A whole lot of "jackpots"

Last evening when we all landed home, Jason and I were more or less ready to crash.  Jason was having a little "post SPI class" let down and I was just tired from juggling the week with the added complexity of having a student for a husband!  Really all went super well the entire week and the girls were a big part of the smoothness we experienced during the week.  They just went with the flow and had a grand time being with different friends.  Yesterday I spent the whole day in town with the girls doing errands, taking a fun little field trip with them to Silver Lake Mill, and going to Jason's class presentation in the afternoon before heading home together.  But good moods and helpful attitudes are not enough to protect me from the sheer exhaustion that comes over me after taking Alida to a shoe store!  She now has two pairs of new summer shoes and I can only hope her feet don't grow too fast.  She is 100% pleasant in the store but wants to bring me a new pair of shoes to try on about every 30 seconds, or she wants to try shoes on herself and race up and down aisles, or she just likes to pull them off and show us the variety of shoes in the store.  I was very glad to pay our bill and get out of that store!  And she wondered why I wanted her to ride in the cart in Sharp Shopper. :)

Anyway, it was a muggy, hot evening and that only added to our tiredness.  We unloaded the car, put some things away and then headed out with baskets in hand.  Jason picked the hull peas, I picked snow peas and Kali started in on the sugar snap peas.  Alida rotated around, chattering almost nonstop about her garden finds!  I also picked lettuce and kale and then decided that we better not get more things to process that evening.  As Jason was collecting eggs and putting in chickens we heard the first loud clap of thunder.  Another evening storm rolled in, with less wind but louder thunder and then the rain just dumped!

It was so fun to sit in the living room snipping ends off peas and shelling the hull peas together while watching the rain completely hide the mountain from our view and then it slowly reappeared as the storm passed.  Then I stepped outside.   It was a magical transformation!  The air was cool and fresh and everything was dripping wet.  We left the rest of the peas inside, delayed supper even further and out we went!  The girls splashed in the fire ring, while Jason and I happily discovered water in the retention pit in Nora's garden. I walked around in amazement of our little paradise.  The butterfly weed in Nora's garden is at its prime (1-2 weeks later than normal, as it often blooms right on the anniversary of her death).  The drastic change in weather kind of made me want to jump up and kick my heels, but instead I joined the girls for some splash tag in the fire ring.

We then came in, got rinsed off, I whipped up a batch of pancakes for those not completely stuffed with peas, and we finished off our food processing event.  By the end of the evening we had two trays each of hull peas, sugar snap peas and snow peas in the freezer.  Alida keeps wondering why we are freezing things and I keep trying to explain but I'm not sure it will sink in fully until we pull them out come December and January!  I went out today to get mustard greens for our breakfast and I am quite certain everything I picked yesterday needs to be picked again.  Between the rain and the sun, things are growing so fast I think we could almost watch them grow!

And, to end, we had more bear excitement today. After lunch, Kali was once again in the living room and exclaimed, "the cub is back."  Sure enough.  See for yourselves...

We've gotten our fill of pictures now and must turn our attention to making our property a place this little guy will not want to hang around!  It sounds like there are at least two, and maybe three, bears of varying sizes who seem more comfortable in the presence of humans than we would like.  I took Alida for a nappy walk today and ended it early as there was a larger bear in the cornfield right by the road and, while it seemed mostly interested in eating corn, it unnerved me a bit to be that close to it (without the door between me and it).  On my way up the drive, I learned that a smaller bear had been found within the hour in our neighbor's yurt.  I put a call in to the Virginia Wildlife Center and based on my description of the cub, the staff person there was pretty confident it was probably a year or so old and just a "bear in training," learning the ropes of life on its own.  I would like to wish it well, and would also like it to discern that it would really like to spend its time farther away from the humans.  Unfortunately, it was probably the good smells coming out our windows that drew it to our porch.  No denying it was kind of cute as it sat on our walk just sniffing away!  And, who can blame it!  The freshly steamed snow peas and the eggs scrambled with an abundance of garlic scapes, mustard greens and spinach were delicious!

P.s. I guess you might be wanting an explanation for the title of this post.  At one point last evening in our wonderful flurry of harvesting and then exploring the rain washed world, Alida noted something about us having "a lot of jackpots."  And I believe that comment came soon after Jason said something like, "this is what happy looks like!"