We had a good week makin’ stuff… like makin’ great meals, and enjoying Auntie Pat’s preserves… Thanks Auntie Pat!

We also had two boxes of apples sitting around. Some started to look like little Apple People – so we thought we’d better start makin’ something good from them!

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Makin’ Applesauce

I got the fun of peeling, coring and slicing the apples, all with this fun little machine. Cherryl and Karen chopped, cooked, and mashed the apples and we had perfect applesauce! We’d picked blackberries too, which gave me the idea to add blackberries to some of the sauce. It was fantastic! I remember Apple-Berry Sauce from when I was a kid… but Bryan says this is “Bapplesauce.”

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Makin’ Bread

Karen and Cherryl both make great bread, and they teamed up makin’ some beautiful loaves. They experimented with single or double rising times and other variations I don’t remember, but they all were great!

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Makin’ Wakes

Loren and Karen recently added a ski boat to their family… an amazing Malibu Wake Setter. I called it a ski boat, but skiing isn’t the most popular thing today. Wake Boarding and Wake Surfing are the thing. This boat is so sophisticated – it has lots of features I never knew existed, or that you’d need. Or want… whatever. It has at least three ballast tanks, that fill with varying amounts of water to help contour the wake differently. It has a little hydraulically operated scoop thing that folds down behind the stern to make the stern drop lower and thereby create a bigger wake. There is even a little gadget that pushes the stern to one side, to make the boat crab a bit sideways, to create an asymmetrical wake. Different settings of all these parameters can be memorized and labeled so each boarder can have whatever they prefer. It also has cruise control. The whole boat is amazing!

[There is also a huge sound system, with more speakers than most homes have. If you ran out of fuel, I’m guessing you could get home just by blasting away with those rear-facing speakers. We didn’t try it.]

We went to Lake Pend Oreille in Idaho for the last boat outing of the season. The day was beautiful, and the water was a few degrees above freezing, so silly people could play behind the boat. Karen showed us a bit of wake surfing, and Loren showed a little more. I’ve never been Wake Boarding, or Wake Surfing, but wasn’t going to let a lake full of almost frozen water keep me from trying it! Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get up on the board, so finally decided to just pull behind the boat a bit. Then Ashlyn and Bryan got towed on “Big Mable” for a while. After Bryan was close to frozen, Ashlyn chose to continue a bit longer. An absolutely gorgeous lake and fun on the boat added up to a beautiful day!

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Makin’ Way for Fall

In preparation for fall, the cool boat got put in storage. It takes up too much space in the shop, getting in the way of the pickle ball and basketball playing! During the winter it’s good to have exercise/play space indoors, so off the boat goes. But still a little sad to see it go…

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The weather has been great, but it is definitely getting cooler. We are mostly surrounded by evergreens, but here and there are deciduous trees displaying their fall fashions.

I’ll close with this nice shot Loren grabbed – of our gold at the end of the rainbow!

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