Rambutan

Have you ever heard of rambutan before?  I haven't.  It's a fruit, and this particular batch is from Guatemala, although I'm sure you can grow these in any tropical location.  Anyway, the top two there are the uneaten fruits, these hairy berries that sort of look like sea urchins.  The last thing you think when looking at these may be, "I wonder what it tastes like?"  Nevertheless, we all sat around today, sampling the rambutan.  You start by cutting an incision around the hemisphere of the outer shell, and you can see the end result of that with the shells in the bottom of the picture above.  What is not seen in these pictures is the fruit, which is a white fruit that reminds you of a grape in taste, and maybe in texture too.  The challenge with the inner layer of a rambutan is that there is also a pit, a large seed in the middle of the fruit.  This clings to this juicy fruit in such a way that you till have to get to it either with a knife, or you just pop the whole thing in your mouth and work away at it that way.  Either way, the fruit is a pretty big hassle to eat.  While its taste is good, it's just not that much effort to get at!

Anyway, here's the new series at KidPak coming up.  It's called "At the Movies," which of course is what the series at Free Chapel is called.  While they're looking at more grown-up movies, we're looking at animated movies from the past year or so, and drawing Biblical messages from them.  Today I was writing some more on one of those messages.  We have about three done, and I have one more to go.

Pop up showers are all over North Georgia, and we actually have been seeing a little bit of rain now.  It comes from all directions, whereas in the spring, the showers always come from the west.  Lately, these showers have come from the north.  Still, we have this strange shield around our area that dissipates rain showers before they arrive here, and frequently we miss out on the rain that everyone else is getting.  This is to our advantage during the rougher weather.  But lately, we've had to go out and water our plants more frequently, bummed that the rain showers couldn't do that for us.

We were grocery shopping today, picking up a few things for the Fourth of July weekend.  We grilled some burgers tonight, because I found some gluten-free buns for Mom to have a nice burger on the grill.  Mom was working on Alice's garden in the back, and it's looking very nice.  We'll share some pictures of that later on.  Nana is pretty repetitive, the same questions over and over again, the same actions, the same moodiness.  For years now, and it's wearing us all down, but we're doing our best.  

Maddie had taekwondo tonight, so that got a few of us out the door.  It gives Mom a break, and meanwhile, Nana is good watching the kids spar and train through the observation windows.  I'm there too, watching Maddie practice with her friends.  She loves taekwondo quite a bit, and has missed a lot this month, along with other students.  This is due to Summer Xtreme and Forward.  But she's back now, or at least as soon as the Fourth of July holiday is over with - no taekwondo tomorrow or Monday.

It's been a decent day.  We read tonight and we said our prayers too.  We're getting ready for the holiday weekend, it is shaping up to be nice.  Today we bought an American flag to put on the front porch.  We'll have it there just in time for the Fourth of July.