More home canning action

hi all,
We are busy canning here in the Emerson house. It's crazy for me to think that I am able to can food, and make all these super neat foods that I never would have thought of before. I mean I made grape syrup! have any of you ever made syrup, probably not, but let me tell you if you mess up making grape Jam, you just might end up with some tasty grape syrup =) So the grape jam was a little runny, we have moved on to new things.

Tonight we made Vegtable Salsa, which seems to have gone well. And we also made a batch of Cherry Jam, and oh my goodness is it Delicious, with a capital D! The cherry Jam actually set up like it was supposed to, which is in distinct contrast to the Grape Jam.

Included in the busy day today was taking newborn photos of Paisley, which I will be working on here soon. And I posted some pictures from my trip to London on my facebook page.

Other then that, not much else to say... Oh and I updated my real website www.mattemerson.com with some new pictures also.

-Matt

Twilight Movie

So, last night we went to see Twilight. We've been waiting a long time to see it, so it was pretty cool. I got my tickets the night before, because I was afraid that they would be sold out. But they weren't. But that is ok. The theater was pretty much full, and overall it was an enjoyable experience. Matt went, along with Kate and Chancy and a bunch of people from Kate's ward. Kate left her baby at home, and I guess she wasn't doing so well, so we took Kate right after the movie back home. So, sorry, we didn't get any pictures of our home-made Twilight shirts that we made on Thursday night. Darn, huh. I'm sure you're all bummed out. Yes, you heard right. We made t-shirts to wear. Mine said, "This Bella married her Edward" on the front, and I*heart*EC on the back. I think it was cute, in spite of the fact that it was one of Matt's white t-shirts.

Anyways, on another note, half my family is down in Mississippi/Louisiana right and I wish I could be there. But, alas, I have so much homework/studying to do right before the end of the semester. Plus, I don't think I could drive 15 hours by myself. By the time I got there, my siblings would be gone anyways. I'm glad that Mike has posted pictures of our family on his Facebook account. He posted this one of me and Penny from a long time ago. Like when we were 3. We are so cute! Our hair! I'm going to see if he can email it to me so I can post it on here, because I want everyone to see how cute we were at one time.
It is sad that it takes a funeral to bring everyone together. But I'm glad they all got to go. I just wish I could have gone.

Well, I have to study for a Biology test and also for my Practical (final exam in Bio lab) so I'll go now. Talk to you guys later.

Pam

PS. Oh, and by the way, for those of you dying to know, our Grape Jam experiment didn't quite turn out :(

Yummy Applesauce

Ok, so I don't know what has gotten into my husband, but yesterday he started talking about canning our own food. How hard can it be? All sorts of people used to do it. And we would like to get self sufficient when we move to Cali, and when we have a nice garden, it would be good to be able to preserve our food. So we started looking around for a pressure canner. But we were having a hard time finding one, so we ended up with a 5 layer food dehydrator instead. We dehydrated some food yesterday, and it should be ready by tomorrow. We did bananas, kiwi, pears, and some orange peppers that we had left over from dinner.



Somehow, Matt was still not satisfied, so today when we saw a pressure canner and all sorts of canning supplies at Tayler's Do-It center (our local hardware store) we decided to take the leap. But how to get started? We wanted to start with something fairly simple that didn't have a lot of ingredients. The applesauce recipe in the book we had bought yesterday (we can't do anything without first buying a book on it) looked good, so we though, what the heck? Let's do it. And here are the products of our labor!










Yes, I helped, although it doesn't look like it because Matt is the only one in the pictures. I was the one keeping up on the dishes and I actually pulled all the jars out of the water to be filled and put the lids on.

Actually it was great fun, and we have some really yummy applesauce to show for it. (We had some left over, not enough for a jar, so we chilled it and ate it already :)

Fun stuff, huh. And add to that the fact that we bought a bread maker and now I'm going to be making all our bread for sandwiches. Matt'll make a homemaker out of me!

~Pam

Paisley

More pictures

She finally came into the room after noon. She is so cute!

Video of the new girl

Here she is! I had to wait b/c it takes a little while to process the video. She's so cute!




I haven't seen Kate yet. But I did call: Lani, Peggy, Marie, Beth, Matt, and Penny. I'm waiting for a little bit to call Jill, and I guess my number for Mike isn't the right one.

Here she is!

Here she is! Paisley Minette Lineberry. 7 lbs 9 oz. 19 3/4 inches. Born at 8:06 am November 13, 2008. She has strawberry blonde hair!









Kate is still in recovery. I'll update you on her progress when I find out!

Love you all!

Pam

Fail Blog

Ok, I can't stop looking at this blog site. It is hilarious. So far my favorites:











:) You guys should check it out. I can't for sure say that all the posts are tasteful, but the ones I've seen so far have been really funny!

Pam

PS. Yes, I will be posting pictures of Kate's baby later. I haven't decided when I'm going to go to the hospital, but I'll probably be heading out her pretty soon. If I could get off the computer, that is.

Guess what Matt did today!

:) Isn't he sweet?




Oh, and by the way, Happy Veterans Day!

HaHaHaHaHaHa

Don't know why, but this thing left me giggling. Ok, literally laughing out loud. :)

About biking

Believe it or not this post will be about biking, which in theory is the subject of this blog.

We have settled on a route across the country! We have tried to include as much of our family in to account as possible while sticking to as many bike friendly routes as possible. We are members of the Adventure Cycling Association and are using their routes for most of the rides. While we are making this entire journey on our own we would be thrilled to have guests for parts of the ride, if you are interested in joining us for part of our ride let us know!!!!

Here is our route, we are roughly planning on starting April 2010:





-Matt

Do You Believe?

Marriage

I am a Californian, and I voted in this election. And I am proud to say that I voted against Proposition 8. And I am so saddened by the fact that Californian's have a passed a law to discriminate against people based on their sexual orientation. It is a disgrace to our society that we are now legalizing discrimination.

Everyone in this country is guaranteed the freedom to practice any religion they choose. Why can you not let other people practice what they choose?

Marriage has a legal significance as the spouse can make life & death decisions for their spouse. By denying gays & lesbians the the right to marry, you are denying them to have these rights. I am ashamed of anyone who recommends denying someones rights. Especially women and African-Americans who both have had to fight for their rights.

If you believe in Christ then you don't have the right to judge (Matthew 7:1), so please stop judging homosexuals. It is not your job to judge them and deny them their legal rights, instead work on improving yourself (Matthew 7:3)

-Matt

Its has been a long time

Ok, so I have to apologize for not writing sooner. I know I get on everyone else for not keeping up with their blogs, but I have no room to talk, now do I? I have been pretty busy these past few weeks. For one of my classes I have to do 70 hours in the classroom. I was assigned to a first grade and a fourth grade classroom, with 35 hours in each. I am fortunate that I do not have class during the day on Monday, Wednesday or Friday, so I can stay all day and knock the hours out. I started a couple weeks ago, and I spend 5 whole days in the first grade classroom. Those kids have changed my mind about which grade I want to teach. I don't think I would mind teaching the younger kids, which surprised me. I got to do so much with the class. I gave spelling tests, read stories, helped them with their work, and for one day I took over the whole class and taught all the lessons. The college class this is for is Classroom Management, and so I was supposed to pay attention to what makes the classroom run smoothly. This teacher had a routine for everything, which was great for the kids. She taught language arts only, so she had two separate classes of kids that switched right before lunch. The thing I noticed is that the afternoon class was always rushing and often didn't have time for all the work they needed to do. But other than that, it was kind of nice to teach the same lesson twice. If it didn't go smoothly in the morning, you can change it and make it better for the afternoon.
I've been in the 4th grade now for 2 classes, and it is a big change. The teacher is less organized, but she has good intentions. She has a lot of information that she wants to impart to me. I don't think she realizes how little time I'm going to be there. She keeps making plans, but she has a terrible memory and forgets, so it is ok. It all works out. She had me design a book report project for the class. They read biographies of famous women, so I made a paper bag puppet of Hillary Clinton as an example.



This is my first attempt. The final product was much better. But you get the idea. It looks sort of like her, huh?

So far, it has been fun to be in the classroom. I guess the more experience I get inside the room the more I feel like I could do this someday. And that someday is coming up very quickly. This spring I have a 150 hour practicum, half of that will be at the Child Study Center at ODU working with preschoolers. And then in the Fall I will have my Teacher Candidate Internship, otherwise known as Student Teaching. So exciting! (: But seriously, I have the worst case of senior-itis. It is getting terrible. The instructors ask for some ridiculous things, and I'm so close to the end of the Bachelor's that it is hard to do it sometimes. But all I need to do is get it done.

Oh, so I took a test on Tuesday for my Legal Aspects of Special Ed class. I did horrible. On the first test I missed 5, and thought I did bad, but I actually got the highest score, so the teacher curved the scores and I ended up with 100%. So this time, when I missed 12 (!) I was a little bummed out. But it was still in the B range, so I wasn't too worried. Well, once again I scored the highest in the class and the teacher curved our scores so that I got a 91%, but then he added 1 more point to make the number of failures less. So I ended up with a 92%. After all that, and I still got the highest score. This teacher lets us grade our tests after we take them to get an idea of what our score is. He was sitting next to me after I had scored it, and asked me how I did. I said I missed 12. He was surprised. He said "You? It must have been a hard test, then, huh." :) It was a hard test. I usually don't do that badly on multiple choice tests.

Ok, this post was really for Mom, who called me today and talked for 8 minutes before my class started. She said I needed to post, so I thought I would. I want to say that Matt had a wonderful time visiting with her in London, and when he gets the pics from the wedding processed, he'll post the pics of Mom and London. So stay tuned! I love you, Mom. Thanks for calling. It was good to hear your voice. And I'm glad Matt could give you a calling card so you could talk to us back home.