Grandgirls and Visine

June, 1997

Alexandra and Adela have been here a week now and they are enjoying the advantages of country life with the swing in the walnut tree and having Mihaela, our neighbor, to play with. It is nice to have girls around. They are not quite so rambunctious as boys, but then again, it has been a long time and my memory may be a bit fuzzy.

The dog trainer came today. He will teach the dog commands in English so that I can take advantage of his expertise and Eugen will know how to handle Rini, who is growing by leaps and bounds. At least she has learned not to use the front porch for her personal toilet and she does not run into the house whenever the door is opened. I think these are quite remarkable accomplishments for a dog not yet six months old who was used to indoor life before she came to us.

We have not yet taken all of the visine, sour cherries, from the trees. And I think that we never will get to the end of this task! We have taken the seeds from several liters of them and put them into jars with aspirin, hoping that this method of preserving them is as sound as it is easy. We have also put about 40 liters into bags in the freezer and today Eugeniu made jam, 9 huge jars of it and I put more bags into the freezer along with a few liter-sized bags of apricots that have fallen from the trees. Alexandra helped a lot with the visine by helping with the sorting of the good and the bad as she and Mihaela put them into freezer bags. Oana and Catalin took home a huge chest full of them and when they brought it back on Saturday, we filled it with a bucket full of visine that Costinel had picked. Fortunately Monica agreed to take it home with her. Costinel, who is Mihaela's brother, is still climbing into the trees to pick visine, but now we hope that the neighbors will take the rest. We have enough to last for quite a while and that includes the ones hanging from the nails at one end of the patio. Nicu says that we will be able to resuscitate them by soaking them in water. This will be an interesting experiment as I have long been interested in methods of drying food naturally.

Eugen is busy working on a plan for building a greenhouse plus. I like all of his plans and hope that we can follow our dream to build it.