Leaving Sunny California for Wintery Utah

So we have completed phase 1 of our mission, which was serving on the Nut Farm in California.   We are headed back to Utah until the next phase, which will begin March 1st in Florida for 12 months.

The past 3 weeks were pretty crazy, as we had many projects to complete.  On my end, Sister Smith and I were given $200 and asked to plant flowers in several flower beds around the main office.  Where I come from, when November hits we are usually pulling OUT flowers before the snow falls, not planting them,  but oh well, we do what we're told.  I have no trouble spending someone else's money!

 I just hope they all flourish, fill in and look fabulous.  Unfortunately I won't be here to see the end results.

Another project I was involved in was scanning very large maps and building plans onto the computer so the original mouse-eaten copies could be pitched.  Some of the maps were pretty fragile and dirty, so they were a little challenging to feed through the scanner.  Although we got around 200 maps scanned while I was here, we only scratched the surface of the work that could be done.  

A third project came about when a company in Japan found 2 aspirins in their order of almonds, which meant that all production workers had to have the pockets taken off their work smocks so that nothing gets carried into the production areas.  So Sister Smith and I began the tedious task of unpicking the pockets.  The problem was that there were 150+ smocks, and the pockets are all sewn into the side seams.  It takes about 45 minutes to unpick each smock, so between volunteering at the elementary school, helping teach English classes to Spanish workers, scanning documents and planting flowers, we were unpicking smocks in every free moment we had.

But wait....that isn't all.  With Christmas just around the corner, the company puts together about 250 gift boxes for employees, vendors and some people in high places in Salt Lake.  Each large gift box holds a bag of walnuts, a bag of raw almonds and a bag of roasted almonds.  The nuts come loose in big boxes, so guess who got to scoop the almonds and walnuts into the bags and seal them up...yup, me and Sister Smith.  We had 2 of the production workers come in to help us which made the task go faster, and we had it done in a few days.  

In the meantime, Bruce and Elder Smith were working on the two garages.  The trusses arrived and the men were able to get them installed with the help of an extended fork lift.

With the end gables in place, they were prepared to put the roof on each garage.  For this project they were able to get help from two strapping farm workers who had experience walking on rafters while carrying 4X8 sheets of plywood.  

On his last two days on the job Bruce, Elder Smith and Elder Garner (who just arrived from Idaho) were able to get the paper on the roof and begin putting on the shingles.

Although Bruce will not be able to see the project through to completion, he feels good about the service and work he was able to perform while he was here.


We bid farewell to the many friends and co-workers that we have enjoyed the past four months, and are looking forward to new adventures in Florida.
Until then, we won't be creating any more blog posts.  We will be busy in Utah preparing for our daughter Rachel's wedding in December, and doing some clerical work at the Farmland Reserve office in Salt Lake.  Join us again in March!

We're Raising the Roof Here on the Farm

The men are making great progress on the garages.  Here are a few pictures which are self explanatory.

 Walls went up first.  Bruce is still pretty agile for a Senior Missionary!

When the trusses first arrived they were 8 feet too short due to a manufacturing error.  It was fixed later that same day.

In other news, last week we had our first Semi-annual Zone Conference with the Smith's and our Directors from Salt Lake.  We were well fed, enlightened by the Spirit, and enjoyed showing off our projects.  Our 5-minute presentations were centered around the Articles of Faith.  We each had to pick one and talk about how our life has been influenced by it.  Our focus of study for the next 6 months is on the Articles of Faith, which will be fun to study.    One funny part was that at the beginning and the end of the conference we sang all the verses of two hymns...acapella.  Well, with only 7 people there (our Farm Manager joined us but didn't sing), the songs sounded somewhat lame because the range was way too high for everyone, and none of us come near Tabernacle Choir quality.  At the end of the conference our Director was praising our efforts and giving us instruction but added, "I know I'm just preaching to the choir....".  After his third reference to this I piped up...."It's pretty obvious that we ain't no choir!"

Happy Missionaries standing in front of a Farm tractor.  Pretty scenic, huh?

Over the weekend we took a little overnight get-away to Monterey to visit the Aquarium and see the sights.  It was wonderful!  After spending hours in the aquarium we ate at Fisherman's Wharf, played at Dennis the Menace Playground, ate some fried artichokes, then spent the night at the Smith's son's house with his family.  Very fun!  The funny incident was that at night I was brushing my teeth so I stuck my hand in my travel bag, but pulled out the cortizone cream instead of the toothpaste.  It is REALLY NASTY.  Five days later I can still taste residue of the cortizone cream on my toothbrush.  The good part is that my teeth don't itch as a result. :)  

Aquarium pictures are below.

                                         This is a giant artichoke, but not the one we ate. The picture below is at Fisherman's Wharf where we ate clam chowder and garlic bread.

 We trust you will all have a Happy Halloween!  We'd like to thank our daughter Jill for sending us our Halloween decoration.  That's about as good as it gets out here.

Here At The Farm It's SUN DAY Every Day!

Did I happen to mention that we live in a gated community?  Did I also mention that we have a number of prisons in our immediate area, one of which houses Charles Manson.  (For those not familiar with Manson, he was a high-profile murderer in the 1970's.  He is now 80, and not going anywhere.)

This big guy lives near the farm at an eating place called The Idle Spur.  It's a folksy place but the food is good.

So we stopped at a thrift store so Bruce could buy a couple of work shirts, and he found a really nice Abercrombie and Fitch shirt that looked like new.  When he got it home he tried it on and found out it had long gorilla sleeves.  So during the week, I unpicked one cuff and shortened it 3 inches, but left the other one long.....I wanted to see if he would notice the difference.   He did.  I haven't fixed the other sleeve yet, but it is on my list of things to do.











This week our gleaning in the fields included walnuts, almonds, tomatoes, pears and grapes.  The grapes are REALLY BIG.  "How big are they", you ask?  They are soooo big that one fills your whole mouth.  They are sooo big a robin would mistake it for her egg.  They are sooo big you would choke if you swallowed it whole.  And they are crisp and explode with flavor in your mouth.

Here is Elder Fillmore and Elder Smith cracking walnuts on a crank walnut cracker that is amazingly easy, and you can crack many at the same time.  Unfortunately, they don't sell them anymore....at least we couldn't find any online or from any of the old hardware stores that used to carry them.

This is Bruce with the ditch witch making more trenches to bury water lines.  Yes, they did cut more existing pipes that had to be repaired.  The shop behind him was without water for about three days until they could locate where the line hooked into the system.








Other happenings:  Bruce did a variety of jobs including some concrete patching, a little welding and some woodworking.  The lumber was delivered yesterday for the two garages, so next time you will see the progress as it takes shape and form.
We hosted another birthday party for the October birthdays....remember the pies last month?  This month we made pumpkin rolls and it was another hit.

They don't call me "Miss-Understood" for nothing.  Here are some examples:

Ann:  The radio said the Pope was addressing congress and he arrived with his wife Rose.  I didn't know he had a wife.

Bruce:  The announcer said he arrived with his WHITE ROBES, and no, he isn't married.

Bruce has started feeding the cat that keeps our house mouse free, and asked me to look for some cat food. 

Ann: (to clerk)  Can you tell me where the cat food is?

Clerk: (points to trays of cantalope and watermelon)

Ann:  Is that cat food?

Clerk:  Oh, I thought you were asking for CUT FRUIT.

Ann: (chuckling...it must be my Utah accent)

Sister Smith called me while Bruce and I were cracking walnuts at a friends house. (There was a chain saw buzzing in the background)

Sister Smith:  When you stop by here, can you pick up some chairs for your neighbor boys?

Ann:  Sure.  (Why would the little boys need chairs from the Smith's?)

Later we stopped by the Smith's and found Elder Smith at home.

Ann:  Your wife asked me to pick up some chairs to take home.

Kay:  Chairs?  I don't know anything about any chairs.

Ann:  Well she said to take some chairs home for the neighbor boys.

Kay:  Oh, you are supposed to take them some PEARS!  Here is the bag.

On a more spiritual note, Conference was great and we were uplifted and edified by the talks.  We have also been enjoying our couple study time each evening where we are reading Jesus the Christ by James E. Talmage.  It is sometimes the highlight of our day.

All Work and No Play Makes Senior Missionaries Incapable of Jovial Behavior

 Yup,  this is us at the ocean.  We went down to Ventura for a day and experienced a flea market (new hat for Elder Fillmore), picked free avocados, ate at a Chinese buffet, walked in the waves, visited a quaint Danish village and bought 15 large grapefruits for $5....which were yummy I might add.  We traveled with two other senior missionary couples (sorry the picture is dark, but it was getting late).  We are on the right.

While at the flea market, we found these shirts for the neighbor boys, which we just couldn't pass up because they are so appropriate.

Every 1st Thursday the office celebrates birthdays for the month, and the Senior Missionaries are responsible to buy or make the goodies.  It was my turn, so I made 9 of the 11 pies shown in the picture.  They were a big hit.  Apparently a lot of people don't make pies anymore.  The 2 apple pies were served warm with ice cream.....another hit.

Next time you are enjoying your raisin bran, think of this picture.  They are making raisins by drying grapes on...you guessed it....the ground.  At least they put paper down first!

The big news is the changes happening in our own backyard....literally.  This beautiful mulberry tree came down, and the greenish looking grass was dug up, in preparation for two garages which will be built this next month by Elder Fillmore and Elder Smith.

The neighbor boys are LOVING all the dirt piles, trenches and treasures that they are finding in the dirt.

Other memorable experiences from the past two weeks:
Bruce:  Fixed several broken water lines incurred in the yard digging and also from a farm machine     that hit a post with water and gas lines attached.
Installed shelves in the equipment trailer, so his wife can organize it for the working elders
 Ran a jack hammer for the first time in his life...to free the damaged water and electrical pipes for replacement.  It was a real bone jerking experience.
 Operated a ditch witch....you can compare it to a chain saw on steroids, with wheels.

Ann:  Fed young missionaries (6-8 of them) multiple times
Fed senior missionaries multiple times (6 of them)
Cleaning out aforementioned trailer (mouse poop heaven)
Participated in the graduation of 16  Hispanic workers from the Daily Dose English Program
Assembled 14 quilts for the Relief Society & Young Women to tie for the Linus Project (donated  quilts to help displaced youth in protective care)
Scanning large maps on a HUGE  scanner so they can be digitized

It's always fun on the farm!  Until next time:  Hold on to your horses...it only gets better.

Clean the Stalls, We've Got Company!

The weeks are flying by, and we are trying to get in as much as possible.

The big highlight was having Katie and Ken and their eight kids drop in for an overnight stay.  They were on the California coast for a wedding and family vacation.

They are big on HUGE GROUP SELFIES.

 We were all decked out with hair nets, hard hats and ear plugs for a tour of the nut processing plant.    Following the tour we drove to a pistachio field to watch the machines shaking trees, then we picked some huge grapes and small asian pears.



This the the whole crew together at our home in McFarland, CA.

We were also able to get away for a great Saturday trip to the Sequoia National Forest. This isn't the tallest tree in the world, but it has the biggest circumference at the base. It's called the General Sherman tree.

This is the school where I volunteer with ninety 2nd grade students.  Note the typical California style building where the hallways are outside and the lunchroom tables are under the trees.

Because I service 4 classes, I only get to read with each child once a week.  My second week at the school one student commented, "Why are you STILL old?"  I guess they noticed I was old the first week and thought I'd get over it by the second week.....Nope, it didn't happen.

We were displaced from our home for two nights while the field across the street from us was being fumigated prior to planting.  The Best Western was a huge step up from the last hotel we stayed in.  We had a king sized bed, free breakfast, and fancy towels.  They fanned our towels, the kleenex and the toilet paper.  

Unfortunately, while at the hotel, our car was in dire need of a new alternator, so while enduring triple-digit temperatures, Elder Fillmore and Elder Smith replaced the alternator.  Sister Fillmore helped by holding two umbrellas up to give them a little shade.

When I shop locally in McFarland people generally stare at me when I walk into the store.  I don't know if it's because of my missionary tag or the fact that I'm the only caucasian person in the store.  I am  trying to be more environmentally friendly, so I took my cloth bags to put the groceries in.  When I got to the checkout, the poor bagger didn't know how to load the bags.  He told the checker, "This wasn't in the video they showed me at training."

Another funny e-mail conversation between our daughter Jan and her dad.

Jan: I went into Harbor Freight the other day and it smelled like you!

Bruce:  I hate the Harbor Freight smell.  I think it's the chemicals they use to fumigate the stuff coming in from China.

Jan:  But all the shiny sockets and saw blades are fun to look at.

Bruce:  Once you get past the smell, it's great! 

 (Isn't it fun when we consider the memories our kids will remember us by!)

Adios until next time.  Stay comfy, dry and happy!

NUT HARVEST HAS BEGUN

What a cool thing it is to be here during harvest.  If you missed the tree shaking video, refer to the blog called "Getting There is Half the Fun" for a link to the South Valley Farms video.  Watching the tree shaking is one of the harvest highlights.  But first, some interesting facts about pistachio and almond trees.

A pistachio tree is created by grafting a bud from a current pistachio tree into an entirely different host sapling when it is about 2 feet tall.  That tiny bud grows into an adult pistachio tree, after the top of the host is cut off.  That is significant when you consider that tens of thousands of these trees have to be budded by hand, in the fields, by workers who are bending over to bud them and are moving so fast that you have to trot beside them to keep up.   The same thing is true of almond trees, but they are grafted when the hosts are just sticks, before being planted in the ground.

When the tree shaking is done and the almonds are on the ground drying, sweepers go into the fields and sweep the nuts into tidy rows to be sucked up by machines that put them in the semi-trucks.

The sweepers have to sweep under the branches, so the machines are about as tall as I am, and workers are stuffed into tiny cabs to drive them.  It's a dusty affair and we wonder how the drivers can even see what they are doing.

But the trees aren't done yet...to ensure that EVERY NUT is off the trees, workers attack each tree one last time with a pole to knock off any remaining nuts.  With over a million trees, that's a lot of smacking!

Large semi-trucks bring the nuts to the processing plant to be weighed, sorted, cleaned and bagged. Before unloading, the trucks weigh in and the block of trees that produced those particular nuts is noted on the computer system.  Literally every nut can be traced back to it's field of origin, because through the whole process the nuts are taken care of with the batch they started with.

The trucks roll in and out continuously all day, six days a week.  The nuts are either dumped on the ground, using a conveyer belt to turn them into a mountain of nuts, or unloaded directly into grates in the ground that take them right into the building, depending on what batch they belong to.

The piles in the picture were created by 10:30 am and more trucks were coming in.  By the next morning, these nuts are all gone, the yard is swept and ready for a new batch.

The overhead conveyers are creating mountains of hulls and a separate mountain of shells behind this one.  This is sold to cattle ranchers for feed, and they make a pretty profit on it.

Now let's talk about what Elder Fillmore has been up to.  He has been pouring over plans for the 2 garages that he and Elder Smith will build as soon as the building permits are issued.  In the meantime, he  has been fixing sliding glass doors, installing doorbells, patching a large hole in a wall (a resident was trying to hang a picture but punctured a water line), replacing weather stripping around doors and replacing batteries in smoke and carbon monoxide detectors.

What you see here is a larger water line that got broken in front of some old homes that are coming down.  The foreman on the demolition team called Elder Fillmore who came to the rescue and capped off the pipe in the middle of the mess.  He put down a front door off of the house (in picture above you can recognize the doorknob still on the door), so he could kneel on it and not have to slosh through the mud.  Another happy customer was satisfied with his work.

Let me explain my projects.  The missionary elders are maintenance men who have 3 shops or storage areas to work out of.  Tools of all sorts are stored in two of them and the third one had old furniture, mattresses, and household goods stored there in boxes (which the mice had a "hay day" with).  Of the 20 homes that the missionaries maintain, 5 are completely furnished....formerly 6 houses.   Over the years a sizable stockpile of household furniture, vacuums, irons, ironing boards, blenders, microwaves, sheets, blankets, pillows, plates, pots, pans, toasters, and anything you would find in kitchen drawers has accumulated.  Elders Fillmore and Smith made the excess furniture available for field workers, and the rest of the usable stuff was delivered to my door to be laundered, cleaned up, and stored.

I did multiple loads of laundry and had my dishwasher running full time for a couple of days. What you see here does not account for the stuff already in the closet in our 3rd bedroom, which is used as a study.  All the sheets, comforters and pillows were stored in the closet in bedroom #2.  The final picture shows the room cleaned up, with mattress and box springs on the left, as well as the extra vacuums.

With that project done, I attacked one of the other storage areas and organized all the hand tools, paints, screws, nails, electrical and plumbing supplies.  Between the mouse poop found in the household boxes and the massive amounts of mouse poop (including one mouse corpse) found in that storage area, I was totally grossed out.  I wore a face mask and gloves as I worked through the dust and mouse poop.  So....two storage areas down and one remaining for another week.

One last incident to report on.  Elder Smith was on our neighbor's roof replacing a part on a non-working air conditioner.  The dad and 3 boys were out back, or so they thought.  The 2-year old made his way around front to the ladder and climbed onto the roof.  Elder Smith saw him as he was teetering a bit and called him over to him, then he secured him in his arms.




















The story had a happy ending but could have been a real mission-spoiler for us and devastating for the family.

Join us next time when we tell you about our trip to Sequoia National Park:)