school year so the students were not able to witness the marvel of them changing into butterfly's.  The teacher and I went into the classroom one day to find they had come out of their pupae - beautiful! 

Upon searching the Internet, I found out that Odis is a Leafy Spurge Hawkmoth Caterpillar (Hyles euphorbiae) a European species introduced to help control the Leafy Spurge.  To read more about Otis, go here.  Leafy Spurge is an aggressive perennial weed that can completely overtake large areas of open land.

I Must Say...........

The last pictures I took of the garden were on July 22.  I can't believe how much it has grown.  It's hard to see what is growing because everything has grown so tall, (especially the potatoes) it is hard to tell what is what from this angle.

But, when taken from different angles, you can see how prosperous our (I say our, but Evan has done all the work) garden is.  So far we have harvested some lettuce, cauliflower, broccoli, spinach, zucchini, tomatoes, beets, and peas.  We still have beans, potatoes, and carrots that we haven't been able to eat.....still waiting for them to mature.  Although we've only gotten a few peas, the pods are filling in nicely and it won't be long before we can fill our buckets.  

The flowers that bloom on the potato plants are so tiny and delicate.  It's nice to know that in a short time, hidden underground will be nice, big potatoes where once the tiny blossoms stood.

What is this?  How did it get missed?  It's a very big WEED!  It is (or I should say...was) growing right in the middle of the potatoes.  I decided to take a picture of it standing there so proudly before yanking it out by the roots.

From the overall view of the garden, you don't see what is growing within all the greenery.  Take a look at these beauties.  I must say...............Evan has done a fantastic job!