Father's Day ... and freezers.

I feel so far behind in posting photos, but I thought I'd share these fresh, brand new ones. (AND, because Corinna is already way ahead of me in telling tales of all things aquatic.)

Yesterday we met up with Scott, Cor & Sophie for an afternoon at White Rock beach, to honour these fatherly men of ours. The weather seemed hard to predict, and a few times I wished I had packed a pair of flip flops and capris. The closer we got to our destination, the nicer the weather got. The temperature difference from the street to the beach was very noticeable, so I was still glad to have a cozy hoodie on. Since I just can't pick a few, and so this isn't the longest post ever ... a pictorial review. (And, because I really like slide shows - much easier for the slacker blogger that I am.)

After a super yummy picnic, we made our way down to the beach. Our boys didn't eat much, as they were busy chasing crows, butterflies, and looking for trains. Marty got right into the water and sand ... and had a very cold shower in the foot washing tap at the end of it all. Max was mostly very cautious and did a great job of keeping his cast dry. Only twice did we have a scare. Once when we walked across the little lagoon, he stumbled on the moat of a sandcastle (he had found a "clamster" - empty clam shell - that he wanted to give to some other little boys). The second scare was on our way back to the van and he took quite a risky run through a little stream. The seaweed made it look much shallower. He wobbled a bit, but made it through clean and dry.

Also for Father's Day, Paul had been asked to share some thoughts on fathering in church today. It was neat to see him up on stage again, although the context was so different from the last time he preached a sermon. Today's was very short. One lady thanked him for his "speech". :) I think he enjoyed it, and I think he just might get asked to speak for more than 5 minutes sometime.

Max and Paul just got home from a father and son trip to the gas station (for gas for the lawnmower). Paul had "hired" Max to move all the rocks from the grass back onto the garden path. His reward was some kind of treat, and Max just came in, proudly showing off his very first slurpee! Speaking of the garden, here's what Paul has done with what used to be a terribly overrun weed patch. (Several angles, for your viewing pleasure.)

First, a reminder of the starting point ...

And now ...

With help from friends, he cleared out the centre, laid down weed stopper paper stuff and built the big frame. After that he cleared out the pathway, laid down more weed stopper paper stuff, and built the outer frame. Then there was a lot of rock shoveling to be done. Our tenant downstairs has purchased several kinds of organic seeds, and I kind of suspect she'll be the main gardener. I'll help out too, enough to get a small share in the crop. Maybe I'll pull out all the weeds that survived the roto-tiller to get it all ready for her. I wonder what can be planted at this time of year? She's house sitting for her in-laws (last week, and another two weeks), so maybe I can have it all ready for her.

I shall be off and check on the progress of defrosting the freezer we've been storing for my parents. It was just decided today that we'll be buying it from them. Wee! A nice stand-up freezer! We've actually done a fair amount of freezer shuffling lately.
We had one that we brought from Prince Rupert, but didn't ever plug it in because we were storing my parents' stand-up. A co-worker of Paul's urgently needed a deep freeze to store bait for his fishing guide business. As ours was just sitting there, we offered to sell it to him. He didn't care that it was a bit smelly, as it was going to get a whole lot worse. We were happy to sell it to him and continued to use my parents'. They hadn't decided how they were going to transport it to their nearly completed home in Clearwater, and weren't sure if they even wanted to go to the trouble. As they didn't know what to do with theirs, we needed to buy one for ourselves. This past week, we went from having just a few things in their deep freeze to
stocking up our own with about 40 ready to heat meals and a 1/4 side of a cow!

The meals came from a long day spent in a church kitchen with 8 other moms. Angela, the girl who organized everything, did all the planning and grocery shopping. On the day of cooking, we all got set to work on our chosen task. Kelly and I were pleased with our choice of building lasagnas. Everyone brought their own 6 lbs. of cooked ground beef, and we assembled everything. We liked our recipe choice because it didn't require any chopping of freezing cold chicken, eye-watering onions, or peeling pounds and pounds of potatoes. Nor did we need to worry about under-cooking, over-cooking, burning food. With little risk to our personal safety, it suited us two Preggos quite well. And Prego was the word of the day! We mixed 4 big jugs of Prego sauce for each person's 6 lbs. of beef. It was an easy, but time consuming procedure. When we finally finished building them, we figured we had made at least 50, depending on what size of containers each person had. I came home with 4 - 9x13 and I think about 4 - 8x8. We all came home with our fair share of lasagne (which we've already sampled, and it's delicious!), chicken shepherd's pie (I got 5 or 6 - 8x8), chicken tetrazzini (5 or 6 - 8x8), baked ziti with Italian sausage (about 5 meals), 3 Ziploc bags of meatballs, and a whole lot of potato and corn chowder. For the soup, I got about 9 Ziploc bags - about half full, which wasn't quite enough to feed me and my kids and my cousin and her two kids - and 11 small containers that I think will be the perfect size for my boys to share for lunch, or for an adult single serving. Overall, we are very pleased with the amount of meals we got and for what the final grocery bill was.

The 1/4 cow came from, well, a farm. We're excited about all the meat ready to go in our freezer, just have to remember to take it out in plenty of time to thaw.

Back to the freezer shuffle. Mom & Dad have decided to sell it to us, so we now need to defrost it so we can transfer all our things (and a few of their things that were worth keeping) from our deep freeze into theirs, which is now ours. Anybody wanna buy a deep freeze?

And in other really exciting news ... we FINALLY got our tax return. It took 5.5 weeks! Sheesh.

I think that's enough for today. Have a good week!

(Not so sure why the spacing is funny. Is it on your computer?)