Hannah’s baby bunnies are just over 2 weeks olds and are starting to open their eyes. Today we let her a get a few of them out and bring them up to the house to play on the grass. Max is a little rough with the bunnies so we have to supervise the playtime. Hannah takes very good care of the momma rabbit and loves to hold the soft bunnies. She will be selling them again for $5 each to try to earn some school money.

Every summer we make the trek to Panguitch Lake for our annual Chidester family reunion. It is fun to see family and hear the stories of Jolynn’s ancestors who helped to settle Panguitch, UT. My favorite part is helping Dan with the cooking and eating way too much food.

The weather was amazing, and the kids had a blast just romping and playing near the campground. This year we mostly played with our Teeple cousins since most of Jolynn’s siblings couldn’t make it. Aunt Heidi always brings the best treats. Luke beat me in a arm wrestle again.

Jolynn refused to pose with her batch of applesauce that she canned today. Alyssa was more than happy to do the posing. This is homemade applesauce that she made from the yellow delicious apples that Hannah and I picked from our orchard yesterday. Don’t tell Jolynn, but this half-a-days worth of hard sweaty work only used up about a third of the apples. She would have canned into the night if she wasn’t 8 months pregnant. We made her stop and put her feet up, then I did the cooking and dishes (we went to McDonalds).

After we got home from our McDonalds outing this huge thunderstorm dumped some serious rain in us. This picture is looking west to our neighbors house. You can see that it is pretty much a raging river running between our houses. Thankfully our house is on the higher ground and most of the water went right on by. But, I spent an hour or two helping the Blackburns re-route the river so it didn’t completely destroy their yard. Their garden ended up under about a foot of water. The ditches and canals were running at full capacity. Our other neighbors the Bagley’s got some flooding in their basement. It made for an exciting evening.

We were incubating about 80 eggs that we had collected from our pheasants. They have been incubating for about 24 days now and this morning we awoke to 30 chicks that hatched during the night. Some you can see are still wet and a little groggy from busting out of the egg. A few are all dried and just as chipper as they can be. We hope to have a few more hatch today.

We picked the apples from our “Yellow Delicious” apple tree. Hannah was my good helper and we filled 4 5-gallon buckets clear full of apples. Jolynn is hoping to make some yummy applesauce. We discarded a couple of buckets full of wormy or bird-eaten apples. Our chickens and rabbits enjoyed eating them.

Speaking of rabbits, our momma rabbit gave birth to eight healthy baby bunnies while we were in San Diego last week. Hannah will be selling them for $5 each when they get their eyes open and get a bit bigger.

Our last full day in San Diego started with me slipping away at 5:00 AM for an el-cheapo half-day fishing charter. I really enjoyed being on the ocean and the fishing was a bit challenging with rented gear. The cost was like $40, but that’s because there was 71 people on an 80 foot fishing boat with only 2 deck-hands to help us all. The guys that caught a lot of fish and the biggest fish had their own gear and fishing lures while the rest of us were stuck dangling live bait over the side. I saw some huge baracuda caught as well as 3-4 bonito. I was standing next to one pro when he got “spooled” by something huge. I just caught this baby baracuda. Was a slow day fishing. Next time I’ll spring for a smaller boat with more one-on-one instruction.

Jolynn enjoyed sleeping in and a quiet breakfast at the hotel. This is the view from where we caught the water taxi near our hotel. She was kind enough to meet me for lunch at Joe’s Crab Shack where I ate a huge bucket of crab legs. We were pretty lazy the rest of the day and walked through the Hotel Del Coronado. We enjoyed a quiet movie at the hotel “27 Dresses” and then a fantastic dinner at the historic boat house restaraunt. We took a cab to the beach and got to see our last ocean sunset. Back to the grind.