Every year, our church sponsors a soccer camp/vacation Bible school known as Big Kick Soccer Camp. This year we have around 150 kids, aged 4-12 years and 20 or so coaches, aged 250-300 years…or so it feels.
Anyhow, my kids are surely having a ball playing soccer, getting really muddy and hearing Bible stories. These pictures are from last night, a perfect soccer evening!
We canned a bunch of green beans last night with the new pressure cooker. I really enjoy using the All-American pressure cooker for a number of reasons. It seems to come to temperature very fast. This could really be a perception thing since it has a temperature gauge.
With a normal weighted-pressure cooker without a gauge (see pic below), I always watch the pot never knowing if it is almost at pressure, if the heat is actaully climbing, etc…and, of course, a watched pot never boils. With this canner, I can see the temp and pressure as soon as it boils. I also like this canner because it does not have a rubber gasket to break down and fail. The All-American is formed in a shape such that a metal-to-metal seal is formed. It is also American made (of course) which I appreciate.
Now, the bad stuff…you have to get the lid and base of the canner lined up just right or a seal will not form and the canner will not get to pressure. We ran into this problem last night on our second load of green beans. I didn’t realize it was not sealed until it got pretty hot. I couldn’t just open it and try again (it was still very hot, even though not to pressure). We’ll recan the beans tonight since it was almost midnight when we figured it all out. We’ll just put new lids on the jars and try again.
Most times this canner seals fine but I always have to gently pry the lid from the base after it cools.
It forms a very tight seal. The manual says that a screwdriver placed just right will break the seal (and it does) but I wish I could just pop the lid off every time. It is possible that I am not aligning the lid right when I screw down the bolts that hold the lid and base together. I think that task is nearly impossible though. This is a small issue but an issue nonetheless.
Finally, the All-American is very heavy compared to other canners. This is good and bad. It has a substantial feel to it for sure. The problem is that it is not recommended for glass top stoves and it is heavy to move when full. the price is fairly high but it should last a lifetime. It just has a quiality look-and-feel which I really appreciate.
I sort of like the sounds of canning so I recorded some of what we were doing last night with the canner. I hope you enjoy this “sound-seeing tour”. Click the arrow below to hear it :
Fourteen years ago today, Emily and I were married in Charleston. It’s hard to believe how fast the time has flown. We have lived in 3 states, have 2 beautiful kids, a great place to live, jobs we like and we love each other more than ever. I never dreamed that life would work quite like it has, but through ups and downs, we’ve mostly had a lot of fun and I couldn’t imagine it any other way! Thanks wife!
Now, on to the other part…we got each other some interesting presents this year. Actually, we each bought our own, but we had the other’s blessing. Emily got me a new All-American pressure cooker and I got her some aquamarine earrings. This is a good arrangement!
My parents were in town last weekend and helped us harvest from the garden. Most of out time was spent picking beans. There were 6 rows of tenderette bush beans to pick. All together, we harvested 44 pounds of beans on this first picking. A bushel of beans of 30 pounds so we picked about one and a half bushels all together. We expect to harvest again this weekend and we may get another harvest after that. Once we picked, we spent a good deal of time snapping the ends off the beans and breaking them into pieces for canning. With two pressure canners going, we canned 30 quarts of beans on Saturday/Sunday. Beans are simple to can. We fill the warm jars nearly to the top with beans, add boiling water and a teaspoon of canning salt and pressure can them at 240 degrees for 25 minutes. Of the 30 quarts, only one didn’t seal. Aside from the beans we canned, three families had a good helping of fresh beans to boot. Emily’s grandfather mentioned and I have read that beans near tomatoes do better than beans alone and that certainly was true of our first harvest. We have one row of beans between two rows of tomatoes and they are larger, healthier plants and produced more beans than the rows that were away from the tomatoes. Next year, we will plant tomatoes and beans, every other row.
We harvested yellow summer squash on Saturday when my parents were here for a visit. I didn’t count but I suppose we collected around 25 perfect sized squash. We ate a bunch of it and gave some away. I have a bunch of it in the dehydrator also. Squash is around 94% water so dehydration can significantly reduce the volume for storage. We haven’t tried to rehydrate and use squash yet but we have had luck with bell peppers and hot peppers. I expect we’ll use it in with other stuff more than we will eat it in a squash-only dish. We’ll see. 
Anyhow, I took some pics a while back of bumblebees in the squash flowers. We have quite a few plants and there were tons (I didn’t count but I am positive it was over 100) bumblebees in the flowers.
Many flowers had two or three bumblebees. It is paying off now. 
I think the flowers must be too deep for my honeybees to get nectar from it as I never saw a single honeybee. Anyhow, there are still a lot of flowers and bumblebees so I guess we’ll have a lot of squash. I surely hope so…I love it!
Abigail came home from church today with quite a shiner. I asked her what happened and she said that her friend’s head was where she was putting her head. I think Abigail took the worst of it but she seems in pretty good shape now! I am surprised that this is her first significant black eye the way she and her brother wrestle. I usually take the beating then I guess.
A few days ago I noticed this awesome sternwheeler docked at the levee. The Cincinnati Belle spent 2 days docked at Haddad Riverfront park (the official name for the levee) and provided lunch and excursion trips (see the Gazette article). I didn’t realize it was going to be here until it was too late for us to participate but it surely looked good on the water. I hope they continue to dock here from time to time. I would love to take the kids on a trip!
I love driving home from work in the summer seeing all of the boats floating nearby waiting for Live on the Levee. The levee is a fantastic part of the city and part of what makes the downtown so neat. Maybe I need to get a boat!
I take it back! I take it all back! Abort your 2.6 upgrade. I write software for a living…I know what happens when stuff is first released! What was I thinking?!?!
Ok, get my point? It wasn’t all pretty afterall. Lots of good stuff but some stuff just doesn’t work as well as it should. e.g. image uploads were a mess for me…I think I will wait for v 2.6.1 or something. I was fortunate enough to have saved everything to roll back…and that was easy and went smoothly. Sorry for the false alarm!
Last night we went to a WV Power baseball game. The kids were excited to go, but I think it was mainly because we said they could get a pop while there. Anyhow, the game started at 7:05 – the Power vs. the Columbus (SC) Catfish. We arrived a few minutes early and the pleading for drinks began. We squelched that issue pretty quickly by buying $12 worth of drinks. The postal service was promoting their new stamp commorating the 100th anniversary of the song, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”. It looks like a pretty cool stamp, as stamps go. 
Anyhow, it was an absolutely perfect night for baseball and the Power did not disappoint, winning with a final score of 14-4. Now, to be honest, we are not a baseball family. We don’t play, we don’t watch, we just don’t care about it. In spite of that, the set-up at Appalachian Power Park is first-rate and we had a lot of fun just being around the fans and the event.
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I just upgraded wordpress, the software I use to build this site. Version 2.6 was released in the last few days and adds a number of pretty nice features. I won’t go through them here but check out this video
for info on what has changed. All in all, the upgrade was extremely easy. I just made a backup of the database and my wp-content area. I stopped all wamp services just in case. My instructions didn’t explicitly say to stop them but from experience with Windows services, I figured it couldn’t hurt. The download for the new source was small and speedy. I unzipped and copied everything (except the wp-content dir) into the wordpress root and then carefully copied the new stuff from the downloaded wp-content over the appropriate items in my wp_content (I didn’t want to hammer my mods, themes, etc). I restarted all wamp services and logged in to the site. On initial login, I got a message that I needed to upgrade my database…and there was a nice button to push to take care of it. I pushed the button and 5 seconds later I was in. That’s it. I was so surprised at how easy it was. I haven’t figured out how useful some of the changes will be yet though I especially like captions for pictures and the supposed easier editing in the wysiwyg post/page creator. We’ll see how that part works out. Anyhow, congratulations wordpress for an awesome update!