Happy Thanksgiving (and Thanksgiving Weekend)!

We had a good Thanksgiving this year.  Brian and Chelsea were here, and Carol and Mark came over and brought Grandpa for Thanksgiving Dinner.  I think Grandpa was sorry he came.  He wanted to eat dinner and go home, but Carol and Mark, of course, wanted to stay and visit for awhile.

We sort of celebrated Brian's birthday while they were here.  His birthday present was a Bar Review course, so we didn't actually do anything near his birthday.  The pie had one candle on it, and Brian had a very hard time blowing it out.

We are all laughing at his amazing blowing abilities.

Making turkey sugar cookies is one of Chelsea's family's traditions, so she made some for us.

We are making the mincemeat pocket pies.

Susan made the green bean casserole.  She looked at the recipe and said it called for one can of green beans, so I had her double it.  She accidentally added milk for a triple batch instead of a double batch, so I said to go ahead and triple it.  When she had the stuff all mixed together, it looked like cream of green bean soup, so I looked at the recipe, and each batch called for TWO cans of green beans instead of one.  She had to add three more cans of green beans.  It was hilarious!  We still have an untouched green bean casserole in the refrigerator ready to go!

We had carrots from our garden in the feast.

Susan and Dad preparing the turkey for the rotisserie.

Perfect!

Susan and Grandpa.  He will be 90 on his next birthday.

Your dad and I just don't pose well for pictures.  The feast begins.

As always, the day after Thanksgiving we put up the Christmas decorations!

Susan and Chelsea are fixing the count-down calendar.

For dinner, we had our annual Turkey Dinner Leftover Pizza.  Amy, we sure are glad you invented that one!

It's Hanukkah!  We celebrated by having latka tortilla bowls for breakfast!

We worked all day on Friday, so Saturday was game day!  (Not football, obviously.)

We are making the matso ball soup for Hanukkah dinner!

It was tasty and delicious!

Then, of course, we played the dreidel game. (Spell check tells me I spelled that wrong, but it didn't offer me any better options, so there you go.)

Where is he hiding now?

Susan went through a David Bowie streak a while back (why, I don't know), and she had a David Bowie picture taped up on her current infatuation shelf.  I guess she moved on, because one day I came in to sew and I found this.



The challenge was on.  We have been hiding his picture back and forth for each other to happen upon ever since.

 

This Weekend Has Been a Good One!

We had a much deserved, relaxing weekend.  We dug up these vegetables from our garden this weekend.  We had beets, carrots, kohlrabi and parsnips in the front, and kale in the backyard.

There was the first airing of the Dr. Who Fiftiety Anniversary Special on Saturday.  I don't know if you can see it or not, but Matt Smith and David Tennant are TOGETHER AT THE SAME TIME!!!

"CA-RAZZZY!"  You'll have to see the episode in order to understand Suzu's reaction.

We had a good snow last night.  Here's Dad doing what he does after a snowstorm!

John and Kyle came over for dinner on Sunday.  Heather and Lance are out of town on a Rehoboth Choir trip.  Look!  Kyle is eating lettuce by his own free will and choice.  (He's using a spoon, but we'll overlook that!)

This is Susan and me listening to dad read the annual reading of "Smashed Potatoes and Other Thanksgiving Disasters."

Done and finished for another year!

Smashed Potatoes and Other Thanksgiving Disasters!

It's that time of the year again!  We are reading Smashed Potatoes and Other Thanksgiving Disasters, in the evenings again.  We've read that book together before Thanksgiving for a lot of years now.  This blog is to show what goes on during the annual "reading of the book."

The dad is reading the book.  A little while before we read, I had a glass of milk.  You might know what that means.  Anyway, right after I took the picture, the power of the milk kicked in loud and clear.  The dad started laughing hysterically, and so Susan and I did, too.  We had a hard time gaining composure.  When he stopped laughing enough to read, the dad read the next line.  "That was a sound she didn't want to hear."  We laughed for another 5 minutes.  Maybe you had to be there! 

Since I had the camera out anyway, I realized Amy probably hadn't seen the graduation pictures now that all the pictures are there!

Susan should start to worry.  This is what she has in store!

En garde!

This is a Christmas Cactus that I rescued from Wal-Mart after Christmas a few years ago.  It was left to die, and I couldn't let that happen if I could help it.  I stuck it in the extra bedroom for a couple of years, and it never thrived.  In fact it just about gave up and died.  I was just about to chuck it, when I decided to put it in the window in the green room to see if that would help.  As we were reading, I noticed that not only has the plant started to grow again, but it has started to bloom!  Can you see the two tiny flowers starting in the middle, and the flower up in the top left corner?  It's adorable!

A Whole Lot More of Just Plain Ordinary!

 

 

I didn't do a blog post last week because all we had done was plain old ordinary stuff.  Amy said that's what she likes most to see... just plain ordinary life.  So that's what we have here this week is a whole lot of ordinary.  Ordinary is good.

 

Heather McMullin is one chocolate lovin' woman.  The past couple of years she's put together chocolate orders from Hershey's so folks can order chocolate in bulk.  This year, we bought 75 lbs. of Special Dark Chocolate chips.  We bought 25 lbs. at first, and then we found out she had 50 extra pounds, so we bought that, to.  They're really good chocolate chips!  Next time y-all are home, you might want to grab a few pounds of chocolate chips!  The dad has been saving plastic bottles for just such an occasion.  He's packed up the chips with oxygen absorbers.

I bought this cool leaf blower from an infomercial.  You can either use it as a blower, or you can suck the leaves up and the contraption mulches the leaves before they go in the bag.  I've bought a lot of dumb stuff from infomercials, but this one is a gem!

Dad and Susan made their very first pumpkin roll.  It was amazingly delicious!

The Hallmark Channel (starting at the beginning of November), has been playing sappy Christmas Movies round the clock.  I love sappy Christmas movies.  We've watched a bunch already!

While watching those sappy movies, I'm binding another quilt for Quilts of Valor.  I didn't make this one.  One lady cut out all the squares, one pieced the top, one did the machine quilting, and I'm doing the binding.  Our Quilt Club has done several this way.  I like binding duty the best, and no one else does.  We all do the parts we like best.

Nothin' like  fire in the fireplace when we're watching Christmas movies!

Here's some more ordinary.  Every weekend, it takes me about 3 hours to grade the weekly assessments and enter the grades.  A good old Christmas movie makes that job a whole lot more palatable.

Susan and I donated blood this week.  United Blood Services give points, now, for donating blood.  We cashed in our blood points and got movie passes.  Yesterday afternoon, we went to see Last Vegas.  It was hilarious!  It was worth spending blood points for.

Alton Brown Live!

Clear last summer we got an e-mail from Popejoy Hall saying that Alton Brown was going to be doing a show in Albuquerque!  We called Brian and Chelsea to see if they wanted to go with us, and we bought tickets.  From the time we got the e-mail to the time we ordered tickets, the best tickets left were in the mezzanine.  (Maybe 10 minutes.)  They sold completely out in less than an hour.

It was a great show.  It was sort of a variety, comedy, stand-up , cooking show all in one.  It was great.  I went home from school sick that morning (with strep), went to the doctor and started on anti-biotics, and went to the show.  I was probably like Typhoid Mary spreading my strep germs around, but I'm still glad we went!

Here he is!

Before we went to the show, we ate dinner at Twisters.  My throat was so raw that all I ate was plain old French fries.

Here are Brian and Chelsea on the Park and Ride bus on the way to Popejoy.

Anticipation!

Chelsea got her picture taken with Alton!  

Alton took our picture and put it on Twitter.  We're famous!

It really was a fun show, and I would go to it again in a minute!  I just wish the rest of you were closer so you could have come, too!

How 'Bout Them Sox!?!

The Red Sox won the World Series this year at Fenway Park for the first time since 1918.  They have won since then, but never in a home game at Fenway Park.  Wahoo!  They played against the St. Louis Cardinals, and won it 4 games to 2.  It was a great year for post-season baseball!