Loves, we had a lovely Thanksgiving weekend. I gave up trying to work at my regular job mid-week and I took all of Wednesday off and planted trees outside and set up the Christmas tree inside. On Thursday morning, I continued to clean the house and move furniture and Jeremy really started in on the cooking. I really enjoy this prep time with Jeremy – we’ve thrown enough parties to know how long things take, so we are busy the entire time, but not rushing and we are keeping each other company. I feel like that is the key to enjoying things.
At four, the party began – we had about 30 people show up this year. Vince/Dani, Bob/Katherine and Emy/Seth stayed on the west coast and went to Portland – we kind of can’t believe that the family center of gravity is shifting to Oregon, but I think it’s happening! Dani got a very nice offer for a funded master’s program at the Oregon State University in Corvallis starting early next year, we are thrilled for them and HOORAY – the holidays are more fun when you have a good plan in place.
There was Jenga –
There was a lot of food. There was only dark meat served from two birds because…well we bought 2 turkeys and Jeremy sous vides them in separate containers. So the plan was all the dark meat and half of the white meat and freeze the other half of the white meat for later. But Jeremy inadvertantly turned off the sous vide-er of the white meat section while he was setting it up, so when he set it out to carve, it was still raw! Oh no! He quickly put it into the oven, where it roasted and was ready when like many hours later after the dessert course and folks had headed out to see Wicked already.
Don’t worry, there was enough food.
I asked for many servings of vegetables without cheese or fat on them and so Jeremy obliged with bright green beans and broccoli and cauliflower which I adored – I love my fiber homework.
We closed out the night we a long talk with the Horowitz family – fun talking about Carla and old memories. Food wise – this was a very balanced thanksgiving – not too many leftovers, not an enormous amount of dessert, just right.
The rest of the weekend was very social and active, but in a low-key kind of way. I planted four trees in our backyard- two serviceberries and two magnolias on a beautiful 65 degree day. This took me four hours which included erecting wire fencing around all the trees to prevent the deer from eating them. (If you take a look at my backyard, I’m growing wire fencing and not much else.) I had bought bare root serviceberries early this year, but they didn’t take, so I increased my expenditure and bought 3 gallon trees, fingers crossed they will grow in the spring. We also saw Megan (who stopped by for an afternoon hang – she hung out while I wrapped Christmas gifts), Pat and his wife Theresa – we all went to see Zootopia 2 (where a huge plot point rests on patent approval! go…patent office) and had tacos for dinner together. Noah came over for a bit to help us move a couch from upstairs to downstairs.
On that note, we spent a lot of time rearranging the house especially upstairs. I finished decluttering our papers (which still left 18 boxes – still a lot, but I’m working on it) and Jeremy and I moved beds, carpets, laundry, dressers all around. The reason this started was because I made my BLACK FRIDAY goal!!!
I made 175 hours of total playtime on my guitar app (not all 175 was this year…, just FYI – I did not practice like 3.3 hours a week lol). It was a good goal, ambitious enough that I needed to play most days, but if I missed a day here or there, I wasn’t terribly behind. I finished my goal on the Tuesday before BLACK FRIDAY and felt triumphant. Jeremy cheered me on – as he does – and on Tuesday he told me dinner was ready and I told him I needed to play 2 more minutes and he said – go for it and then it was done. As a reward, I’m buying myself a dresser – which I think I’ll get to in the new year as this is a high spend month – hence the decluttering and moving furniture around and making space for the new dresser. Now I’m making my guitar goal for next BLACK FRIDAY and what my reward will be. I have an idea, but not ready for telling you yet.
