Another Applesauce Birthday

Aaron is now a 30 year old man! Can you believe it! He is now a real adult, expected to act like one at all times. Actually, Aaron became a real adult a long time ago as evidenced by his willingness to spend his birthday weekend canning applesauce two years in a row.

Aaron worked hard this weekend. There were nine hours of cutting, cooking, mashing, and processing apples followed by 3 more hours of processing apples. This man has earned his 30 year old maturity.

I forgot to take my camera to Idaho, but the whole process looked something like this:
While the end result looked a lot like this:

With the combined forces of Mom and Dad and Liz, we made 104 beautiful quarts of applesauce and apple slices. Oh, the yumminess! I should also mention the efforts of my mother's 90 year old friend who sprayed the apple tree for worms. We were grateful for that, too!

For Aaron's actual birthday, we continued the food preparing madness by making Chinese food and a coconut cream cake. The Chinese food wasn't hard, just time consuming. The coconut cream cake, on the other hand, was a completely ill-fated endeavor. Let me tell you of my woes. I found a recipe for this cake on a food blog and decided it was perfect for Aaron, my all-things-coconut loving husband. I kept it a secret and secretly went to the store to purchase cream of coconut and coconut extract. I also bought some coconut, but that wasn't a secret.

The first sign that this cake tempted Fate was that I forgot several key ingredients here in Provo. I bought more at Walmart and then proceeded to lose those repurchased key ingredients somewhere in my mother's house. But it was okay...for the moment. I made the cake and put the batter into two 9 inch round pans--as directed.

About 25 minutes into the cooking process, my nose started to sense a strange burning smell. The cake had overflowed the pans. Disaster! My mom cheerfully said that the cake would be okay and that she knew it would not taste like smoke. Aaron and I left her to finish cooking the cakes while we headed to bed.

The next morning, I walked upstairs and found what looked to be a toasted coconut cream cake. My good mother had realized at 11:40, after sticking the cakes with a tooth pick twice, that someone (yours truly) had turned off the oven. So she reheated the oven and finished cooking the cakes.

My beautiful, creamy, layered cake turned into two, flat, slightly charred lumps with a little cream cheese spread over the top. They looked terrible, but I thought they tasted very yummy. Aaron said it was okay.

Thus ends the coconut cream cake saga. Happy Birthday, Aaron!

A Junior High View of History

I got a little job this year working as the English Dept. grader at a local junior high school. The joys of wading through paragraph length run-on sentences have only been overshadowed by the money I get paid to do so.

Recently, the students have written a few things to make me feel ancient of days.

One girl was writing about her superhero alter-ego who traveled back in time 15 whole years to find all the women wearing dresses and all the men using pocket watches. According to her, 1996 was pretty much pioneer time.

Another assignment was to make up a biography for the character of Walter Mitty from "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty." One student's Walter Mitty was born in 1982 and had several married children. For that to be possible, this 29 year old man would have had children at 14 who then got married when they were 15...or something like that. In this kid's mind, 1982 was a LONG time ago.

Another Walter Mitty was born in 1984 and died at the ripe old age of 80.

The math and history teachers at this school might want to take a few points off these kids' grades.

I just can't take Annie seriously in these things.