Well that was

one hell of a week! In a good way!

Monday, through a strange set of circumstances, I volunteered to help set up a food bank on our end of the county. Food security, both personal and community-wide, is really important to me, and this was something I'd been thinking about for a while. Pretty funny that the week I made up my mind to get involved in the community this just sort of fell into my lap. :D

Tuesday was our first civic club meeting and it was GREAT! We took the kids and I just sort of assumed that they would play on the playground while we met with the other folks. Well, one of the committee members (that I've known for ... oh ... 25 years? maybe 30?) brought his teenaged daughter, who very kindly watched out for the girls the entire time. I volunteered to help organize the Halloween Carnival (the civic club's biggest fundraiser of the year), which will actually be on Halloween this year. I'm so excited! This meeting was a really, really big deal for us as a family. I've been so worried that all of my grandmother's trash talk about our religion would have the whole group ready to burn us at the stake. I'm pretty ashamed of myself that I made such assumptions about people. Everybody was so nice. :) We even met the people who bought the "pink" gingerbread house across the street from the park: a nice Jewish couple who are apparently pretty serious preppers! I'm hoping to get to know them a little better.

We had F's birthday party at the park yesterday: another Big Deal, as this is the first time any other kids have come to her party. There were 4 5-y/o's and 1 2-y/o, all girls. Glad it was outdoors, as I don't think we could have stood all the squealing inside! LOL Anyway, everybody had a great time.

Today, I picked tomato hornworms off my tomato plants (and some other kind of worm, too) and fed them to the chickens ... who actually ATE them this time! Yay! Now that I know what I'm looking for, I'll be checking the plants every afternoon and giving the chicks an afternoon snack.

I also made my very first "all-by-myself" batch of pickles: dilled okra. Mmmm. AND, I'm marinating (right this second!) a bowl of sliced tomatoes in cheap red wine. Yep, you read that right! Tomorrow, I shall drain them, sprinkle them with salt and dried herbs, and dehydrate them. Mom already did some for me and they are so freakin' delicious I want to eat the entire bag. But I won't: I'm determined to make a homemade pizza with homegrown dried tomatoes. I WILL keep some tomatoes for that. I WILL TOO!

I should be baking bread right now, or folding laundry, or cutting up pears to make preserves, but the girls didn't nap today and I'm frickin' tired. Plus, we ate a LOT of popcorn this afternoon/evening and now I feel kinda sick. :P

OH ... did I mention that we had nearly 10 INCHES of rain last week?!?! Ridiculous ...