Cooking, Lighting, Tea and more...

Those that know me, know I am not a very good cook. It is one of the reasons that I loved having Workawayers here that spoiled us with good food.

For my upcoming birthday, my family sent me an Instapot. I am not one to normally promote a product, everyone has their own favorites...however, this might be the answer to some better meals for us.

I opened up my present yesterday and found a recipe online that ingredients that I actually had in my kitchen. I threw everything in the pot and we had dinner! Okay, there were a few learning curves in there...but the dinner was not burned! So, I am going to make tonight's dinner with it too!!!

New Lights
Rick was at a store that had household light fixtures clearanced for $5 each. By the way, Rick is addicted to ALL kinds of lighting projects. Since the day I met him, he has been obsessed with improving our lighting needs. Whether it is the color of the bulbs we are using or the fixtures or well...anything lighting related. After many years of working on lighting problems, he has become very quick and efficient at making modifications. That is, until he tried to change 1 in our living room. It turns out that the electrical box was set back about 2 inches from the finished surface of the wall. It appears that a large hammer was used to open the wall to originally access the box. None of the holes lined up and my husband quit his project after an hour to reassess the situation. The next day, he was back at it and we now have a bunch of lights to still do, but only the 1 finished!

Creatures
​Our farm frog is still alive and very interested in hanging out around the coffee.  :) I think my husband is playing a new game of "where is the frog today?"
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The next 2 pictures are of a very strange red bug and my son's cat that may look innocent, but she is a bug and lizard terrorizer. 

Coffee Update
We are trying to make coffee tea this year. Not to sell, just to see if we can. Our first batch was a failure. We washed the coffee skins too well and removed all of the sugars. Melvin was kind enough to tell me that the tea tasted like dirt...haha.

So, we are doing a batch of natural processed coffee, so that I can take the dried skins off and try again....I will let you know how it goes!

Our storage issue of all of the dried coffee in the "resting phase" has gotten out of hand. We are building a new storage house, but in the meantime there are bags and bags of coffee that I have to deal with. :)

The last 2 pictures are just a few of the new leased trees for 2019. Part of the fun is making the signs and knowing what each sign is symbolizing. :) Some are romantic, some are funny and some are just reminders of special moments....Emma's sign was designed by a little girl that has a bird and wanted to include our dogs (Karma and Dante) because they fight over sticks and she thinks that is funny....haha.

Wind
It has been so windy lately that some of the new, baby mangoes are flying off of the tree like little bullets. :(

Electro-etching
We have been busy keeping our coffee travel mugs in stock. We electro-etch each one ourselves and it turns out that most people have never seen it done. So, I am attaching some pictures from our last batch of mugs. By the way, Rick's hand is all healed and he is back to working on everything as if he never burned it in the first place!

​I will update more later, but I have coffee to process now and I doubt Rick will wait much longer for me!