Oh the stinking smell of apples!!!

One of the great things about having 5 apple trees are, of course, the apples....then there is the down side....the stinking, rotting, bug infested apples that lay on the ground under the trees. I know, I know, you are saying, "Just rake them up!" Well, honestly, it got away from me. They started falling....I didn't get out there to rake them. The ones that fell got mashed in to the ground. Then more fell on top. We aren't mowing as short during the summer so the grass is thick and the rake won't reach down far enough into the grass....IT'S HARD! Last summer, Melecio, Brett's AWESOME maintenance forman, would always pile them up for us and then we would feed them to the cows across the street. Well, advance one year, Melecio went back to Mexico to be with his family (also a great guy) and we have a new forman. He does his job, just not like Melecio. Brett doesn't want them getting too much overtime and I think if the crew started to clean up those apples, they would certainly be into overtime! There are a ton....and my entire point of this is that THEY STINK! I just have to go out there, suck it up, pretend I am a pioneer woman and work my booty off!

So back to the up side of 5 apple trees....I made four loaves of apple cake/bread with peeled apples to spare....I found a recipe for Apple Scones, but I've not ventured there...yet. I've never been good at "cutting butter into flour" and it calls for that in the scones recipe. Besides, Brett is using my huge mixing bowl to hold his precious...and I'll add delicious....yellow meated watermelon. So my bowl is in use at the moment.

After our lessons today (which went very well), we ate lunch and headed out to the barn for the second time to check on the goat family. Still no baby.... Then we headed out to run some errands. While we were out, my "magic" back door on our van quit working. It won't stay open when I open it with the auto feature aka "magic" OR if I open it manually. Ugh! I took it by the local Japanese Automotive (great guys) and they will take a look at it next week. I hope it's not too expensive...it's out of warranty...of course! At least it's not a horse and buggy, huh? Maybe that would actually be easier....hummmm.....