Here they come

And so it begins…

We got our first red tomatoes today. This week I decided to try and track how much our garden produced. We have been eating green beans for a couple weeks now, so I will estimate those. All I know is that we are going to have lots of tomatoes, and eggplants (we have already eaten about 15 of those) and peppers, and who knows what else.

Time to get the pressure canner out.

It has been a crazy month thus far.

We started the month with three weddings in two weeks and for the past couple weeks we went to K-Zoo to visit family/friends and then went camping. Plus there have been lots of vegetables (and weeds) to harvest from the garden.

If you are in Kalamazoo the AirZoo is awesome and free. This was my first time since they redid it and I was very impressed.

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Soccer in the USA

So the World Cup has come and gone again. This year it seemed like more people in the US payed attention than last time. I sure hope that this trend continues. Over the past month I have watched a ton of soccer and had the time to think about how alien the game is to those of us in the USA. I feel that between the timing and all the diving will keep pro soccer on the back burner.

The timing of the sport is wacko. Counting up it totally foreign. We have to first know that they play for 90 minutes and then subtract the time on the clock from 90 to figure out how much time is left. Americans don’t want to know how much time has elapsed, we want to know how much is left until we can go get food and use the bathroom. To make matters worse there aren’t any commercial breaks so if you don’t have a DVR you have to hold it. There is a halftime at 45 minutes. Stoppage time does get added on at the half and end because the clock never stops. It gets totally confusing to play until 47 minutes, stop for halftime and then reset the clock to 45. This makes no sense to Americans.

Another reason is diving. To Americans this is not viewed as unsportsmanlike or fair. Seeing people constantly fall down clutching their knee my appeal to those in the English Premier League and other European Leagues, but not here in the US.

Low scoring and long games don’t help either, but fakers and weird timing make this game unfriendly in the US.

Fun Canoeing

A while ago I decided that we needed to paddle a good chunk of the Huron River this summer. Yesterday we spent most of the day on the river. We started at US-23/Whitmore Lake Road up in Brighton and paddled all the way to Whitewood Lake in the Dexter-Pinckney area. We had a great time and got a chance to visit the Locks on our way by their house. The kids were fine on our 5 hour trip, we made a couple stops for leg stretching and using the bathroom.

Being Unemployed

Well, I have finished my first week of being laid off. So far it has been crazy busy! I have actually been off work for two weeks, but the first one was vacation. We had three weddings in those two weeks, one of which I was in so it was pretty hectic. There was also some family in town, adding to the chaos.

Most of the applying stuff is taken care of, or at least as taken care of as I can at this point. It is great being able to spend so much time with the family. We have been going crazy with the gardens too. This week we thinned the beets and carrots, and got our first green beans and potatoes.