Thanksgiving Preparations

 

Well Mommy's famous (and quite fabulous!) turkey head is waiting for a pineapple. In the meantime, the handbag that Bob fashioned for me from a log will do nicely! I think my sister Cathy said she's providing the pineapple... (*1)

So here are a couple of helpful suggestions to make your holiday entertaining that much easier. First off, don't clean the house too early. Like I'm talking wait until the last minute if possible.

Case in point: this floor was clean... maybe yesterday? But we're heavy traffic: bringing in autumn leaves and general dirt on our boots type people so I learned the hard way to clean at the last minute or have to do it all over. Hell! I've got more important things to do with my time! (Like play outside and track in more dirt!) (*2)

And here's another tip: no matter what they tell you on the packaging or the Internet, your frozen turkey will still be frozen after many days of refrigerator thawing!

Here's Bob attempting to wrestle guts from our 13 pound friend. What do you do when you get one of those 20 pound behemoths?!?! Anyway, I'm certain that tragedy will be averted, the bird will thaw and a lovely golden brown turkey will grace the table tomorrow.  But now I have to go clean!!

(*1) I sorta forgot to buy one, along with dish soap. Yes, several trips to various stores and I forgot. I guess we'll have to dine on dirty platters and grubby, reused stemware! The horrors!

(*2) Similar to the time I bought and wrapped a birthday present for a friend. Several months passed before seeing this friend, in which time the wrapping paper was a crumpled, dirty mess and I had to re-wrap it. 

Pop Quiz: Solstice Edition

Okay kids: What are the two things that Rita enjoys about the Holiday Season? If you said, "Xmas tree!" and "Cookies!" than you have a splendid memory. Above is the partially decorated pine tree that Bob harvested from our vast acreage. It's actually a bit taller than some recent models and boy is there plenty of open space to hang ornaments! Looks great!

                                     

And here's the beginnings of several bouts of cookie creation. We didn't have the ingredients I needed for a few of the other cookies I intended to make, so I resorted to that pseudo-healthy standby of oatmeal raisin cookies. They're half gone already.

Here's our tree illuminated at night. I think this was from our Solstice Celebration. We like to hold celebrations; what else can you do in times of COVID 19 and continued Trumpism?! Let's break out the booze and have a ball... (*1)

It is strange to be decorating and thinking that we'd ordinarily have family (Hi Cathy! Hi Beatrice! Hi John!) over for pork roast, which Bob is just now starting to cook in the CrockPot. (Or, The CrackPot as it IS at our house!). We're cooking the pork roast a day early, thinking we'll enjoy it for Xmas eve as well as Xmas day because Holy Hell! The weather people are predicting heavy rain! High winds! Flooding! Armafuckinggeddon!! Power outages! Darkness! Despair! Our energy company (don't get me started on Eversource (*2)) left a weird robo-message excusing themselves in advance of any responsibility for power outages. They advised to remove or tie down any outdoor decorations... yeah, right. (*3)

So we're having a small feast: mashed potatoes, roast pork, gravy, Brussels sprouts and our own carrots. And we have a warm spinach artichoke dip as an appetizer and a punkin pie to finish up. Slosh it all down with a nice red Bordeaux and boy are we livin' the good life!

In the meantime, I'm doing everything with one hand tied behind my back as I had a freak accident (*4) and my left hand looks like I decked someone in a bar fight. I'm swollen and can't bend two fingers. Thank goodness I'm a Rightie! 

So... Happy Holidays from us and ours to you and yours!

(*1) To quote Miss Peggy Lee.

(*2) And there were a couple of degenerates (one, whaling away at a rose vine with a machete!!) sent by Eversource to prune the trees that line the driveway so as to prevent outages. But walking out to the mailbox and surveying every bloody inch of the driveway, I was unable to discern that they had done anything!!

(*3)  But I will bring Burned Santa inside for the night. Remember him? Rescued from the wilds of Shamokin Pennsylvania where he had been badly burned in some heathen Xmas sacrifice. He gets tied to the fence every year as our one concession to outdoor holiday decorations.

(*4) Don't ask how I managed to hook my sleeve on a gate, pull on it and cause my poor, innocent left hand to come careening across and POW! impact on the side of the horse food bucket. I am swollen and can't bend two fingers.

... And as Happy a New Year as is Possible Under the Circumstances

An interesting beginning to the New Year... I can say that Bob saved the day yesterday. I woke up at about 5:30 and I felt chilly. That's unusual for me as typically, I retain the heat from sleeping under the two hundred blankets with which Bob and I cloak the bed. (Over night, I almost always cast off sweat pants and socks as we sleep and when I stumble outside to let Robin eliminate I am enveloped in an invisible warm envelope.) In any event, it was only 60 upstairs- which is cold as the heat in our house reliably rises and the bedroom is often a good seven or eight degrees warmer than the kitchen. When I went downstairs, it was much colder and obvious that the furnace hadn't come on in a while.
I woke Bob up- such fun to be awoken on New Year's Day to a cold house. Bob tried the furnace and likewise, it didn't come on.... we made a fire in the wood stove.
The immediate tragedy of freezing to death warded off, Bob did some investigation with the furnace itself and found that the on/off switch had been tripped. (Probably be me as I brushed past the furnace in the utility room to flip on the outdoor flood lights at 3:00 am when Robin needed to pee...)

(Our little helper, rooting around for stray bits of dog food on the utility room floor.)
Anyway, Bob got the furnace working and we were happy for about a half an hour. Then Bob tells me that he went outside and checked the propane tanks and... they were all three empty! So he shut off the furnace (again) and we heated quite happily with the wood stove, planning on calling our propane supplier the next day.
The next day turned out to be a holiday (who knew?) and  we had to order on Tuesday. In the meantime, the weather continued warm so no big deal (although as an interesting aside, a good friend (Hello Sheldon!) had inquired about us heating with wood. I said, "Oh, with both Bob and I heating the studios with wood, we usually heat the house with propane. Running three wood stoves is a lot of work!" Little did I know.)
So on Tuesday, Bob orders propane and they came and filled the tanks and a general "hooray" arose from the denizens of The Bauhaus Chicken Coop as warmth would fill the land. The house was still warm from the continuing wood stove fire so it wasn't until early the next morning that we realized the blasted house was cold and the danged furnace wasn't firing and catching. It seemed to want to try, but something wasn't right.
Bob went on line and- intrepid guy that he is!- watched several videos about things that might cause the furnace to not start. He cleaned a widget and make a tweak here or there but still no luck.
Bob re-called the propane company and they dispatched a technician. The man arrived pretty quickly and looked at all the possible fittings and switches and I'm seeing dollar signs flash before my eyes as these guys aren't cheap. But he said the furnace looked in good shape and clean and went outside to test the hoses and line. There he discovered that the delivery man had SHUT OFF the gas coming into the house! He opened the valve and ta-da!! the furnace kicked right in. We aren't even being charged as the technician said that delivery guy must have mistaken our delivery to one that had a leak. So all's well that ends well and we're warm and happy. (The weather got cold right after this episode transpired...)

Yes, a shot of left over (from Lil' Robin's birthday party) balloons, now taken up residence in the downstairs shower stall.

Tidings of Comfort and Joy

Last year, as Bob and Jules and I resided in a "borrowed" home for the holidays, it just never seemed like the Christmas season. Two things make Christmas seem like Christmas were missing- the tree and the Christmas cookies. The tree was missing as we were living in a temporary house that was full of the previous inhabitant's possessions and there really wasn't space for a tree and tragically, the oven on the stove didn't work. We were so deep in the delirious doldrums wondering if we'd ever get our house that Christmas seemed extraneous.
This year, however, we were blessed with the gift of a spruce tree top that was busted in that fluke October snow storm. Bob thought to put the tree- fully ten feet tall- in our stream and it survived just fine. Erected in my studio, which has the very tall ceiling, it looks really spectacular, entirely making up for the lack of tree last year.
I have yet to bake any cookies, but we had a small dinner party last night and we all gathered in my studio around the woodstove and the tree. It was quite magical!