It rained!

And our rain barrels have water in them again! We only got 45 minutes of rain this morning, but the 3/4 " or so that fell was enough to fill the three current sets of rain barrels more than half full! James just put phase 4 together yesterday, so the caulk is still curing and they aren't hooked up yet. He'll tackle that this afternoon.

We picked two half-bushel baskets of peaches Saturday morning, and have them all spread out on paper bags on the livingroom floor ripening. They come off the tree a bit too hard to really consider ripe. By the time they're ripe, they fall off the tree and get bruised when they hit the ground, so those aren't much good for processing.

We did about a 1/4 bushel yesterday-blanch, chill, peel, slice into chunks, immerse in diluted lemon juice to prevent browning, then spread on trays to freeze. We're still refining the process, since they still clumped once we transferred them to gallon bags to store. We'll figure it out! At any rate, we have three gallon bags of frozen peach chunks-roughly two pounds per bag, and we're looking at 10-12 bags by the time we're through.

James has also cooked and frozen two pounds of black beans, to have them ready to use in cooking, along with the chickpeas that were left after he made hummus. He's really enjoying his freezer!

Am I lucky or what? And on top of this, he thanks me for not complaining when he goes out to putter in the yard!

We are enjoying a bit of a slower pace these days, as all of our teenagers are at their other houses for a couple of weeks. We still see quite a bit of Liza, popping in for this or that, as she prepares for her departure in only twenty days! Time flies!