What appears to me to be a Cooper’s Hawk seems to have taken up our neighborhood as a hunting ground.
It grabbed this squirrel one evening and a few days later I’m pretty sure I saw it snatch a mourning dove out of our tree and fly away with it. It’s so fast and quiet though. Once something happens by the time you look it’s a just a blur disappearing.
I like apple cider, but it’s hard to find good (or even real) cider around here without driving way out to the orchards in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas.
So I bought a grinder and a press and built a cider station!
Building the bench took up a good chunk of Saturday–longer than I expected since it’s not exactly complicated, but I plugged along until it was done.
That made Sunday, Cider Sunday!
I bought 9.5 pounds of apples from Safeway: 50% Granny Smith, 25% Fuji, 25% Envy. I sliced them up, Corinne put them in the grinder, Heather ran the grinder. Then we loaded them into the press and out came beautiful, rich cider.
The 9.5 pounds of apples turned into 4.5 cups of cider. Less than I was expecting, but it tastes really good.
Also….not cost effective. I’ll have to pay attention to sale prices on apples. My delicious cider, ignoring equipment costs and labor, came at a cost of $6 a cup, yikes.
The paint on the garage door was in need of a refresh. It was puckering, buckling, chipping, and peeling in sections across the lower half of the door (which gets direct sunlight for about half the year). So on Saturday I scraped, sanded, and pressure washed the door. And on Sunday the girls helped me prime and paint it.
I don’t have a before picture, so you’ll just have to trust me that it needed the work. You can see how badly faded the paint is by comparing the finished door to the wall on either side which was originally the same color.
Heather finished up elementary school this year which came with a bunch of end-of-year activities. Here’s a smattering of them.
On April 21 she had her “Walk Through the American Revolution” play for which she was Benedict Arnold:
On May 5 was the Rancho Color Run, which included Corinne:
On May 30 Heather had her first violin concert:
And a video of part of the concert (sorry for the shakiness, I was standing in the back hand-holding the camera with a zoom lens):
June 2nd was the 5th grade recognition assembly:
And the last day of school was June 8:
That afternoon and evening we invited some of the girls’ friends to go to Lost Worlds (family fun center) and have a little party to celebrate.
