Merry Christmas

May the joy and love

you feel this holiday season
extend to every day
throughout the year.

Christmas 2009

I love a quotation by Ralph Waldo Emerson – “This time, like all times, is a very good one if you know what to do with it.” Isn’t that a wonderful challenge for all of us – knowing what to do with our good times? Christmas is an especially enchanting time and it is with joy that I greet each one of you – family and friends.

There have been a lot of changes this year at the Mathews’. Last spring, when Gary was still feeling fairly able, we had his 65^th Birthday Party/Open House and many of you came or wrote to share your love with Gary; he loved the day. It was a short six weeks later that cancer took his life and ended his three and a half year battle with various health challenges. It has been a pretty good life and, I am sure, he is in much better health now.

Needless to say, there has been some adjusting for me to do. Beth has been here at home with me and we thought that she would be here until she returned to school next fall. But an email yesterday has changed all that. She will be returning to Taiwan for another six month stint as an intern/teacher in a Chinese preschool where she will be teaching English to 3-5 year olds. She loved her first semester there and is excitedly looking forward to another.

Beth and I have spent a fair amount of time sorting and “sifting” through the layers of accumulation from 29 years of living in this house and 34 years of living in Toledo. I am sure that many of you can identify with the pain, the memories, and the release that comes with going through and reducing your holdings. It would be good to be lighter in weight in many ways. There is always next year.

Earlier this fall I went to New England with my mother and brother – to visit “home” and places familiar and places new. The next month I went with our eldest son, Ben, wife, Sonia, and their children, Katrina (8), Samuel (6), and Sarah (4) to Disneyland. I highly recommend going to such a place with children – such a wonderful, happy adventure!

Before the New England trip, I got to spend a bit of time with our next oldest grandchild, Jacob (3 years old and son of Libbey and Erick). We added Aubrey (daughter of Joel and Becky, in Virginia) to our family in February and even got to see her before Gary died. We will be adding another granddaughter in April of next year – Nathan and Sallee’s first.

This time of year is a wonderful time for acknowledging blessings and gifts from our Heavenly Father. They are many and time makes them more evident; foremost is the gift of our Savior. May you enjoy a time of blessing and peace this Christmas season and into the New Year.

Jessica Sprague Class - Day 2

Today we learned to load and add brushes to our photos. I have been somewhat blindly finding my way around PhotoShop Elements. It is good to learn how things are "really" supposed to work.

For today's lesson, I chose one of my favorite pictures of my sweetheart -- before his accident. We were waiting in the Portland Airport for Kyle to arrive home from his mission to the Philippines. I love the gentle strength that I see in this picture. The addition from the class is the frame and text.

I just started a new online class at jessicasprague.com called "Photo Editing: Frame-Ups & Special Effects." The first project was to add a .png frame and word art to an existing photo. I chose one of our granddaughter, Sarah. I don't know who in the family took the original picture (it was on my camera, so I have claimed it), but I love it -- even unadorned.

A New Toy on Loan

Yesterday a package arrived via FedEx. Kyle had told us that it was to be expected, but not what it contained. Our neighbor, James, has been trying to convince me to buy a WebCam, so my first sight of the "gizmo" suggested that it was a WebCam. But, NO! This is an honest-to-goodness digital video camera that is smaller than my Palm. I took it to one of Dad's appointments yesterday, hoping to read the instructions (yes, I am one of those) and take a video or two. The first instruction was to plug it into the computer to charge the battery. I was stuck until we got home and then for seven hours after that. I ended up waiting until this morning, per advice from Beth, and then couldn't get it to turn on. The screen indicated that the battery was fully charged but did nary a thing when I tried to turn it on. To shorten the story by ten or fifteen minutes, I will just say that I had the battery in upside down; once turned over, the camera worked fine. It is such fun and much easier to work than I had anticipated. The videos aren't going to earn any Oscars, but they will provide fun and memories. If I can manage to post them, the first one will be of Dad greeting his family and the second was as I was "putting him to bed" or "The Good Night Kiss." The videos play back just fine on the camera, but the sound is out of sync when I play them back on the computer. You may find that to be so on this blog, as well.








There are several more videos (already), but I feel a bit like the brand new grandma, ready to pounce on any unwary soul, loaded down with a parcel of baby pictures.

O-o-o-o. It has been a long time since I have written here. Two things that are rather exciting happened today. Well, lots of things, but two that I am going to write about here. The first I have been planning for and hoping for for quite a long time. I ordered a digital SLR camera from Costco. It is a Canon Rebel XSi 12.2 MP with a 3" viewing window and two lenses: 18-55mm IS & 75-300m, the same one that Ben has and that I tried over Christmas. I also spent some time on the phone with JerriLynn Woolley, confirming that it would meet my "needs." It won't arrive for 10 - 15 working days, so I hope to be able to contain my impatience.

The second thing I did tonight was find the announcement and supply list for a Shimelle Laine class that sounds exciting. I love her classes because they help us to celebrate the extraordinary in the everyday. I think that we usually discount the wonder of the ordinary -- without some help such as Shimelle consistently gives. The class is called "A Little Book About You THS YEAR." It ensures that there will be at least one picture of me this year, besides the formal one that Gary and I have taken together. A lovely picture that Shimelle has posted as sort of a "logo" for the class is this one:The connection that this has to the buying of the camera is rather tenuous, but here goes; I haven't really minded our little point-and-shoot cameras all that much, until I wish to do as she has done here -- have one portion of the picture in focus and the rest more or less out of focus. I played with that feature on Ben's over Christmas and fell in love with the results all over again -- this time in digital.

Aronia, Chokeberry, Chokecherry. Right!

The Aronia bushes are beautiful and prolific this year. I guess they have been for several years, but I have ignored them for the past two and Gary took care of them before that -- at least once they got their growing legs (or branches). For several years after Kyle planted them, it was a yearly battle with the deer. More often than not, the deer won and ate the fledgling branches nearly down to the ground; but time and an 8' net fence finally won. Now they are taller than I am and very leggy. They are probably too close together for optimum growth and production, but they are doing well, for all that. And, I suspect, they are much too woody to tempt the deer.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided that it was time to get at the berries, so I called Kyle to find out what to do with them, once picked. He did a bit of research and confirmed that we should steam juice them, as Gary has done in years past. I have never picked Aronia before, so was surprised to find that the berries didn't break away cleanly from the stems. In fact, they left a bit of the berry flesh at every juncture. I didn't mention that one of the values of Aronia is their strong, lasting dye. It is a rich purple! As I made my unsuspecting way, picking through the first bush, I was unwittingly spot dying my precious (and only) BYU t-shirt. (As soon as I discovered the impromptu dying project, I traded out the shirts; a good soaking and washing later and the BYU shirt was as good as new.) However, in time, I came to question whether the fruit was actually ripe. Usually nature has a way of cleanly severing the ties to the mother plant when the fruit is ripe and ready to launch on its own; this was definitely not the case with the berries I was picking. Nevertheless, I continued on, picking the entire first bush. Kyle had told me about cultivated bushes in Europe that would yield up to 37 pounds of fruit per bush. Naively I looked at ours and judged them to be loaded and well out-producing those European bushes. The first bush yield weighed in at 5 pounds 14.4 ounces; quite a bit short of the 37 pound goal. Only slightly chagrined, I started juicing them. Admittedly I was distracted during this process. (Wayne Secrist had come to mow our lawn; I chose to take that time for a weed-eater lesson -- and try to remember the juicer, as well. My way of remembering was to race upstairs to check if there was still enough water in the lower reservoir; if there was, I went back to weed-eating, if there wasn't, I simply added more.) That batch of berries must have steamed for two, three or more hours. The resulting juice (all 14 cups of it) was a beautiful color and slightly thick. It had a good taste, but there was an underlying "texture" of flavored paper. Somewhat disappointing.

A few days later I picked the second bush. There are a total of four bushes; three appear to be of the same variety, as they ripen about the same time and the berries have the same surface appearance. (Kyle did plant them in two different years, but doesn't remember which ones he planted when.) Their berries are a dark purple/black with a matte sheen. The fourth bush ripens somewhat later than the others and its berries, while the same color, are glossy. I hadn't paid enough attention to know if the other berries had been glossy previously and then become matte. Next year I will have more to look for.

Since picking the first batch of berries, I had been doing some internet reading and, among other things, learned that aronia is also known as chokeberry or chokecherry because the berries, straight off the bush, make you want to choke. I can attest to that; they are so dry and woody, for all of their good flavor. Another tidbit that I learned is that some people pick them by clipping of the clusters of berries. I tried that with this second bush. It made the outdoor picking go faster and made possible a little bit of help from Gary, getting the berries off the clusters. Although I am not sure that I would really need to remove them from the stems for steam juicing. I had also done some reading on steam juicers and recommended steaming time for various berries. It seems that 60 to 80 minutes should be sufficient for this type of berry. The yield of juice was predictably less, but more flavorful. There were six pounds 3.8 ounces of fruit and 11 cups of juice. A suggestion, from the internet, that the Aronia juice be cut half and half with apple juice and sweetened a bit has made it a wonderful breakfast drink. (Either that, or we are getting used to it.) Twenty cups are in the freezer, awaiting processing into jelly by one means or another; nearly the remaining five cups have been drunk up.

There are many health benefits ascribed to the berry, but I will save that for another time.

Power going underground -- at last!

For a year or more, Wayne Secrist has been talking about putting our electrical service underground. A month or so ago, things started happening: he would show up at our house with a lot of pipes, a 4x4 post, assorted other things. Then there were the hieroglyphics on the front lawn -- sign offs from the various utility companies for digging in that spot. Last Saturday (September 6th) Wayne and Zach Dahl came with a ditch digger and cut a deep, narrow trench from the power pole at the front corner of our lot to the back corner of the house and then at right angles, nearly to the basement wall. They encountered a problem when they ran into the sewer pipe out of the basement, but later patched it and all was good. They also ran another trench at the front of the house, off toward the porch; Charter is to use it to put that service underground, as well. They laid pipe in the trench and then covered it all in, except at the ends. I don't know if there is wire in the pipes yet or if that is to come later. As I understand it, they have gone as far as they can. The next step has to be taken by a licensed electrician; he has come by and looked at everything, but we still have the exterior wiring. He will be responsible for hooking up a new meter base (to be placed on the aforementioned 4x4 at the back corner of the house) and wiring it in into the house. I don't know if he does the PUD end, as well, or not. When he has done his work, he will switch over the power and then we can take all of the wiring off the outside of the house. Wayne recommends that we leave the current meter base (non-functioning) so as to not leave a hole in the siding that is currently there. When we can afford to side that portion, the metter base can go. I'll put in some pictures that, hopefully, will illustrate the electrical work and clarify the part of the house that will get sided in the next week or two. We will also be replacing the two side playroom windows and, hopefully, insulating that wall. More on that as it begins to happen.