4th of July weekend

Since I started getting more exercise (biking to and from work) and running occasionally, I feel so fantastic emotionally! My body is a little sore and tired, but I expect to get used to that. The Tour de France going on now is an additional inspiration.

This long weekend was great, I got so much done! But last night A was complaining about how sore his body was after so much standing up. (He usually sits in front of a computer 60 hours per week.) We were able to not only see my family, but get a lot of house projects finished up- like suspending the tomato plants from the eaves so they don't fall over and crush each other.

4th of July is apricot-picking-time at my parents house. They have one tree, which had a light crop this year, but produced an enormous amount last year. We brought home enough apricots to make about two batches of jam (5 jars each) but ended up making only one batch and eating the rest. Since I was still in a jam-making mood, I bought a half box of strawberries at the farmer's market and made Strawberry-Marsala jam out of them, but we can't taste the Marsala at all. If you use pectin, it only takes about an hour to do the whole procedure, including sterilizing the jars. My next batch of jam will be pectin-free, which requires up to an hour of standing over a boiling pot of fruit until it gets thick.

Thinking about apricots, and wanting to buy a tree for the former sandbox spot in our backyard, we decided to buy an apricot tree. This was also a nod to the heritage of our area, which is full of housing developments like "the greenhouses" and "cherry orchard," describing what was destroyed to build the new houses. Our neighborhood used to be an apricot orchard. When we brought home this new tree, we decided it made more sense to put it in the place where the living Christmas tree was. So we pulled out the Christmas tree with its pot, which was also buried, and then dug another hole, one foot away, for the apricot tree, in a better location. No shorcuts for us, even though we are renters and will most likely never harvest any fruit from this tree! Although, if we had known how hard the earth would be, we may have found it in our hearts to compromise on location.

Next project is to buy an evergreen to put in the sandbox area- perhaps an avocado tree.