What's this a picture of, you ask?

Apple crap. My friend Diana invited some people down to her parents’ house in Corvallis to make cider. Don’t worry though, it wasn’t the fermented kind…although I could probably let the cider that I came home with sit out for a while…

Her parents live in an adorable house kind of in the woods. Seriously, these are direct quotes from the directions she sent us to find the place. “over the railroad tracks, past the gas station/country store” and “about 20 feet later there are 4 mailboxes on your left and a dirt road on the right” and “go through the forest” and “ignore the tacky no trespassing signs.” Needless to say, my car got lost and appropriately enough, we ended up in a town called Tangent. Perfect.

Pressing cider was fun. Here’s a link to a Wikipedia article, however, the traditional cider press that is pictured there looks more like a medieval torture device as opposed to what we used. The picture above is what’s left over after you’ve pressed all the juice out. They just put it in the compost pile, but we were trying to come up with other things we could do with the apple detritus. I came up with bricks, if you mixed it with some sort of natural mortar and then viola! Organic bricks!!

After pressing cider, Diana’s mother fed us a delicious dinner of BBQ beef sandwiches and soup and fresh fruit and vegetables and apple pie and, of course, the cider we had just pressed, which was seriously amazing. After the food had digested some, Diana’s dad brought out his collection of didgeridoos. Of course. We took turns attempting to play, but for the most part just made a bunch of really awkward noises. After failing at that, a couple of us took turns on the piano, an instrument we were much more familiar with, and had a Wicked/Little Mermaid sing along. It ended up being a fairly magical day.