anyhow, here's a summary of the past two months or so. below is a pic of shawn and denali on their daily run. this is how shawn runs denali and she loves it! she pulls shawn on the bike until she's too tired and then he pedals and keeps her going. on this particular trip i went with them on our family bike ride and denali got a hold of a road-kill squirrel. she was so proud of her catch and it took some coaxing to get her to release it. she's quite the huntress. in our backyard she's caught one bird and one squirrel already.
about a mile or so from our house is a Scandinavian heritage park. it's awesome! a lot of the people from this area are from norway. every october there's a huge norsk hostfest that celebrates the norwegian heritage here. here is one of my favorite statues at the park: it's hans christian andersen - a celebrated norwegian. i love this statue as it portrays such a lovable guy that is hard not to want to know what he's thinking.
and here's a building at the park. i think it's a church. i've never been to the park when the building is open, so i've never been inside, but i will make it eventually.
some friends that we've made while here had a wedding reception and i got to make the cake! they were married this spring, right before chris got deployed, and then had their wedding reception when he got back. i happened to get to know this couple through becky's sister, who was in my same ward when i was at rick's college, a million years ago. cool, huh! anyhow, i was nosey and asked if they were going to have a cake, they said no and so i offered to make it. i love making cakes and want more practice at making them so i'm glad they accepted my offering. :) it turned out great! angel food cake with whipped cream frosting - not your traditional wedding cake. mmmm! it was delicious!
a few weeks ago me and shawn and denali (or rather shawn, denali and i...) went to explore Theodore Roosevelt national park. we loved it!! we only had a day to experience the park so we went for the quick overview and want to go back to explore it more thoroughly. while there we saw a ton of wildlife! we saw plains bison, mule deer, antelope, prairie dogs, elk, wild horses... it was awesome!! here's some of the bison that we saw. it amazes me every time i run into them that they could care less about anyone or anything nearby. they walked right next to our car - if i was a more daring and brainless person i could've put my hand out the window and touched some of them. there were even two males that did a bit head butting. really cool!
shawn wanted to try and call in the elk so we went on a wild elk chase. we had heard the males bugling and the females calling all night long and that morning shawn was able to call some females in but they didn't come all the way in. so we crossed the river that meanders through the park, randomly found a trail on the other side, followed it for a while and then headed out off the trail trying to find elk. there never were any that answered back but we did blunder into some females and they paused for a bit when shawn did his bugle but decided that we weren't worth the effort so they left. i guess shawn needs to work on getting a more "manly" bugle. tee hee.
this is shawn's tool for his bugle - and it really sounds real! it's a plastic accordion straw that he bends to make the noise right. this particular straw we got free from someplace and it has hearts around it that say "love" and other such un-manly words. i think the pink and red color might've clued the females in to thinking that they wanted someone with a deeper bugle. we'll have to search out restaurants that give away blue or green straws next. i'm sure those'll work better. :) haha!
and here's me chewing on a piece of grass...
and us together! we rarely have pictures of us together since i'm usually snapping all the pictures. we just need to get a photographer to follow us, just so we can be in a picture once together, a picture of us doing something other than posing for the camera that i cleverly hold in my outstretched hand.
here's onto my latest projects: honey!!! people at church have befriended one of the beekeepers around here and so our ward gets a super good deal on raw honey for people to fill up for food storage. this guy owns 4,000 hives, spends the summer here in north dakota and the winter in california renting his bees out to pollinate the crops down there. he gets a lot of honey in the summer and so a friend invited me to go help to fill all the honey orders for our ward. i have no idea how many gallons we filled, but it was a lot!! there were possibly about 20 5-gallon buckets we filled up, plus all the other miscellaneous containers. i personally took home three gallons and i'm so glad i did. it tastes delicious and it's super good for you! i've been trying to substitute honey in for things that require sugar, like my breads.
i took lots of pictures of the honey as we poured it from the vat. when we'd get down to the bottom of the vat the different types of honey would mix (from different flowers) and awesome shapes would appear in the honey. i also asked a billion questions about bees and learned so much that really makes me appreciate the little guys. like, have you ever heard of bee sting therapy? some people claim that they've been cured from multiple sclerosis because of it. and did you know that the bees determine what type of bee a larvae will be (worker, drone, queen) depending on how much food they feed the larvae? it's amazing!
another project i've been working on is making anything and everything out of crab apples. for those of you that don't know or that are in denial, crab apples make some of the best applesauce i've ever had. and the sad thing is that people think that they're just ornamental and that there's no purpose for them other than making a mess of their yard and driveway every fall. that's the wrong attitude! make them into applesauce, apple jelly, fruit leather, apple cider additions and you can substitute applesauce for fat in breads, cookies... they're great! me and some friends did the first batch and then i continued on alone. i wanted a lot because it's soooo good!
shawn got off work early one day and came and helped me pick apples on base. no one wants their crab apples so you just have to knock on doors and ask to take the apples from their yard. and presto! the apples are yours!
there was also a tree on base of normal apples (i don't know what kind these are) that hadn't been pruned so there were tons of little apples. i picked a box of those - they were delicious!
all in all i processed four boxes on my own and it's a lot of work! here's my stash that i ended up with. i'm quite pleased with myself. :)
and for those of you that have asked, here is my house. this is the backyard, which is the only way we go in our house. the front door is reserved for those that don't know better. haha! i'll take a picture of that later for you. the blue thing is a tarp hung on my clothes lines as an awning for the dog when it rains or drizzles. we're working on getting her a dog house. and we rent the main floor and basement. someone else lives upstairs, so we don't quite have a house to ourselves yet.
last weekend my grandparents came up from phoenix to iowa, where they were both born and raised. and since iowa is just a short jaunt away (11 hour drive) i decided i wanted to see and experience the land of my forefathers. here's my grandpa, bob deKay, in front of his name on a monument to all those from griswold, iowa that have served in wars. grandpa served in the korean war.
i got to go to three of the cemeteries around town to see where my ancestors are buried. here my grandparents are standing next to my grandpa's parents (far right) and my grandma's parents and brother (to the left of grandma and grandpa).
g and g took me to a park right out of town and there we found lots of walnut trees with tons of walnuts on the ground. it was fantastic! we had a ball picking them up. i ended up going back on my way back home and got a whole bunch more. they're now sitting in my basement drying so that i can crack them open and get the wonderful black walnuts from inside, as grandma (helen deKay) is demonstrating here. black walnuts are so much harder than those that you get in the store (english walnuts?) and so a nut cracker doesn't really cut it. a hammer works much better but it takes a lot of skill not to blow the nut to pieces when you get frustrated, as i found out the hard way. he he.
all in all it was a wonderful trip. i love my grandparents so much for the people they are and the person that they created in my father. going to griswold helped me to understand them and where they came from better, as well as made me appreciate those who have gone on before me, that i have never met, but have forged the path for me to be.and to close this rather lengthy entry, a last picture. north dakota has these all over the highway systems and i love it! some say "do your best" or "be grateful" or "be happy" but i always like this one. simply put, "smile."
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