My Sojourn in Logan

And I come to the conclusion of my September 2008 slideshows.

Michelle and I were really busy running hither and yon during my two weeks at her house. We really didn't get many pictures, but it was neat just to "live life" with Michelle for a little bit. If we weren't sleeping in, we were at the local Christian bookstore cleaning and organizing (or re-doing the store window! FUN!!), helping with campus outreach, attending Bible studies, or running to Michelle's piano students' homes. Really, anything's fun when you can talk. And talk and talk and talk. Oh, but one morning we got up and hit...HOW many garage sales, Michelle?!? It was really fun, but started to rain later in the morning. So we picked up some chips for lunch (ha ha!) and ran to a consignment store to bargain shop. :)

Another evening we went star-gazing up near a camping site in the mountains. Soooo amazing! Saw several shooting stars! At home, we enjoyed spending time with Michelle's little sister Abbie, curling each-other's hair while watching Cranford.

We also tried to make ice cream. Had great-looking recipe for lemon-blackberry ice cream that we wanted to try. So one Sunday afternoon we decided we'd get it going and then just enjoy some down time, reading and talking. Michelle's brother Dan ran out to get our ingredients for us, since we also had double-duty of watching Abbie (Mr. and Mrs. Shook were out until about 9:30 that evening). So once he came back, we mixed up the lemon ice cream recipe, as well as some vanilla ice cream...might as well, we figured, since we had the ice cream mixer going.

Let me repeat...SINCE THE MIXER WAS GOING. It died. Dan, again, was pressed into service. He worked on it for a good long time, attempting to do what engineers do to breath life into something that doesn't work (mysteries). But the sturbborn and rather old machine only worked for intervals, making HORRIBLE squealings and grindings, and finally stopped dead again. So here we were stuck with a LOT of ice cream mixture and no way to freeze it.

In the meantime, a couple of Michelle's brother Jon's friends came over to ride bikes. So we were trying to find room for the ice cream in freezers, freezing what we could in the squeaky machine, fixing dinner for 4 hungry boys and little Abbie, and washing our multitude of dishes. Just enough of the ice cream had frozen sufficiently for the boys to have a vanilla ice cream slushy for dessert, and then Dan again ran out to see if he could find another ice cream maker. Guess the stores don't carry them in late September. Huh.

In the end we gave up on the ice cream machine, stuffed all the mixtures into the freezer, and hoped it'd be edible on the morrow. I don't think the lemon stuff ever did freeze solid.

Finally, we made some popcorn and sat down for dinner...at nearly 9pm. What was that I said about down time? Why couldn't we have just made...brownies?