Scariest movie this Halloween season.
(I'm buying something from Dove this very second.)
Oh, get a tissue before watching the next one. Emily cried.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Monday, October 8, 2007
Conference Weekend
We spent conference rolling around the house while listening to "Papa Hinkley" on the radio. Grampa Duane came over and tried his level best to drive us a little batty with his AM only portable radio. He search up and down the dial for conference but mostly BLARED the Mariachi station mingled with static for most of the morning. I distracted myself by taking bunches of random black and whites of Zina.
For lunch we packed a picnic and "enjoyed" a foot of snow at Hope campground -- a Davis family conference tradition. I have pictures on the other camera that I will download tonight. Later we went to the Pitcher family gathering in Alpine. Well, Marco and kids went to the Pitcher family gathering in Alpine. I joined forces with Whitney and we shot bridals for Suzanne and Lauren all around the Pitcher family gathering in Alpine.
Saturday, October 6, 2007
Hen Party
My favorite two hours in Utah County is Priesthood Session of General Conference. I love when the city drains of all it's testosterone and rivers of estrogen run uninhibited through the streets! I like to celebrate the blessed occasion by inviting as many of my closest dozen of BYU sisters as are able to come over for good food and gossip.
We are a interesting bunch. Emily likes to call us the harem -- I prefer quorum. The list is by no means set in stone as much as set in habit. We are married, single, divorced, too fertile, not fertile enough, thin, fat, employed, broke, conservative, liberal, fast and slow. Interestingly, we have one thing in common -- we all served missions. (There again, some of us loved it and some, ... well, I will let them talk for themselves.) Maybe this is why we don't think it is such a leap to consider our friendship religious in nature.
Not long ago I ran into an old flame from high school at a Sunstone dinner. He asked me how it is that I was still "a believer" even after intellectual reflection of the church. The answer came out with out even thinking. I told him it was because of my amazing group of girl friends. They make it easy to be a believer. True story.
It's a harem of hens! . . .
ps. Thanks, gals. Who thought a bunch of 30 somethings could party until 3:30 in the morning?
We are a interesting bunch. Emily likes to call us the harem -- I prefer quorum. The list is by no means set in stone as much as set in habit. We are married, single, divorced, too fertile, not fertile enough, thin, fat, employed, broke, conservative, liberal, fast and slow. Interestingly, we have one thing in common -- we all served missions. (There again, some of us loved it and some, ... well, I will let them talk for themselves.) Maybe this is why we don't think it is such a leap to consider our friendship religious in nature.
Not long ago I ran into an old flame from high school at a Sunstone dinner. He asked me how it is that I was still "a believer" even after intellectual reflection of the church. The answer came out with out even thinking. I told him it was because of my amazing group of girl friends. They make it easy to be a believer. True story.
It's a harem of hens! . . .
ps. Thanks, gals. Who thought a bunch of 30 somethings could party until 3:30 in the morning?
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Apples for Apples ...
Motivated to action by Marco's memories of a childhood of orchards, I took the kids apple picking in our neighborhood's last orchard. Stratton's trees are about half picked and I think slated for slash and burn this winter to make way for a new batch of ticky-tacky houses. I wish we could all be like Raquel and Oliver. They have an "Urban Homestead", producing bushels and bushels of food on just 1/4 acre. So different from the growing trend to fear anything edible that comes in less than 3 wrappers. (Three wrapper food, for example, is like microwave popcorn -- bags, wrapped in plastic, sealed in a cardboard box.) Our landlord in DC just informed us that a chunk of our deposit is being with held, in part, because we "planted tomatoes, which are what RATS eat."
Enjoy the slide show. (smile and act natural)
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
From Marco
I asked Marco to write a little about Orem and orchards. Thanks, Marco ...When I was a kid, Orem was all about orchards. "It's that rocky Orem soil" people would say. "Perfect for fruit trees." We grew up picking fruit. Cherries especially, at both my Grandpas' orchards. We would get 5 cents a pound. Sweet cherries were better than pie cherries. We only got 3 cents for pie cherries, because you didn't have to pick them with the stems on, but you'd get all sticky.
It took a lot of cherries to fill a crate, 40 pounds a crate... $2 for 40 pounds. On a good day we would fill 3 or 4 crates in a day. The mexican workers my grandpas hired would pick 8 or 10 crates whole families out in the trees, busy, serious, non-stop. We weren't as motivated. We ate a lot of cherries. And threw a lot at each other. And daydreamed a lot. So $8 a day was a pretty good take for us.
Even people whose grandpas weren't trying to teach them the value of a good honest days work ("why, when I was a kid, I'd work all week for a quarter...!") by making them pick for cash, would still spend plenty of summer mornings on ladders picking fruit. Everybody worked at the welfare farm, and for us, that meant picking fruit. Pears and peaches mostly. One year, just before the Orem Mall was built, the owner of the land told our stake president that if he would water and pick the orchard, the stake could have the fruit. So we had two orchards to pick that year. And they held off the bulldozers until after the harvest.
Yes, the Orem Mall used to be all orchards. So did just about everyplace else in Orem. UVSC campus: former orchards. The University Parkway stripmalls: deceased Orchards. Walmart, ex-Orchards. The used car lots along State Street: nevermore Orchards. The WordPerfect campus: deleted Orchards. Our Arthurs Court neighborhood: obliterated Orchards. All the other Orem neighborhoods, schools, shops, and office parks built since 1975, all former, used-to-be Orchards. Of course, "Orchard" elementary school and "The Orchards" shopping center..... well, you know.
Even the stake welfare farms are gone now. Somebody finally got to the welfare committee at last and made them crunch the numbers, and proved that it would take 748 years of picking peaches to make the same profit as selling one building lot to Ivory Homes.
But when I was a kid, you couldn't miss the orchards in Orem, since they were everywhere. It was a green, leafy, town in the summer, and rows and rows of skeletal shadows in winter. And even in the suburban enclaves that had been carved here and there into the orchards, most people had a tree or two in their yard, and I think they actually picked them in those days. Some late winter mornings you'd really be reminded about the orchards, since in case of cold-snap that threatened the blossoms, all the farmers would light up these acrid "smudge-pots" that would belch thick black smoke that would hang low in the orchards and (supposedly) raise the temperature a few degrees, enough to save the crop. Of course, the smoke would blanket the valley, so it was probably also enough to cause us all to have early onset emphysema... but then in those days we also had Geneva Steel, so we had battle-toughened lungs, immune to pollution, and besides what's a few extra zillion parts per billion of particulates among friends! Since everybody's dad either worked at Geneva or in an orchard, nobody complained...
One winter, my grandpa decided I needed to be taught the value of a days work when it was freezing outside as well. He got Mr Cordner, who owned all the orchards north of 800 North (where the golf course and all those zillion dollar McMansions are now) to hire me to help prune and fertilize his pear crop. I turned out to be no good at pruning. But I spread tons and tons of (probably highly toxic) Geneva by-product granular fertilizer up and down his miles and miles of pear rows. A nice Mexican guy driving the tractor, and me freezing and scooping industrial-smelling steel mill fertilizer on the trailer, and dumping it along the rows.
My grandpas were part-time farmers. They had regular "winter jobs" too, besides being farmers -- one was a high school teacher, the other a lawyer. Mr Cordner was a counselor at the high school. My sixth grade teacher, Mr Crandall, also had an orchard. He and his brothers, I think. And, unlike my grandpas' orchards which are, saldly, long gone, Mr Crandall's orchard is still there. It's one of the very last orchards in Orem. And unbelievably, its right on Center Street. They probably get calls 5 times a day from hungry real estate developers who can't wait to bulldoze the last trees in Orem and pack in some lovely vinyl and stucco Ivory ticky-tackies, but thankfully they have so far resisted. Beautiful purple-red apples and bright green pears. It's a reminder of where, besides the grocery store, apples come from. It's a good think we still have a few of them around. And the Crandalls just planted some new trees last year, so maybe they'll be around a while longer. I hope so.
It took a lot of cherries to fill a crate, 40 pounds a crate... $2 for 40 pounds. On a good day we would fill 3 or 4 crates in a day. The mexican workers my grandpas hired would pick 8 or 10 crates whole families out in the trees, busy, serious, non-stop. We weren't as motivated. We ate a lot of cherries. And threw a lot at each other. And daydreamed a lot. So $8 a day was a pretty good take for us.
Even people whose grandpas weren't trying to teach them the value of a good honest days work ("why, when I was a kid, I'd work all week for a quarter...!") by making them pick for cash, would still spend plenty of summer mornings on ladders picking fruit. Everybody worked at the welfare farm, and for us, that meant picking fruit. Pears and peaches mostly. One year, just before the Orem Mall was built, the owner of the land told our stake president that if he would water and pick the orchard, the stake could have the fruit. So we had two orchards to pick that year. And they held off the bulldozers until after the harvest.
Yes, the Orem Mall used to be all orchards. So did just about everyplace else in Orem. UVSC campus: former orchards. The University Parkway stripmalls: deceased Orchards. Walmart, ex-Orchards. The used car lots along State Street: nevermore Orchards. The WordPerfect campus: deleted Orchards. Our Arthurs Court neighborhood: obliterated Orchards. All the other Orem neighborhoods, schools, shops, and office parks built since 1975, all former, used-to-be Orchards. Of course, "Orchard" elementary school and "The Orchards" shopping center..... well, you know.
Even the stake welfare farms are gone now. Somebody finally got to the welfare committee at last and made them crunch the numbers, and proved that it would take 748 years of picking peaches to make the same profit as selling one building lot to Ivory Homes.
But when I was a kid, you couldn't miss the orchards in Orem, since they were everywhere. It was a green, leafy, town in the summer, and rows and rows of skeletal shadows in winter. And even in the suburban enclaves that had been carved here and there into the orchards, most people had a tree or two in their yard, and I think they actually picked them in those days. Some late winter mornings you'd really be reminded about the orchards, since in case of cold-snap that threatened the blossoms, all the farmers would light up these acrid "smudge-pots" that would belch thick black smoke that would hang low in the orchards and (supposedly) raise the temperature a few degrees, enough to save the crop. Of course, the smoke would blanket the valley, so it was probably also enough to cause us all to have early onset emphysema... but then in those days we also had Geneva Steel, so we had battle-toughened lungs, immune to pollution, and besides what's a few extra zillion parts per billion of particulates among friends! Since everybody's dad either worked at Geneva or in an orchard, nobody complained...
One winter, my grandpa decided I needed to be taught the value of a days work when it was freezing outside as well. He got Mr Cordner, who owned all the orchards north of 800 North (where the golf course and all those zillion dollar McMansions are now) to hire me to help prune and fertilize his pear crop. I turned out to be no good at pruning. But I spread tons and tons of (probably highly toxic) Geneva by-product granular fertilizer up and down his miles and miles of pear rows. A nice Mexican guy driving the tractor, and me freezing and scooping industrial-smelling steel mill fertilizer on the trailer, and dumping it along the rows.
My grandpas were part-time farmers. They had regular "winter jobs" too, besides being farmers -- one was a high school teacher, the other a lawyer. Mr Cordner was a counselor at the high school. My sixth grade teacher, Mr Crandall, also had an orchard. He and his brothers, I think. And, unlike my grandpas' orchards which are, saldly, long gone, Mr Crandall's orchard is still there. It's one of the very last orchards in Orem. And unbelievably, its right on Center Street. They probably get calls 5 times a day from hungry real estate developers who can't wait to bulldoze the last trees in Orem and pack in some lovely vinyl and stucco Ivory ticky-tackies, but thankfully they have so far resisted. Beautiful purple-red apples and bright green pears. It's a reminder of where, besides the grocery store, apples come from. It's a good think we still have a few of them around. And the Crandalls just planted some new trees last year, so maybe they'll be around a while longer. I hope so.
(Apples and tractor from Crandall's orchard.)
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
Thanks to Whitney ...
Well, it's official. Thanks to Whitney, I went into debt for the first time in a long while. Innocently, I stepped into her photo shop expecting to come home with a new lens and instead I came home with a new camera. That was yesterday. It took a good 24 hours (and just as many phone calls to Whitney asking her if I did the right thing) to shake off the shock. Now comes the "fun" part of working for a living.
Email me if you need a bargain on a family portrait or a wedding photographer (or a window washer, a dog walker, a feng shui consultant -- anything that might pay yesterday's tab.) Write to andipitcher@aol.com. You better hurry. Once I get the shot of Richie Sambora and Lindsey Lohan holding hands in drug treatment (over the back fence), my prices are going up!
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