After a day in Kamloops meeting with some coaches from the Overlander Ski Club–Chris and I are head coaches of our Barriere Club — we came home and processed more apples.

The apple juice was so good, we made more. This time Chris used our potato ricer to recover apple sauce and it worked much better. We made 8 quarts of apple juice (about 2 gallons) and recovered about 10 quarts of apple sauce. I seem to still be having some issues with head space/tightness of rings as inevitably I have at least one jar pop open in the canner, letting loose apple goo.

I’m not sure what we will do with so much apple sauce but the kids do like to eat it all on its own…

I swung by Wal Mart today and took a picture of all their crushed cardboard. When I was there months ago they wouldn’t let us take any and I was quite struck by the irony of this as we were parked by their bales of crushed cardboard. T his is a much smaller pile than when I was there before…to be fair to Wal Mart (cack, did I just extend fairness to them???) other big box stores also refused to give us cardboard.

The pictures in this blog posting will be the last ones I’ll post using the kids cameras! Today we bought a new digital SLR camera (yay, yay, yay!). After 6 months of research and questioning need vs. want we decided it was time.

I bought a manual SLR back in the late 80s when I was still in Journalism School and I simple loved it. I took it everywhere until the repair bill for it in early 2000 made its maintenance uneconomical. Since then we’ve had a series of campact digital cameras but I’ve yearned for more ever since.

I compared prices on the Nikon D-90 for several months and discovered the prices were no better in the U.S. Plus, a Canadian repair shop would not honour the warranty on a U.S. purchased unit. I checked ebay and look at used units. But today The Future Shop put many of its cameras on sale (open box, which meant we didn’t get a box for it). We’ve purchased many open box items over the years and are quite happy to save hundreds of dollars to leave the box behind (which we usually throw away as soon as we get home anyway). For the camera and a universal lens we ended up paying about $250 less on these two items than was priced several days ago. And Chris asked for an additional discount for buying the “package”. He pushed it a little further by asking for a camera case thrown in but that appeared to be the threshold! We were offered a discount on that too, but Chris remembered I already had my old camera case. So the sales person gave me a bit more of a discount on a high transfer memory card.

Chris has learned over the years that the big box stores have a lot more room for profit and that it is acceptable to ask for a lower price (something we do not go for at smaller, independent stores). I have been amazed at how much lower a salesperson will go and how quickly. I am still not good at this. We are quite polite when we venture into bargaining and are always conscious of frugal vs. cheap.

As we left the store, Chris turned to me and said, “How are the effects of that endorphin rush? Run out yet?” Nope, nope, nope! I had a full caffeinated coffee right after the purchase, too so I’ve been pretty happy all afternoon and evening!

I hid the camera tonight to avoid the kids putting fingerprints all over it but might sneak a few minutes later tonight to put it together. Here’s the body of the camera.

Check out the blog late tomorrow night to see some of my new photos!