Preparing for family reunion

Carl's kids and spouses and grandkids are all coming together in Albuquerque for a family reunion. Carl committed that we would provide one of the breakfasts with biscuits and sausage gravy. I baked the biscuits ...

... and Carl made the gravy -- here he was browning the sausage. We purchased sausage just for this event when we were in Quartzsite in January. The Coyote market there has a very nice butcher counter and they make their own country/breakfast sausage.

Unfortunately, no pictures of the biscuits or the finished gravy!

One funny thing -- we received quite a bit of food from friends who were leaving from Venture Out and wanted to empty their refrigerators. One friend gave us two tubes of canned biscuits. We normally just make dropped biscuits with a Bis-quik-like (store brand) product, and I made some of those, but we decided to use up the canned biscuits. Show Low is at about 6300', so it is higher elevation than where we are accustomed to living. This causes things to cook differently - for example, water boils at a lower temperature, so if you need to boil something for "10" minutes, it will take longer than that to get done; also, baking can require your to decrease leavening agents, increase liquids or flour, reduce sugar, and increase oven temperature.

We have also noticed that packaging is sometimes expanded -- I bought some potato chips and the bag was fully "inflated"; a plastic bottle had the bottom "pooch" out so it wouldn't sit flat on the counter. With the biscuits, when I opened the tubes, they all but exploded! It just took pulling the label a little ways before the tube opened explosively, and one of them even splattered a small amount of raw biscuit out! I had never had *that* happen before!

Dinner out with ham friends

Our time is Show Low is getting short, so we are prioritizing getting together with friends here...

We met up with Tom and Chere, Jeanne and Nick at Sal & Teresa's Mexican Restaurant. Sal unfortunately passed away a year ago, but the restaurant still is going well.

We enjoyed the food and the company, although we forgot to take a picture of our group!

Mountain vendors

As we were driving to the Farmer's Market in Show Low, we saw signs for another market at the Show Low Gym... unfortunately, the signs were getting blown around a lot, so we ended up taking quite a detour to get to the Gym, but we eventually got there...

This market was inside and had a variety of items, including a few booths selling clothing. The interesting aspect of this market was that you picked up the items you wanted as you walked through the market, but then you paid at a central location. I guess this is easier on the folks who are manning the booths to not have to handle money or support credit card sales.

I thought the Chocolate thoughts were appropriate: "A Day Without Chocolate Is Like... JUST KIDDING - I HAVE NO IDEA!" and "Chocolate comes from Cocoa... Which is a Tree... a Tree is a Plant... Chocolate is a Salad!"

We didn't find anything that we couldn't do without, but it was nice to be inside and out of the wind!

Show Low Farmer's Market

We visited the Show Low Farmer's Market a second time... on our previous visit, we didn't see much "grown" stuff  (no vegetables or fruit) -- more "made" stuff (crafts -- knitted/crocheted goods, paintings, framed photos; made-to-order signs, baked goods, jerky, home-made alcohol/fermented products - ginger beer, kombucha, vanilla). This time, there was one booth with a small number of fruits - strawberries, peaches (maybe nectarines), some other fruit that I'm forgetting, and there was a meat producer selling beef and pork.

There were quite a few more booths.

The wind was quite strong so many of the vendors were having to use extreme means to keep their EZ-ups from flying away!

We talked with the folks selling beef and pork for a little while -- the wife said that they got in to raising pigs because her husband had allergic reactions to pork products. They found that his allergies were to things used in the processing, not the pork itself. They then also got in to raising beef (I am not clear on whether they just raise steers to beef or whether they have a herd). She did indicate that they bring in alfalfa hay rather than feeding the cattle on the sparse local vegetation. (https://www.rustykranchaz.com/legacy)

Their prices and inventory on the day we were there

We enjoy talking with local folks about things they are passionate about. The last time we visited the market, we talked with one lady making homemade vanilla flavoring and another lady selling ginger bug and kombucha. Carl bought some ginger bug and has been making various carbonated beverages (using a preservative-free fruit juice with a small amount of the ginger bug, letting the sugars ferment a little making the carbonation).

Even more sights in the sky

Carl has been wanting to get a picture of the Milky Way for a long time (https://journeyinamazinggrace.blogspot.com/2022/02/a-slower-day.html. https://journeyinamazinggrace.blogspot.com/2022/07/viewing-milky-way.html). Prime viewing time of the Milky Way for our location started 6/13, but, wouldn't you know it, even though we've had super clear skies for weeks, clouds started moving in each afternoon during that week. The prime time was going on for two weeks, so on 6/19, after we did dance lessons and danced to the band at the White Mountain Dance Hall, we decided to try to find a dark place to try to see the Milky Way and take pictures.

From the dance hall, we drove east and tried driving down a side road a little ways... but we ended up on what appeared to be private land, so we turned around. We then went to a wildlife area where it appeared on Google maps that there may be a couple of lakes over which we could look toward the south/southeast. However, it appeared that we may have disturbed a couple of vehicles of folks who may have been engaged in romantic encounters (one was already parked when we got there but soon left, another drove in but left as soon as they saw us), and unfortunately, we were too close to the ambient light from Show Low so we decided to try another spot.

I had seen pictures posted on Facebook from near Vernon, so we headed east on US-60 heading toward Vernon. Carl was concerned if we got into Vernon, there would be too many lights from houses, so he found a side road and we decided to take it. 

While it looked like from the map that the road might proceed a ways off of US-60, in reality, there was a gate just a little ways off the highway. 

The satellite view on google maps shows a little better that there is a line paralleling US-60, that's a fence (https://www.google.com/maps/@34.2828492,-109.8527299,184m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu).

This capture from Google street view allows you to see it better -- of course, it was well after dark by the time we were there, so we didn't exactly have this view when we turned off of US-60! (link to google street view of location)

Now, the gate had a sign on it indicating that we should close it if we went through it, and *maybe* if we still had the Jeep, we may have attempted it, but we decided that discretion was the better part of valor and that we should not take the car beyond the gate.

However, there was also a walk-through gate, and we decided that it would be doable for us to take the tripod and our phones on the other side of the fence.

Our Google Pixel phones have the ability to do "astrophotography". If we put the phone on "night sight", it will take a slightly longer exposure picture (the ones that we took of the planets over the last few nights used that setting). If the phone detects that it is being held very still (like being mounted on a tripod or sitting on a firm surface), the night sight indicator (crescent moon) will change to a astro indicator (stars), and it will take a 4+ minute exposure. Now, in 4 minutes, the earth will rotate enough that the stars will not look like points, but will rather look like short streaks; software embedded in the phone's camera will post-process the resultant image and correct for the earth's rotation, so the stars look like points.

Here are a few of our results:

This was before we crossed the fence, and we got less sky and more trees than we wanted.

On the other side of the fence... better! If you click on this picture when looking at the blog online, I think you'll get a big image of this picture, and you'll be able to see a streak at the bottom of the picture just above the tree to the right -- I think that was an airplane.

A better composition of sky and trees

Another picture with a streak of an airplane near the top of the leftmost tree.

And... the "money shot"...

Carl wanted to get a picture of us looking at the Milky Way. We couldn't really tell what the camera was pointing at, but I stood where we thought the foreground of the picture would be, and I set a timer on my watch for 4 1/2 minutes. Carl started the astro-shot and hurried over to stand next to me. We stood still, though we could talk for the 4+ minutes. Once my watch timer went off, we went to the phone camera to see what we'd gotten and were pleased with the results! 

When the camera takes the 4 minute exposure, it also takes a video. That picture of us is actually a screen shot from the end of the video as it has us more lit-up than the resultant picture. We think, because headlights from traffic passing on US-60 would illuminate the area briefly, that we happened to capture a moment of the headlight illumination. Carl did a small amount of post-processing to bump the saturation levels up a bit. 

We think that we can now check-off "get a photo of the Milky Way" from our to-do list! 

Bible Study at Venture In

Many of the planned activities here at Venture In are organized and run by members of the Venture In Chapel. We have enjoyed participating in the chapel services on Sunday and the co-ed Bible Study on Friday mornings.

This is a picture from a recent Friday morning meeting. Each week there are more people participating in the study.

The study is using Dr David Jeremiah's book, "The Promise of Heaven".

Someone from the VI Chapel produces an outline for each week's lesson and provides it to us. There are also group discussion questions that we go through.

I have never done a study of a book by Dr David Jeremiah. There are videos of him doing a sermon. His sermons are almost word-for-word duplicated in the book, so we cover 1-2 chapters in the book each week. I don't know whether the discussion questions are provided in a leader's guide or whether one of the leaders in the VI Chapel comes up with the discussion questions. Regardless, we are enjoying it, and we are getting to meet fellow believers in the park.

Some last "SOTA-ites" pictures

One of our friends who went up Porter Mountain and did the SOTA contacts provided us with some additional pictures...

Operators in action - Jeanne with the microphone, Carl recording

The group of operators

After the time on the mountain, we adjourned to Culver's for sustenance and frozen custard!

Always fun being with friends!