Bluegill Fishing and Strawberry Jam

This weekend was free fishing weekend in Illinois, so Friday evening I took Katie to Jubilee College State Park to fish for bluegill in a pond there. It is a nice little pond just teeming with life, including some loud frogs. She did a pretty good job casting and caught and released two bluegill.  On Saturday evening, Kris, Katie, and returned to the pond.  This time Katie caught three bluegills and Kris caught four.  All but one of the fish were returned; the littlest we brought home to put in our rain barrel to eat mosquito wrigglers.  It was still in there today, despite a few inches of stormy rains throughout today that seems to have washed tall the wrigglers out of the rain barrel!  Another major event this weekend was making strawberry.  Our home strawberry crop peaked last week, and I think that raccoons helped deplete them.  Yesterday, the family went to Schaer's Farm on the other side of the river to pick about 14 pounds of strawberries.  Today we made them into about 8 pints of low-sugar jam and about 10 pints of regular jam.