New camera - more photos

Louis has been working at DirecTV for about 6 weeks now. He is past the 3 weeks of training & the 2 weeks of OJT with a coach. Those early 5 weeks were difficult for him as he is not a "Morning person" & yet he had to get up at 4:00 a.m. to 4:30 each morning & leave for work by 5:00 or shortly after. He survived with an average in the 90's on his tests & graded calls. He finds the work challenging & interesting so far. His peers average about 25 years old! Now he has started a later shift more to his liking... It leaves me with most of the animal chores, but that's "ok". We are paying our bills. After getting hay for the animals for the winter with his first few paychecks, (since we no longer have horses boarding here), Louis bought me an Olympus SP 350 digital camera for my birthday! I'm learning how to use it now.

We were given an antique apple press a couple weeks ago. The date it was cast - 1872 - is stamped in the metal parts of it. We spent one afternoon pressing 19 half-gallons of apple juice from Ron Smith's apples. He helped me to get the hang of the whole procedure. Then a few days later, we spent 3 to 4 hours pressing the apples we still had downstairs on tarps ripening from the pickings of our apple trees. I had been making apple sauce & crisps & had given a lot of apples away to friends & family, yet we still pressed 17 half-gallons of juice from what remained. Letting the juice sit for 2 to 3 days allowed it to become the cider that we then froze. What fun! All the bees in our immediate vicinity gorged themselves on the juice & apple mash. The horses & sheep loved the mash, gobbling it as fast as I could place it in their troughs. One bee did sting me, though it could have been worse, since a swarm of them surrounded Ron & I as we worked the press. A couple of the wooden parts broke during the last pressings, so Ron plans to find some hard maple to replace some of the wooden sections this winter. Now I am finishing the processing of our harvested & ripe pears & tomatoes. We've eaten a lot of homemade tomato soup lately!