Our Thanksgiving Weekend

It's harvest time! Jim is busily picking a plateful of cayenne peppers - sort of like a peck of pickled peppers, except we don't like them pickled, and don't know what a peck is. He'll dry them and the grind them up, to be sprinkled on just about anything he wants. The green peppers beside them also produced a bumper crop, which Sarah has diced and frozen. Behind him, the tomato plants are going crazy, but they are likely to freeze before actually producing any tomatoes - rats. However, we were able to pick some basil leaves, dry them, and grind our own - better than store-bought. Hopefully we can do the same with some oregano, if it hasn't frozen yet.

It's also pansy planting time! We missed it last year, so Sarah was even more excited about it this time. These are the only flowers that seem to do well all winter - they are even ok with snow. Sarah tried not to over do it, but still had to send Jim back for more pots and soil.

For our Thanksgiving dinner, Jim cooked steaks on the grill. Nope, not too traditional, but Jim's family decided not to get together, so we just went with what we know. Jim had just cooked hamburgers the week before, while Sarah was planting pansies, so we have a picture of that to show.

We spent most of the weekend sitting around, as Sarah had a nasty cold, and Jim was worn out from long days and nights of recovering from a server crash at the high school.

However, on Saturday we decided to have a small adventure, and drove out to Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park.
It's about 60 miles from St. George, south of Zion National Park. We went past Colorado City, stopping in Hilldale to take a quick look at some of the Black family land. Part of the road is unpaved and rather sandy, and would have been very scary if wet, but there wasn't a cloud in the sky, so no worries except getting stuck in sandy potholes.

The park itself consists of a small stretch of salmon-colored sand dunes up against a mountain ridge. The signs said the sand comes from Navajo sandstone, the same layer that makes up the walls of Zion Canyon. I'm not sure where they get "coral pink" from - I suppose it sounds more catchy than orangish-tan. It is very soft, however.

Here's a picture of Jim with one shoe off sampling the softness of the sand. Sarah tried it too, but found it was as cold as putting your foot in a mountain stream.

We looked out at the observation deck, then took the little 1 km trail with signs describing vegetation, tracks, and so on which were fairly well written (it turns out that the ripples in the sand are "mathematically mysterious"). There are some really tall grasses that reminded Sarah of the sea oats in North Carolina.


Sarah also tried sliding down a very small dune - it's a little like riding an avalanche, except you have to kind of keep it going.


There were people riding four wheelers around on the bigger dunes in the distance. We took a few cool pictures of ripples and such.

We were getting tired and it was getting dark, so we were glad to finish the loop. We asked a fellow hiker to take a picture of us together.

Despite Sarah's desire to add to her colored sand collection, we obeyed the injunction not to remove sand from the park. As we were driving home, however, we realized that the sandy road had the same kind of sand, and stopped to scoop up a ziplock bag full. It would make a great zen garden - anybody have a source for tiny rakes?

The finishing touch on our adventure was when Jim suddenly pulled over to the side of the road, having seen a spectacular moonrise in the rear view mirror. A huge yellow moon was rising over the cliff. Unsurprisingly, our attempts at capturing it on film paled in comparison to the real thing, but hopefully this gives you the idea.


We arrived home to find all the gerbils well. Hope you had a good Thanksgiving too!

It's Sunday morning at 7:45 MDT

and Mom and Dad just left. They arrived yesterday at about 5:30 pm with Grandma and Steve, taking them on their yearly odesey to Quartzsite. They tried out our back porch swing:

We all went out to dinner at the Golden Corral when J got home. It was crowded, but we got in and had good food. We lost Steve for a bit - I helped him find some mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans and fried chicken, but then I went to get something else for me, and he couldn't find his way back to our table, so he chose another family to sit with. The guy at that table noticed us looking all around for him, and we brought him back with us.

We only have one guest bed, so Grandma and Steve stayed at Betty and Blake's condo. Mom and Dad told them to be ready by 8 am, so at 7:40 they roused us with a phone call saying they were ready to go. Dad did tell them not to change their watches, not wanting to create extra confusion, and obviously they were obedient. So, they're off. It seems like a lot of house-cleaning for just a few hours of visiting. But now we have a clean house, so it's all good. It's all ready for anybody else that wants to come visit :).

Anyway, they talked about other family members blogging, so I thought I'd give it a try. J wasn't too motivated, but he helped come up with the title. He may post too - who knows. He has a sore shoulder from shotgun shooting yesterday (while I was cleaning) - he got NRA certified to teach rifle and shotgun courses. He is eating homemade salsa and chips for breakfast, I see. I am eating hot chocolate and an English muffin with raspberry jam.

We have stake conference today, so we are enjoying the lack extra meetings. We may even take a drive up to Zion to see the fall leaves. Or we may veg here at home playing with pictures on the Google program Picasa.


So, that's it so far. The gerbils are happy, so I guess all's well with the world.