I Like #273

 Welcome to another week of things to like! 

Lee Anna's prompt for this week is apples!  I grew up with lots of apple trees at my parents and they still have an orchard filled with fruit trees, many of which are apples.  I've talked to my mother several times this week and each time, she's been processing apples so the prompt is a timely one!

I have lots of fun apple-related memories, of making dried apples and apple sauce and apple butter and apple pie and apple crisp.  Peeling and coring and cutting out the worst of the worms, and the way your whole kitchen gets sticky when you're processing the fruit.  I really love having the (now remote) privilege of home grown fruit and hope my mom will set some aside for me. I think my favorite memory though might be when my mom sent me a care package during my first year of college and used apples as packing material inside the box!

The most exciting thing that happened this week is that my friend Brett and I went up to the Oklahoma Salt Plains to dig for hourglass selenite crystals.  It's part of a wildlife refuge and very soon lots of migrating birds will be coming including some pelicans!  The salt flats are really cool- the base layer is this brown iron-rich sandy mud, but there's this quick-forming thin layer of evaporative salt crystals that forms on top to make the undisturbed regions a bright white.  The selenite crystals are really cool, they seem to nucleate around sand, so most of the crystals have this wonderful hourglass structure.  They're very fragile but pretty easy to find and we had a really lovely time.

A few crafty updates this week too! Not so much things I did this week as things I realized I forgot to share that I discovered while cleaning out iphone pics this week. My neighbor Fernanda and her husband Paul recently had a little baby girl, so that of course meant a baby quilt.

And our choir director recently left our church and took a position at a new church so I made her a fun tote bag as a going away present.  I used some of my favorite star wars fabric and pulled out my embroidery machine to have some fun.

And we have started using three ring binders to corral our music at choir, so I made myself a delightful pencil case to keep in my binder.  It's so bright and colorful!

The pups had a good week too- they behaved themselves and got lots of snuggles.  It makes me giggle to see the way they sort of blend in to the sofa.

The dahlias are looking lovely, but unfortunately you can see some wretched disease has infected all the leaves.

I hope everyone is having a good week, and thanks to LeeAnna for keeping looking for the positive!