Activities!

I am going to try something I haven't tried yet here on NVNG... I'm going to not write so much this time. More photos, fewer words. Letting the pictures tell the stories. I fear that I am using this blog as though it were a journal or diary, telling each little detail to preserve for posterity. That's bad. I'm bad. I'll try to be better, starting today.

This post will be of all that's gone on so far this week. Starting with the curtains that I made for the kitchen window last Sunday night. My mother found these really great dish towels and gave them to us so that I could make curtains out of them, because the roosters in the kitchen had become too floofy for our liking. I whipped out the sewing machine, got my own bobbin going, an within an hour or so I had these babies done! Maybe I could get used to sewing after all.

This photo is of our old curtains, the ones from the kitchen in our Newton apartment that we transferred to Dedham. They looked okay here, but were a little too... too much curtain.
This photo is posted specifically for my mother - look at those straight stitches! You're a great teacher - thank you!
And lastly... here's the finished product. There is no curtain or valance on the top part of the window so it does look a little bare, but I am thinking of maybe hanging a small plant or something. That or just waiting until I get used to the way the new window looks. Both Doug and I agree, though, that with the rooster curtains gone the yellow just isn't working in the kitchen. And neither is the light fixture. See below.
This is the lovely (!) light fixture in our kitchen. The people who lived here before us thought they lived in Italy. Stone sculptures of cherubs and angels were all over the house - that's right, inside - and so were all kinds of grapes and vines and faux-effects on the walls... This house is no Tuscan villa, so I'm not sure where they got this style idea. Did they have a strange love for the Olive Garden? Anyway, they were kind enough to leave us this fixture. Doug and I do not like this light fixture. So serious question here - do you know anyone who wants it?

Anyway, what else did we do this week. Tuesday I cooked a soup. A good soup - French Lentil Soup, the recipe for which I found on epicurious.com. I highly recommend it (both the soup and the site). It came out very tasty, though it does lack color. I've attached some photos of the cooking process, a sort-of photo play-by-play:

Soup, phase 1 - softening and browning the vegetables. We love carrots here, and this soup has them. Yay!
Soup, phase 2: (really, this is more like phase 3 or 4, but I skipped a couple of steps). Here the soup has been boiled and simmered and is almost ready to serve. It looks magical in this cloud of steam - but I am no magician in the kitchen.
And lastly, here is the soup, partially pureed, more vegetable stock added, and ready to eat. We ate some leftover chicken with it, too, which Wyatt seems to think is all for him and his glowing eyes (I used red-eye reduction on his eyes, but I think I preferred them red...).


Finally, the activity that we've been enjoying the most this week is listening to Christmas records. The scratchier the better for me. I "borrowed" my mother's Christmas records over Thanksgiving because on the Very Merry Christmas album that she and my father got free from the Mobil gas station one year a long, long, long time ago is my absolute favorite Christmas song of all time - Christmas in My Home Town, by Charley Pride. There's something about the string-bass beat on this song that is infectious, and Charley has a great voice. Plus, the song (and all of her records) bring back memories of my childhood Christmases. My mother always had the most lovely Christmas tree, and we would have so much fun cutting down our own tree, decorating it, decorating the house, having hot chocolate, listening to Christmas records. There's something about Christmas in your childhood home that never grows old. I love going to my parents' home for Christmas each year. But this year, with these records, I have a little bit of their home, my old home, here in my new home with me, and I'm loving it.

This is the record with the Charley Pride song. Charley's the one at three o'clock, between Arthur Fieldler and Morton Gould. This record also has Julie Andrews, Robert Shaw, and Perry Como. Mobil made a good record back in the day!
The Andy Williams Christmas Album is one of my favorite Christmas albums; I never tire of listening to this one all the way through. I have it on CD now, but it's not as good without all the scratchy static in the background.
And here's Perry Como. What a pure voice he had! My mother had excellent taste. How do I know that this record was my mother's? She wrote her name on the back of this and all of her records, just so anyone who wanted to take Perry home would know to back off - it's Ruth's property! No one gets between Ruth and her records, and I am glad of that because now I get to enjoy the sounds of Christmas on vinyl.