Friday: ate some Mexican takeout, played some Enemy Territory with Jamie for way too long. Had trouble getting to sleep, then I got paged early early Saturday morning.

Saturday: Spent about 7 hours at my mom’s farm and had a blast. This was the first annual Corn Grinding and Apple Squeezing event at the Porter farm. This isn’t the first time they’ve done the food processing, they usually do that once or more a year out at Air Acres. This year, they took the setup to the house. To be specific, they took it to the pasture.

Here’s how it worked: The corn grinding is performed via a grinder that is belt-driven off of an old tractor setup just for the event. The corn was turned into meal that was used to make fresh cornbread for lunch. It was awesome. There’s also an apple juicing machine and this thing has a large crank-powered cog with bunches of teeth that eat apples to make pulp. That falls into a barrel with a cloth to filter the solid bits. When the barrel is full, you lower the press and tighten it till done. It’s really easy, and very rustic. The juice is good too.

But that wasn’t the whole point of Saturday’s party. There were the Beano Air Races (don’t ask me what Beano means), which consisted of at least 10 different RC airplanes flown around a circuit set off by 20-foot pylons. The circuit was what, 50 yards wide? Not sure about that. My brother has a new plan he “flew”. Note the quotes. Most of the time his plane was stuck in a tree. He needs to work on that. The races were pretty informal though. Lots of testing and free-flight was done in addition to the several circuit races. Everybody loved watching that.

There were games for the kids and games for the adults and food for everyone. here are some pictures taken by Jay.

Sunday: Spent a lot of the day indoors tweaking the Brindy’s Giftables website and otherwise goofing off. Staci’s mom bought us dinner at IHOP to celebrate Staci’s birthday. When I got home I started on the countertop project. It’s done, the corian is cut. It wasn’t a huge deal, but the proper prepwork took some time. I actually did a better job cutting it than the person who did it originally. It was free though.