Chicken with Blueberry Sauce.

This dish is simply amazing. The flavor is bright and bold, fruity that just pops! in your mouth. The chicken was so juicy and tender... literally, I had clear juices running down my fork and onto my hand! I just can't express how wonderful this is, and how much I absolutely adore it.


Chicken with Blueberry Sauce.

The two times I've made the chicken, I've paired it with Honey-Garlic Angel Hair and boiled carrots. It works well together, and we love stirring the leftover sauce into the pasta for an extra kick once the chicken is eaten. :-)

( Recipes. )

Duck Banding 2010.

The start of the Duck Banding story begins HERE, and this just the pick-up. This is a picture-heavy post, beware!

The duck banding done at J. Clark Salyer National Wildlife Refuge is a special treat for the 7th graders at Memorial Middle School. Each year, the seventh grade classes return permission forms just to be considered for the trip, but only 20 students are drawn out of all slips received. A.J. was just lucky enough to be one of those winning the experience, and he was so excited!

The other entry covers a lot of the morning, and the getting there, so I'm just going to jump right into the how-to's of banding in this post. The process was more involved than I had imagined!

After we heard the feed rockets go off, the bus crept toward the water a bit more, and then we piled out. The feed rockets are mounted on steel poles, and the end of each rocket is attached to a string on the apron of the large nets used to capture the ducks. The barley rockets shoot out, the nets sailing along on the end of them, and the ducks flock and swarm to eat, captured at once. It's really a very cool procedure.

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And my favorite picture from the day:


A duck flies into the sunlit horizon.