Moritz Life

I'm done with the tomatoes for the year. I've done about 30 pints of salsa, which doesn't seem like a lot, but my biggest dutch oven could only cook about 8 pints at a time. I may be investing in a bigger pot! It was fun and we will enjoy eating the salsa! Come on over for some nachos!

Close to us is Sequoia National Park, home to the largest tree in the world, the "General Sherman". Here's a picture from the Fresno Bee newspaper giving you an idea of how big these trees are (and this isn't even one of the larger ones!), as this one fell in the region.

We were pleasantly surprised to have Lewis and Barbara Hyslip from Calgary with us for little over an hour today. (Lewis was a former area administrator for the Church of God in Western Canada). They were driving through on the way to Sacramento from Los Angeles. We gave them a "taste" of Hanford at Superior Dairy. Perfect for this HOT day!

The tomato saga continues. I canned one batch of salsa (6 pints) and one batch of Spaghetti Sauce (10 pints) and then tried a new salsa recipe which looked very close to the ingredients on the Pace Salsa that we all really like. It came out very good (8 pints)( and I have enough tomatoes left to make 16 more pints! The only thing I will modify is to decrease the amount of vinegar so it's not quite so.... vinegary! I still had 2/3 of a box of tomatoes left so on Friday a gentleman from the local soup kitchen came to pick them up. The cook thought she might make tomato soup! This was a lot of fun - especially since the average temperature outside was 105 when I was canning inside! Thank goodness for air conditioning.

Well time to update everyone on my summer so far.

First, I am having fun on my time off of school. It has been nice and relaxing compared to what I am used to while at University, and I keep having to remind myself of this so that I don't get back into school a month from now and wish that I would have used my summer more wisely.

Jonathan and I, as well as one of our friends took a day trip up to the mountains this past week on Wednesday, it was nice. We were hoping to escape the 100+ degree farenheit temperatures of the valley, but it was still probably about 90 up there. It was good though, we got some frisbee in, and we got to see some people at the camp that we visited.

I am hoping to take a quick trip to the coast sometime in the next few weeks, at least before school starts. Get some more sunning in, and get a chance to swim in the ocean this summer, which I haven't done yet.

Hope everyone is keeping well!

Hanford has been hit with a heat wave!

For seven days in a row now our temperature has exceeded 100F (apx. 38C), and there is no end in sight for at least another week. They are telling us that this is the hottest July in probably at least 10 years, and if it continues through to the end of the month, possibly one of the hottest ever.

Yesterday (Sunday) was the hottest, at 107F (42C). Today we had some relief at 106F.

But, we have nothing to complain about. On Sunday, Death Valley, California hit 128F (53C)!
OUCH!

FINALLY! I've sorted through my 300+ digital photos from our recent trip to pull out a few highlights. Take a look at: http://moritzonline.blogspot.com/.

Remember blogs are backwards, so for a more chronological look at our trip scroll down to the BOTTOM of July 17th and work your way to the top!

Also, click on any photo for a higher resolution look.

This morning was another new adventure for me and Luke. We went with a friend of mine, Diane Coelho, out to their tomato fields (and I mean fields!) between Riverdale and Five Points. The 3 of us picked tomatoes for about 15-20 minutes and I have a cooler and box full of tomatoes, a paper grocery bag 3/4 full and Diane picked a box and another big pail full. She's going to make spaghetti sauce and I'm going to try my hand at canning salsa. I'll let you know how it turns out. P.S. I think I have enough tomatoes to feed a small army. Thanks to Diane and her husband John for letting me pick tomatoes. It was a lot of fun. By the way, the rows were probably about 2-3 feet wide, and I never picked more than 4 feet into the row. They were laden with tomatoes. For all you tomato officianados they are roma tomatoes. Maybe some will end up in your local supermarkets!

Well as you may be aware, it was recently the fourth of July. Being this my first fourth of July celebrations with my digital camera I couldn't help but take pictures. So I ended up taking over 200 pictures along with some video. Here is a little sample of some of my pictures.
The first three pictures are of the fireworks the community put on, the next three are from some of the personal fireworks us boys set off.

(Click on the picture to see full picture)











(The guy on the left is Jonathan)

We arrived back in Hanford this evening on schedule, and 6752 miles later!
Our vacation blogging efforts failed. We had hoped to provide you updates throughout our trip, but unfortunately Internet access was not as strong as we would have hoped, and besides we were on vacation taking in many opportunities for relaxing, visiting, and traveling.
Since my last update, here's a brief update of what we did:
Friday, June 24 we headed over to Detroit to visit my cousins. Had a wonderful family dinner at Gunter and Joyce von Doring's. The boys stayed overnight at my cousin Jackie's.
Saturday, June 25 was spent shopping at some "high class" stores, and then to a family BBQ at Jackie's.
Sunday, June 26 we were up early to take Jonathan to the airport. Then we headed over to Grand Rapids to take in a church service at Mars Hill Church, one of the most significant new churches in North America. Then off to Anderson where we spent a few days at the North American Convention of the Church of God.
Wednesday at 4:00am we left Anderson and began our three-day journey back to Hanford. On the way we went through Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas (the Ozark mountains!), Oklahoma, northern Texas, New Mexico (loved it!), Arizona and Nevada before arriving back in California today.
We hope to post some photos later this weekend. Check back!