I am enjoying this Labor weekend. It is always nice to have a Monday off from thinking about going to the office. It's nice to have a day to get a bunch of things done at home without having responsibilities and places to go.
We started the weekend with my yearly visit to the retina specialist on Friday. and it threw the days plans into disarray. I had planned to go to the bank, the courthouse, and the post office and then I remembered that appointment. I took all those things along so Jim could do the driving and those things get done anyway. I don't mind driving from a Kearney eye appointment, but my doctor (based in Hasting, with an office in Grand Island and borrows a Kearney office once a week) has decided that non-emergency cases don't have priority to a "home" office. I'm glad I'm not "serious" anymore, but it is a pain to have to drive somewhere besides here.
Before the weekend, Aaron and the boys (enthusiastic helpers) cut 6. SIX, mind you, Walmart bags stuffed with elderberry heads. After reading that the stems and leaves are toxic, I painstakingly stripped the berries off to get 12 cups of the tiny berries to make jelly. I got syrup the first time because the recipe called from sure-jell (powdered pectin) not certo (liquid-pectin) which Jim has been eating enthusiastically on toast. So, I did it all again, 3 hours of picking over (no help from Jim this time) and using sure-jell, I made beautiful jelly. I wish I could taste it. My mother has been unenthusiastic from the start saying she had elderberry jelly when a girl and it was awful. I wonder if it was really elderberry jelly or had less sugar or as Mom said, she was a girl, not grown up.
The evening of the successful jelly day, we went to Zane's cross-country meet. It was an invitational with 10 or so schools there. It's our first meet so we were unprepared for what to expect. Meets take place at golf courses and there is no parking for the myriad of parents and grandparents that come who all must take separate cars. We got there just before 7:30, the starting time and parking down hill on what seem like a half mile away and was likely a quarter-mile. The Jr. high kids only run a mile, which the high schoolers run three and it is a brutal course with steep hills. One high school boy collapsed just at the finish line and couldn't go any farther. I didn't see what happened to him because we had to be somewhere else, but on the way home and an ambulance was coming back, so I wondered if it had transported than boy. We watched Zane start and finish. There must have been about 30 runners with him. Last week he ran in Burwell and got 7th. It wasn't such a hard course as this one. It was hard on everyone. Jim and I went home driving into the setting sun. I dropped Jim off at Underground Construction and went on home. Driving into the sun was absolutely blinding. I'm too short for visors to do any good, and turning from a side road onto the bypass was terrifying. I could see nothing. I blocked the sun with my arm and hoped for the best.
As you can read, I made it home alright.
Zane is second from the left, making a start. I didn't get any at the finish.
After that Thursday and our uneventful Friday, we spent Saturday at the Zoo. We've been wanting to go by ourselves for several years and as the weather was mild (82), we made our plans and went. We saw nearly everything we wanted to, including the baby elephants and by the end of the day after watching the sea lions being fed, we were exhausted and glad to get on the road for home. We stopped in Lincoln and had a lovely early supper at Cracker Barrel and went to bed early.
On Sunday we had a little respite from the hot weather and we took our bikes out to ride. We rode from the interstate to Fort Kearny State Park, which is Jim's favorite. We rode all around the park because we haven't done that before and Jim wanted to look at the progress of a job he did out there that he was supposed to finish. It was obviously finished without him and the leftover materials are with them, not us. It was still nice out so we had a fire in the fire pit and Jim made s'mores with fudge stripe cookies, which I can't eat. Not having any supper, we were casting our minds around what else we could cook out there. I didn't think I was hungry until Jim was making fried egg and cheese sandwiches in our cast iron skillet and roasting one potato in the fire, which we halved. I buried the potato in the coals
wrapped in foil for barely a half an hour. It was yummy.
We stayed by the fire listening to the frogs by the pond sing until it was dark and then we went to bed.
We spent Labor Day, laboring. Jim helped me with tomatoes, we got 10 dozen quarts of juice. I finished knitting a pair of baby booties, paid my bills, reconciled my accounts and found that my bank is now charging me $35 a month, bye, bye, bank. I also tidied up some little jobs and washed three loads of laundry. Jim spent the part of the day that wasn't tomatoes by working on enlarging the chicken run and the chicken waterer. I enjoy a good working day. There is a satisfaction in accomplishment.
Oh by the way, my retinas are just fine have been staying that way for awhile.
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