All things blueberry…

We had a great end to our Summer Solstice weekend. The weather was amazing! My daughter had a couple of friends over to play with the hose, a few huge sponges and a bunch of buckets. If you’ve never had a bevy of 9 year olds splashing around in your yard…let’s just say, bring earplugs!

The oldest was relaxing after a long Friday and Saturday of getting up early to go to his anime convention (the kids dress up like their favorite Japanese cartoons/graphic novel characters) and staying out way later than usual. He had fun, though. He spent most of Sunday holed up in his room playing Xbox and vegging out. I thought I’d share with you a couple of the pictures that he took, though:

So, yeah, you can see he was going for a theme here…..

In other news, my middle guy spent the day playing with friends outside, riding bikes and the like. I did happen to catch him alone for a few minutes, sitting under the tree in the front yard. I dub these photos “Dude! What crawled up your butt?”:

Apparently he did not enjoy my intrusion on his quiet moment in nature. *snort*

And lastly, Bill and I started a batch of blueberry mead! Bill took a microbrewing class last year and has made a big batch of bear (typo, but I’m leaving it!) and a smaller batch of hard apple cider. While going through my Summer Solstice stuff I found a recipe for blueberry mead, and he just had to try it. My goodness did it smell heavenly while it was getting mixed up! It’s now sitting in a 5 gallon carboy (fancy brewers name for a big glass jug) fermenting. It will be alcoholic in 4 months (right in time for Halloween! Woohoo!), but will be at it’s peak next year at Summer Solstice! I can’t wait to try it. Here’s what a 5 gallon carboy half full of blueberry mead looks like:

Here’s what a 5 gallon carboy of blueberry mead looks like with a sleeping cat:

That’s five pounds of frozen organic blueberries steeped in 3 gallons of water and mixed with pounds of organic wildflower honey with a little yeast. I’m telling you, you can’t imagine how good this smells! (the mead, not the cat). BTW, that’s Tanner, one of my zoo critters.

So we are on to our first full week of summer vacation. Hopefully I will be able to keep this brood busy and out of trouble. Our first order of business is going to be taking a backhoe to my daughter’s room. Ick.