Celebrating 2

Tomorrow is Jacob's 2nd birthday.  But we celebrated today and as far as he knew today was his birthday.  He wore a pin all day that said "Today I'm 2!".

To celebrate we all headed out for a little bowling.  For my American family: we play 5-pin bowling .  As the name suggests, there are only 5 pins and the ball is smaller than one used in 10-pin bowling.  Weighing only 3 pounds, it has no finger holes -- instead it rests in your cupped hand.  The nice thing about 5-pin is that with the smaller ball you can introduce very young kids to bowling.  Don't fool yourself, though, controlling a smaller ball isn't all that easy!

First, it's important to dress correctly!  A bowling shirt and bowling shoes are pretty important. Thanks Auntie Dayna for such a cool shirt!

"Form" ... negotiable.

Body "English" to help the ball down the lane ... totally necessary!

Mom needs help choosing a ball.

There were hugs for Oma when she made a strike!

We all had a great time.

In Jacob's words, "I like to go bowling!" (which is also one of his favourite Raffi songs).

All in a day's work

So, vacation is not over, but we have returned to Calgary to spend the last 2 weeks here.  We spent 3 days in Kelowna where the weather was marginally nice.  Harry got in a round of golf.  I visited yarn shops and art galleries.  We headed back for Calgary with the idea of doing a bunch of canning and cleaning up the yard for winter.  We were about an hour from home when we saw this:

It's a bit early for this much snow on the mountain tops.  Not a good omen!  We got back here on Friday evening and it has been COLD and raining since we got here.  We're expecting snow tonight.  Harry says not to worry ... according to him we'll get a snowfall, THEN we'll get Indian Summer.  I hope he's right.

We brought fresh produce home from the Okanagan Valley.  Today we worked on tomatoes.

We started with 30 pounds of Roma tomatoes.  First we quartered the tomatoes and put them through a tomato press.  A tomato press is soooo cool!  You put the tomatoes in the top and turn the crank.  The tomato puree comes out the right side.  The peels and seeds come out the left side.  We pressed all 30 pounds in about an hour and a half.

Thirty pounds of romas yielded us 12 quarts of tomato puree.

While Harry readied cooking pans and measured puree,  I chopped the mirepoix for the Italian-style sauce we had decided to make first.  Chopping onions gets me every time.  However, swimming goggles work wonders!!  Yeah, yeah ... I KNOW I look stupid.

We cooked the sauce, then processed it.  We bought a steam bath canner in our travels and it is really cool.  It uses about 1/4 of the water and energy of a traditional water-bath canner.

At the end of the day, we had 20 - 500 ml jars of tomato sauce :  15 of Italian-style and 5 plain.  (Conversion:  500 ml is slightly larger than a pint.)

 ... all in a day's work ...