The Demise of Summer, Conference, Twenty Years in Arabia, and Apples

We're kind of bummed that summer is over! We've had snow on the ground twice this past week, and "baby it's cold outside." We mounted an indoor/outdoor thermometer just inside our back door so we can keep track of how cold it's getting. It was 29.4 degrees ferinheit yesterday morning. Burrrrrrr. . . . This is a view out our north window. The morning that we took this picture there were two hot air balloons very close to our house. It's so fun to have the mountains and beautiful serenity of the green golf course near our home, but to look out and see the color and wonder of a gigantic floating ball makes life a delight!We enjoyed going to the Sunday morning session of General Conference the first week-end in October with our good friends, Wayne and Diane Shurtliff. I'm sure that you all enjoyed it as much as we did. If you missed it, be sure to check www.lds.org to hear all the council and inspiration that we got to see in person. We love to hear the words of the general authorities. They seem to be able to pinpoint what we need to hear the most.
It was around the 10th of Oct. when the two of us drove north to Boise and Seattle to put on our famous "Twenty Years in the Middle East" show for Andrea's and Julie's Relief Society groups. We took a bunch of our 'ethno-junk' (Egyptian perfume bottles, Iranian table cloths, Middle East Costumes, etc. etc. etc.) and prepared some tasty foods from the area such as Hummus and Arab bread, tabouli, a platter of dates and uum ali, which tastes a lot like bread pudding with coconut and toasted almonds. It was pretty successful, and we had a good time putting it on.
Oh, did I mention that Dave was the star of the show with his impressive power-point show. He shared his vast knowledge of the Church in the Middle East, Lehi's Trail, and a part about Aramco, and the community we left in April. Sorry this picture isn't the best. . . but it gives you an idea of how it went.
We've been doing applesauce! We found a really nice family in American Fork that shared the abundance of their two, heavily loaded apple trees with us. Heather and her girls helped us pick apples. It was a fun time with Gracie and Janie. They never imagined that apples came on trees. : ))) We took apples to Julie, and would have made applesauce with her, but didn't have enough time. We took apples to Andrea, and bottled 20 quarts of applesauce despite a broken kitchen water pipe. That's another story. We bottled about 20 quarts with Heather as well. It felt good to accomplish so much and teach a skill that will be useful to the rising generations. As it turned out, Dave pealed the great majority of the apples on a handy contraption that peels, cores and slices into horizontal slices all in the same motion. We could hardly keep up with him. It was a great family effort!