Here's Looking at You

This little guy was on our porch the other night! Isn't he cute? Ben picked him up and brought him in our house to show me, at which time I actually did not think he was all that cute. (I am sure I've seen a salamander before, but not in my house, and since I was on the phone at the time, it rather startled me, especially when he dropped him on the floor and he almost squirmed under the hall closet door!) Anyway, once he was back out on the porch again, he was definitely cute, especially since he bothered to pose for the camera (actually, I think he was just paralyzed with fright).

Other than visits from salamanders, not a whole ton is going on right now. I can hardly believe that tomorrow is the 1st of October already! I made pumpkin pie for the first day of fall, and I plan to make pumpkin bread and chili for the first day of October. (Next, I guess, will be cookies for Halloween.) We are gearing up to go to Atlanta in about a week for a visit to celebrate my mom's 50th birthday and also to go up to SC for a couple days for my five-year college reunion/Homecoming. We are really looking forward to all of that a lot. The only thing is, we just hope we can find gas for the car to get up to SC because apparently there is some huge gas shortage in the Southeast (esp. Atlanta), and people are having to cancel activities because they can't find gas to put in their cars. (It started with the panic around Hurricane Ike, but then it got prolonged for some inexplicable reason.) In addition, Ben continues his job search (though is grateful to have some part-time work in the meanwhile that is giving him some great experience for the résumé). I guess besides all that, we are just closely following the financial news and the presidential election campaign. A lot of people are in a fret over everything, but we keep reminding ourselves that the Lord is sovereign and has promised to provide for and protect those who follow him. Thus, Proverbs 3:25: "Have no fear of sudden disaster, or of the ruin that overtakes the wicked, for the Lord will be your confidence and will keep your foot from being snared." Proverbs 1:20-end is also a good passage to meditate on in these uncertain times. Overall, we feel like these times are a calling for people to return to Him and to stop trusting in their riches and thinking that they can live a life apart from God.

Well, that's all for now. More maybe this weekend or after our trip next week!

We Are Coffee Roasters

How many of you out there drink coffee? Well, I try not to drink too much of it, but Ben really, really likes coffee and has been one of those "connoisseurs" of coffee for awhile now. That is, he will NOT drink instant coffee to save his life, and he doesn't do regular filter/drip coffeepots either. Only French press, espresso makers, or the like for him. Anyway, recently, for his 28th birthday, he received from his parents a coffee roaster. Who knew that you could roast coffee beans in the comfort of your own home?!! We didn't know such a thing existed--we thought it was a fancy operation involving large machinery. Well, it's not, and it really only requires a small machine that is about the same size as a coffeemaker. So, last night, we tried our hand at roasting coffee for the first time! It was an adventure...

First, you have to get the green (un-roasted, or, as I like to call them, "raw") coffee beans from somewhere--they're not that easy to find, in fact, so maybe this is another reason not many people roast their own coffee. We got ours as a gift, but they came from a store in California called Sweet Maria's. Here are the beans when we first put them into the roaster:

When you turn the roaster on, turn it to 6 to 8 minutes (more time=darker roast), and it will then begin roasting--which means lots of steam and lots of beans jumping around in the canister! (in fact, there was so much of a smell from it that our fire alarm went off, and we had to quickly open all our doors and windows...)

After it's done, you have to empty out the chaff which burns away from the beans during the roast. It looks pretty gross and smells pretty bad too. Personally, I think the chaff looks like empty cicada shells:

So, in a matter of about 6 minutes, you have beans that look just like the kind you can buy in the store!

And within about a day, you can grind them and make coffee with them--mmm:

The question of the day is: Does home-roasted coffee REALLY taste better? My (Jenny's) answer is, um, not that I can tell (and why on earth go through so much trouble for a cup of coffee?!!) .... however, Ben thinks so, and he is totally excited about this new and interesting "toy" of his. So, alas, this is what he has spent half of his Sunday afternoon doing--roasting 1 lb. of coffee :)

Gerber Daisies

One of my favorite flowers is gerber daisies, and last week Ben had a beautiful bouquet of pink ones awaiting me when I got home from work. They were so pretty that I couldn't resist taking pictures!

Philly & DC

We have been a little missing in action lately - sorry about that. It's hard to believe it's already September! We have been pretty busy lately with Ben officially graduating in late August and now working part-time as his job search commences. (Side note: looking for a job has to be about the most painful, difficult thing to do, so please pray that he/we will be guided to the right place and job at the right time, and that in the meanwhile, we will remain content and trusting in the Lord.) Anyway, last weekend we went to Philadelphia for my cousin Briana's wedding; we drove up Saturday morning, picked up my (Jenny's) dad at the airport and then later that night went to the wedding, which took place outdoors at Cairnwood Estate in Bryn Athyn, PA. The wedding was very pretty with a lovely pink and ivory white color scheme. One nice thing about it was getting to see a lot of my dad's family, who we never get to see, including his mom, my grandmother, who now lives in Washington state (she's in the picture above with me).

Later in the weekend, we went into downtown Philadelphia to see Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell. Although we didn't much care for the city as a whole, it was definitely cool seeing these historic places. The only disappointing thing was that the Independence Hall tour tickets were sold out when we got there, so we only got to see the outside part:

The Liberty Bell:

On Monday, we dropped my dad off at the airport to catch his flight back to Atlanta, and then Ben and I drove back toward home, making a several-hour stop in Washington, DC, on the way. We ate at Union Station (first picture, left, below) and saw the Capitol, and then we went to the U.S. Botanical Garden. We had been to the garden before and loved it, but we really enjoyed seeing it again. We recommend it to anyone who visits DC--especially since it's free!

My favorite was in the desert part of the garden (bottom picture, right): The Old Man Cactus! It is a cactus with a big mess of stuff that looks like an old man's white hair. Pretty funny!

We were very tired after our trip, and then we had the work week to get through, so this weekend we are really taking it easy. Fortunately, too, the tropical storm that passed us, Hanna, ended up being a little wind and rain and that was it, so nothing damaging at all. The sun is even coming out already! (We are a little sad, though, since we were hoping for a really neat tropical storm to watch all day!)

Susan's Visit

This weekend, Susan came to visit; she (as most of you know) is my (Jenny's) lifelong friend from Atlanta. We did a lot of lazing around, but we also walked through Colonial Williamsburg and a little around William & Mary, had a picnic on the York River beach today (with Cheese Shop sandwiches), and took a cruise in her new car (a red Honda s2000). It was fun times. Here are some pictures... (above is a sunflower in the Colonial W'burg garden that was too gorgeous not to take a picture of, and to the right is a pomegranate that was growing on a tree in the same garden.)

Below...Taking a spin in Susan's new wheels, a 2-seater (side and back view):

Picnic on the York River (sitting in the shade since it was very hot!):

Turtles in the Crim Dell pond at William & Mary:

Drinking coffee while watching the Olympics Saturday night (the coffee was made from a specialty new coffee-making contraption that Ben bought with a birthday gift certificate, called a Cona Vacuum):

Mammoth Pictures

Well, here it is - the big slide show of our trip to Mammoth Lakes, CA. Hope at least some of you have the patience and desire to view them all :) Of course, I don't expect everyone to, so if you want to, just click on the show, and then you can just select randomly which ones you want to view...or you can scroll through them all with the arrows at the top. (Click on Gallery View toward the top right if it doesn't at first go to the actual slide show with captions.) Enjoy--and hope you can sense the awesome beauty of the place at least to a small degree through these pictures. (By the way, this is a place Ben's family has been to almost every year since he was very tiny, and a place where his parents went when they were little too, so visiting this place has a great deal of family history/sentiment behind it!)

Back from California

We are back from our fun-filled 11-day trip to California, and it was (sadly) back to work today again for both of us. It is so hard coming back from such a wonderful vacation--especially when we visited one of the most beautiful places on earth with near-perfect weather all the time (warm, but not too hot, sunny, and dry). We will post pictures soon, but we have literally hundreds of them, so I need to sort through and find the best ones to put into a slide show for the blog. For now, here's one tiny glimpse of the beauty that surrounded us out there. This is a picture of a lake, Ellery, that is at almost 10,000 feet, and is just outside Yosemite National Park on the east side. It's where we caught most of our trout, and it's one of our favorite places out there.