Camp Finn draws to a close...

The last 2 days of "Camp Finn" consisted of, you guessed it - the beach.  When you live at the beach it is what it is LOL.

Day 4, headed to the Chesapeake Bay side of things...

What, me - photographing dune grass?  I have a thing for dune grass.

Ok, never mind - this one is the ocean!  Bay, ocean... whatever - it's all a blur this week.

Perfectly camouflaged 

After-dinner shell hunting

Pelicans... my favorite!

Day 5... we had to get out very early since temps were forecasted for 105º

Waiting for my ship to come in :)

In the afternoon it was difficult to entertain with the heat.  I really wanted to take advantage of the summer clearance (already?) sales to get some shorts for the boys so I decided to escape the heat by going to the mall.  The MALL.  I go there about once every 18 months, I hate it - but apparently Finn hates it more.  About 30 minutes into our trip to Old Navy Finn announces "This is the worst day of Camp Finn so far"!

After sitting around the rest of the afternoon we decided we'd go out to dinner, with Loch gone it's cheaper LOL!

We took Finn out for Mexican, and he had his first taste of Churros.  Finn's day brightened up significantly.

After leaving the restaurant at about 6:30 the thermometer still was pegged at 100º, shooting down our plans to kayak at sunset, but that didn't deter the hubs, who took a quick paddle out near the house to get some photos of the sunset.  He missed it by just a couple of minutes, but got some great evening shots anyway.

Camp Finn 2012 is over, and Loch will be home this evening full of stories and dirty laundry and hopefully pictures, so stay tuned for one more camp post!

(I also harvested several perfect Brandywines last night!)

Camp Finnegan

That's what we are calling this week.  Since Loch is lucky enough to be away at camp, we are having "Camp Finnegan" where we go swimming, to the beach, he gets to stay up late and if he wants to eat nothing but 6 Clementines for lunch he can (he did that LOL!).

It's hard to do any canning when you are attending Camp Finn, but I managed to get it done.  I did spicy dill pickles and dilly beans in the morning.  I normally do refrigerator pickles so I'm not used to the color change that happens to pickles during the canning process, I'll have to get used to that but I thought I'd do something different this year, especially since it's been awhile since I had the canning equipment out.

The jalapeños had to wait until evening since Finn wanted to go to the beach and honestly I was sick of the vinegar smell in the kitchen so I was ready to get out of the house myself.

Excuse my obsession over Live Oak trees, they are my favorite and only recently has it dawned on me that when we leave the military I will probably never live near them again.  So I take photos of them whenever I'm at the beach, lots of photos.

Sailor Dad has been working from about 7 am until well after midnight every day this week, so we thought it would be nice if we surprised him with a chocolate shake before we headed home for the evening.  Finn calls it "going to see daddy in jail" LOL I guess because of the coveralls he wears when he works on the jet and that he's always standing behind a tall fence and gobs of concertina wire haha!  They were nice enough to open the gate this time so we didn't have to throw his dinner over the fence :)

I feel kind of bad, while we are at the beach cooling off hubby gets to do things like crawl around on the hot metal of a jet in 100º heat, but as he points out it's way cooler than doing it in the Persian Gulf in 120º with jet blast in his face and full gear and helmets on!  I guess it's all relative.

(hard to see, but there's people on top, looks like a big ol' cookie sheet to me, ouch!)

After getting home I was able to deal with the jalapeños, I pickled and canned 4 pints of rings and picked out the biggest ones to seed and halve and those went into the freezer for stuffed jalapeños at a later date.  My kitchen still smelled like vinegar this morning.

Finn stayed up late watching Hawaii Five-O, his new favorite.  We just finished the first season of the new one and Finn is an addict, after his shower last night he decided to do his hair "like Danno"!

I didn't feel like shelling out the bucks for season two quite yet so I started the "old" episodes from Netflix and Finn was even glued to those!  I have a 7 year old obsessed over old Hawaii Five-O episodes, can't believe it.  I'll have to see if Netflix has Magnum P.I, or Knight Rider episodes LOL

With hubby at work almost 24/7 it's just Finn and I attending Camp Finnegan this week, it's supposed to be over 100º for the next 3-5 days so I have no idea what I'm going to pull out of my hat tomorrow.  It just occurred to me that I don't think I've been truly alone with Finn this long since the first night in the hospital!  It's always "LochandFinn" so this is pretty weird! 

Just as I'm finishing up this post (I'm at Finn's music lessons) I can hear him learning the theme song from Hawaii Five-O on the ukelele in the other room...  no doubt I will have to listen to him play that all the way home in the backseat :)

p.s.  Loch called last night and I wish I could have recorded it to load onto the blog!  He was talking so fast, all about zip lining, rock walls, orienteering, and flying cockroaches in the bunkhouse LOL... I guess he's having a good time, and they DID go tubing, they got caught in that storm the other night so I'm glad I didn't know that at the time or I would have been pretty worried.  He's going on an offshore night fishing trip this evening, I'd like to think that he will be secured to the deck somehow with no chance of man overboard in the dark, yep - I'm going with that scenario :)  Finn kept saying "lemme talk to him" so I passed the phone over and told him to hurry since Loch only had 2 minutes on the phone, and Finn says "I don't miss you, I'm glad you are at camp and I took all your stuff" - ah, brotherly love...

How did those get there?

The pepper girl is back! 

You know where I'll be spending the day!

Canning jalapeños, blanching beans & salvaging some of those massive cukes for refrigerator pickles, every year those first few cukes get away from me!

One day... use it wisely!

A one day break from the high 90's, that is!

I set out to tackle the worst of it today and didn't even make a dent.

First up was to pick beans.

I brought it on myself, with my 50 bean plants per bed, LOL.  Promptly after picking all these I got a little crazy and just ripped all the bush beans out.  That's right, perfectly good bean plants, gone.  They were starting to have that crispy bottom look with little stink bugs setting up outposts so out they went.  Such satisfaction in stuffing plants covered in stinkbugs into a big plastic bag to cook in the sunshine, heeheehee!  Not to worry, I have pole beans that are just starting to really come into production, as you can see from the top left.

Onto the jungle - I really needed a machete for this job but had to settle for hands and pruners.  Take a good look at these photos, they are taken from the same exact spot, you can tell by the PVC hoop in the background LOL - can you believe that I was bushwhacking my way to the garden the past month or so?  That's a path, or is supposed to be!

before...

         

after...

 

We had some wild weather last night.  The temps dropped from the 90's down to about 75 in a matter of minutes, and the wind was gusting to around 60 mph!  The below photo doesn't really do it justice, but over the yard these two sets of clouds were moving in opposite directions towards each other and swirling around, pretty creepy for awhile - we decided to head into our imaginary basement for a while.

But what was bad for us must have been awful for Loch up at Camp Hailstormflashflood -

Check out these radar images for his area, apparently there was quarter size hail too, and they were supposed to go tubing yesterday down the James River, I have a feeling that didn't happen and they spent the afternoon picking ticks off of each other.  Now that's fun times.

Speaking of weather, I was sitting here watching the chaos unfold on tv when I actually started really listening to our meteorologist, and this is what I heard:

"We have some storms here and then they're done."

and this gem...

"Tropical Storm Debby may move south, east or west, but basically will move."

Um, what?!

And.... I picked the first Brandywine of the year!

yeah, can you hear Mother Nature laughing at me?

I snapped this one today at the dentist's office, just thought it was cool the way the morning sun was thrown across the floor and Finn :)

Tomorrow it's back to 90º with 100º forecast for Thursday through the weekend, oh goody.  I think I overdid it today, I just realized I can't get up from the couch...

and he's off!

We took Loch to camp yesterday!  He's finally old enough for a weeklong sleep away camp, and he was so excited!  Finn is still only old enough for the 3 day sleep away camp so he is a little disappointed to not be with his brother, although he would never admit it.

This camp is up in the Yorktown area, a very beautiful drive on the way.

Almost there...

  This camp is on a Naval base, and get this... $200 includes the whole week stay, all food and all trips/activities.  They are going tubing down the James River this week, night fishing offshore on a charter boat, ropes course, campfires every night and some tent camping away from the cabins.  Camps like this normally cost above the $1000 range so we are so fortunate to have this as one of the benefits to being a military family. The pay isn't great in the military, so I take advantage of every other thing that comes our way :)

Below is Loch's cabin.  These are called "Sea Huts" and are what many of our military members live in overseas in the Middle East.  The other "living quarters" that are popular are shipping containers - I'll take this over that any day :)

(Fun fact:  I was stationed at this base after active duty when I served in the Reserves - a beautiful place   about an hour from our house)

Below is one of Loch's counselors, "Jarvis".  In typical college age fashion he was eagerly clapping his hands and rounding up all his new campers and just about bursting with energy, I think it's awesome that the kids get to have a week of being with these guys every year, they have SO much more energy than I do and don't care about messes!

Loch claiming his bunk, with Finn checking it out...

Loch all but pushed us out of there, looks like they have some big campfires planned this week!

I let Loch have my camera for the week instead of wasting money on a disposable that I will never get around to taking in to be developed :) - hopefully he remembers to take some photos this week and not to bring it tubing!

Other events this weekend included my birthday gift... so cliche' for a Navy wife but I've wanted one forever.  It looks gold in the photo but it's silver.  As a rule I don't like wearing jewelry but I do love this!

...and the harvest is coming in strong now!  Finally we have gotten a couple of heirloom larger size tomatoes.  These are Old Virginia's.  At least if the blight takes them all now I can say I at least got a couple first.  

**For grandma & grandpa and anyone else who is interested in what Loch will be doing this week, here's a link to his Camp Schedule - looks like fun even in spite of the ticks and heat!