Nutria Day in South Louisiana

(Don't forget to look at my retreat photos from yesterday's post.)

Well, no self respecting Cajun would listen to a groundhog, but Pierre the Nutria says we will not have 6 more weeks of Yankee winter!

Pierre C. Shadeaux predicts a long and wonderful Louisiana Spring.  It was quite foggy when he woke up this morning!

My cousin and her hubby are visiting from Illinois and flying back to Chicago today.  Maybe.  Her neighbor told them there was 10 feet of snow in their driveway after the snow plow came through.  Give me hurricanes any day!  LOL. 

Her daughters are the smart ones, one lives in Florida, the other in Hawaii.  Go figure.

I enjoyed seeing them.   People kept stopping by our table and marveling at the fact we all look so much alike!  One face, yep, our family has just one face! Karen hopefully will send me the picture Jim took.

While I was at the retreat, I received my Louisiana Traveling Quilt!  I was so excited I tore into the box before I even got halfway in the door!  I have to show it at the Modern guild tonight so I will show some photos tomorrow.

I hope the other two participants (Pat and Kelly) got theirs and we can exude love for our fabulous quilts!  And make eeryone else jealous!  You know they will be!

Cousins and Apples

I had lunch with my other vet cousin John and my visiting cousin Jason/boys/Diane his mom.  It was good to see John and Deb again, it has been a long time.  He is partnering with my vet who built him a new office within the current vet clinic.

John is a specialty vet the other vets go to when they need a higher level of work than they can perform themselves.  His wife Deb is a vet as well, and she shows Cocker Spaniels.  She said she had about 20 dogs at their home right now!  That is more than I have!  LOL.  Frank is so lucky and he doesn't even know it!

I left the camera home so you get no pictures of cousin John.

I did come home and do some apple canning.

I started with this:





And peeled them.  Later I used the leftover liquid to boil down the peels and cores and make apple jelly.


First I sliced the apples in large slices, processed them and decided I wanted them in small pieces.  So I undid all the bottles and chopped and re-processed
them all.  That made for a long long long day of standing on my feet, and now my knee and back are killing me!

See, they just weren't doing right.

Here are half of them lined up,  I had 24 of those suckers to re-do.

See how they are floating to the top.  But they will still make good pies!

The thing I excelled at was making burnt caramel on my stove.  I spent about an hour leaning over it trying to clean it.  I never got some of it off.  I tried so many things.

I think I will heat it up and see if the sugar liquifies and then wipe it out.  I never thought of that yesterday!  LOL>