Concrete or bust

Joe and I poured our concrete counter for the island this week. It turned out that the only day he could get that done with the guys from work was the only day I had available to make my years' supply of jam. So we just worked around each other!! But man, it was a mess (and still is in places).



The deal with concrete counters is that (1)It takes a lot of either research and/or know-how to do them. (2) It is very labor and time intensive. But (3) The materials are ridiculously cheap. I think we're in less than $100 total, where it would have cost us more like $400-500 to do granite or something else on our island. The concrete has to cure for 7-10 days before we can polish, acid stain, polish again, and seal it. Oh, and you can't set anything on it or use it at all before it's sealed. I hope it looks good when we're done!


My sister-in-law told me about a place that sells strawberries for $1 a pound if you come and pick them. So I took the kids with me and we picked 15 pounds of strawberries! Liz came over with a bunch of blackberries Nathan picked last time he was camping. We used my kitchenaid to get the seeds out of the blackberries. Then, I canned a batch of blackberry jam, two batches of strawberry jam, and two batches of mixed berry. It was a lot of work, but I'm really pleased with the results. Jam is not cheap, and we go through a lot. Plus, homemade jam is so much tastier than store jam packed with high fructose corn syrup.


Yesterday, we took a little trip to Spokane. AJ's birthday is on Friday, and we decided it would be cool to celebrate a little early and take him to the new Transformers movie in IMAX. He is still raving about it, even though we had to walk 1.5 miles to the theater because downtown was closed off for Hoopfest. We're busily putting off getting ready for his birthday party on Friday!