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I love this time of year. Every autumn, our yard smells like a freshly opened bottle of Concord grape juice. I find excuses to step outside to take in the yumminess and get closer to the grapevines that line our yard. Unfortunately, Concord grapes have seeds. That’s the only thing that stops them from being the most amazing fruit ever. Concord grapes taste NOTHING like grapes you buy in the store and are sooo much better, if not for the dastardly seeds! If you’ve never tried one in its raw form, put it on your bucket list. Heck, come on over and pick some of ours.

With the grapes finally ripe, this weekend was the Annual Adinaro Juice and Jellymaking Festival. Attendees: me and Grandbaby Amelia. Yes, it’s a poorly attended event. The rest of the clan was “busy.” Picking the grapes is an incredibly tedious task and takes hours. Even worse than the task of PICKING the grapes is the task of STEMMING the grapes. To make the best tasting juice, one must pull each and every little grape off its stem. Those two steps for one grandma and her almost-3-year-old grandbaby takes an entire day. Especially since there were things like snack breaks, storytime, tantrums, and potty breaks interspersed with actual work…all of which I did while Amelia napped. I will give Amelia some credit, she actually lasted about a total of 20 minutes picking the grapes before being distracted by, well, toddler things. Bugs, dirt, sticks, etc.

While the Adinaro Juice Festival was going on in the yard, hubby James was in his woodshop finishing up a project:

It’s a little display cabinet that will hang on the wall in our Christmas room. Our Christmas room is actually the “formal” living room in our house, but since we only use it at Christmas when we all gather in there to open presents, well, that’s just what I call it. Perhaps I should call it the “Dust Bunny” room. Whatever its name, I’m excited for the display cabinet to get finished. Once it’s done, James will start on the next project and I can’t wait! It’ll be a new entertainment center for our family room. When our TV broke, we agreed to wait to replace it until James built a new entertainment cabinet. THAT WAS OVER TWO YEARS AGO. This should give you an idea of how long it takes to get onto James’ project list. Of course, he did remodel the RV in the interim, so I cut him some slack.

The only other thing we squeezed in this weekend was an Emergency Preparedness Fair that was held right next door to us at the neighborhood elementary school. Here was our favorite display:

With James’ OCD ways, he spent loads of time at this table learning how to deal with poop in the event of an emergency.   Being RVers, we already have a leg up on waste management, but here’s a great tip for you all…put a tennis ball in the bottom of a pair of pantyhose, and then cut the leg off. In an emergency, your city water may not function and when what’s left in the toilet evaporates, you’ll have horrible sewage smells coming from your toilet. Put the tennis ball in your toilet to block the noxious odors! Heck, maybe the zombies will be less able to smell you and will keep away.

So! That’s what we’ve been up to this weekend, just hanging at home. Das Bus got a break and spent time adjusting to her new RV pad.