Christmas Aftermath

After spending gobs of (unsolicited) money on us during their stay, my parents left this morning around 7 AM. Among other things, we now have an area rug for the couch/coffee table area, two sets of much needed drawers for our bathroom, and a big pegboard for our garage.

The visit was busier than I would've liked, but what can you expect when you only see your parents a couple times a year, and your area has a big Korean presence? Almost every day had large amounts of driving around, except Christmas day, where we sat around, pleasantly doing nothing in particular. I thought we had told my mom that Harmony would be cooking, but apparently she did not get the memo (she brought lots of food); much of the food that Harmony prepared remains frozen or otherwise uneaten. As predicted, our house is much more organized now, thanks to my mom. As predicted, my dad enthusiastically devoured the carrot cake, monkey bread, and whole wheat chocolate chip oatmeal peanut butter cookies with walnuts.

Among other things, one of our visits to one of the farmers' markets yielded a 5'9" stalk of sugar cane. It was only $2, so I didn't feel too bad about tossing it in the shopping cart. Pictures below illustrates parts of the peeling, crushing, boiling, and reducing. The boiling and reducing took hours.

I know, I should've used macro focus...

Let it be known that a 5 foot stalk of sugarcane produces this much cane juice. If we let it reduce to syrup consistency, it would, of course, be even less. But it's very sweet and very good. We had never made our own sweetener before, and we can see now that when heating costs and labor are factored in, buying sweeteners is much more cost effective. But it was just an experiment, and sort of fun to be able to say we made our own cane juice syrup.



And now some pictures of mischievous little Luna after taking a romp through a damp and dirty backyard. She had also been given a bath that very morning. All was forgiven when we saw how cute she looked in these pictures. Make sure to click on these pictures to fully examine all the dirt that she got on her.





We also found out that Luna makes a very good watchdog. Perhaps too good of a watchdog ;) She would bark if she heard the slightest noise out of my mom or dad during the night. To her credit, how was she to know that my mom or dad made that slight noise?