A little Haggis in our future?

Christmas is such a hectic time of year. Each of the four or whatever weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas is packed with more activity than any other week of the year. This week is no exception. I have been home before 9pm only once so far this week, and that will continue until tomorrow. When does this leave me time to blog? When does this leave me time to write out Christmas cards (which, I promise, are coming)? When does this leave me time to do anything? I haven't listened to Christmas records in forever, haven't cooked in forever, haven't jumped over cheeseburgers in forever, haven't sat down to pet my cats in forever, and haven't drawn up my shades in the dining room in forever. What gives?

I'll tell you something that I have had time for... watching just enough of Cats 101 to decide that a Scottish Fold must be in our future. Doug wholeheartedly agrees, so much so that he contacted Brother Jean (a Franciscian monk, no joke) out of Salem, MA, who lovingly breeds these little critters. He's soon having three litters! How do we know this? Doug has emailed him. Yes, we are that serious. Everyone always wonders when we'll get a fourth cat and we always say that we never will. Four is too many. But really, when a cat looks like this and can sport the name of Haggis, why wouldn't we take the plunge?

Work awaits, but I'll be thinking of little Haggie all day long...

The Christmas Tree

Every year we get a real tree; we go to a tree farm and cut it down ourselves. We become very invested in our Christmas tree, and this means that our Christmas tree requires a blog posting unto itself. So this is it, finally.

This year we went to the Oakwood Christmas Tree Farm in Backwoods, CT, to get our tree with my mother, brother, sister, brother-in-law, the three kids, my sister's mother, father, sister-in-law, and my sister's niece. Three cars to get there - a tree caravan! Trees are less expensive in CT, and there are many indigenous varieties of Christmas trees in the northern portion of the state. The tree we got this year is some kind of hybrid tree, though. It's not a balsam fir, it's not a white pine, but it's something in between. It has the limp branches of a white pine but the thick needles of a balsam fir. It smells like an orange. We like it!

Picking out a tree is for some people very easy. Joanne, my sister's mother-in-law, always gets the first tree she sees. It's always on the very edge of the row, right near the parking area. It's always very small, too. That's fine; that method works for her. It doesn't work for anyone else in the family. The Sheridans are notoriously bad at making decisions, and picking out a tree is no exception. Doug gets very frustrated with all of us, but really all of our diligence pays off in the end, because we always get a great tree. Again, this year is no exception.

This is Doug and Brian at the tree farm, posing with one of the green beauties. We decided against this one in the end. Not special enough. Not the one.

This is Ma Soeur and my mother, posing in a sea of trees. This farm had a lot of trees. We spent a lot of time looking at each one. It was cold, but that didn't stop us from spending hours picking out trees.

Doug and I finally make a decision on a tree. This is the one! We are happy. Really.

Doug gets the honor this year of cutting down the tree while I man the camera. My mother acts as a tree helper. Doug, for whatever reason, tries to cut the tree one-handed. That doesn't last long.

And here's a NVNG first! A video! Watch and listen as we all discuss the felling of the tree... will it fall on Doug's head?

Here's Doug unwrapping the tree once it's finally in its stand in our front room, which means my mother was right - it didn't fall on Doug's head.

Doug puts the tree topper on and poses at this accomplishment. The tree sat like this, with just lights and garland, for a week before we actually finished decorating it. Apparently we don't like to rush things around here.

The Christmas tree, at night. Just lights. Very pretty. Probably could use more lights. I like lights.

The Christmas tree, in the morning. Finally decorated. Looks good!

Here's a close-up of the tree. We don't have a lot of ornaments so there aren't that many on the tree, but I think it looks good like this, actually. This way you can see each ornament and the tree doesn't look cluttered. We don't like clutter in this house. Clutter = bad.

And not only did we put up the tree and decorate it, we also put up some stockings and little Christmasy trinkets. This is our mantle decked out for the holidays, and also my mother's homemade nativity set on our dining table. She painted these in her ceramics class back in 1978, according to the bottom of pieces. I love this set (and so do Meg and Wyatt), and my mother has kindly given it to us. Thanks, Mom!


So that's Christmas so far in Dedham. We love sitting on the sofa and looking into the front room at the tree, and I love that you can see the lit tree from the road. Doug had it on tonight as I was walking up the street to the house from the train, and it made the house look so warm and cozy. Our house feels very much like home now that we have our first tree in it. We aren't going to want to take it down!

Fun with Photo Booth

This past week and weekend have been a whirlwind. Really, that's nothing new, but here it is already 11:30 on Sunday night. Wow.

I wanted to post a couple of new blog entries this weekend... one of our Christmas tree adventures this year, and then one of our fun weekend activities (Merry Birthday party and seeing my youngest niece as a Bon Bon in The Nutcracker), but that never happened. I can't do it all, I guess, but I do try. Just to say that I did in fact get a blog in, I'm posting this amusing photo that I took of myself while at Thanksgiving in Monroe. If you recall, Doug and I were showing Grandpa Doug's Mac, and we were all having a bit of fun with Photo Booth.
Here's another one. You gotta love those Photo Booth filters.
So now that some online Christmas shopping is done and I've posted a blog, it's time to call it a night. Good night!

I promise to do better this time.

So last post I said I'd try to not be so wordy. I don't know if it really worked. This time I'm going to try AGAIN not to be wordy, but I'm not posting any photos, so it will seem like I'm wordier than I really am.

I'm not off to a good start, am I?

Anyway, two important things happened today. One - my friend Jesica (Jipty to all who know me well) is in hard-core labor right now. On Saturday at 5:40pm, after taking castor oil to hopefully bring about some kind of labor, Jesica's water broke. She's been laboring on and off ever since, but today the contractions became regular, and according to her wife's Facebook page, they're now at the hospital. This means that baby should be here before too long! How many hours of labor is that? And how many hours of labor without drugs? Too many for me, and I'm sure too many for Jesica. I'm sure I'll get more details post-birth, but I almost don't want them. I'm on the fence enough as it is about having children, and hearing about prolonged labor won't make me lean toward the wanting children side, that's for sure. But I'm rooting for a healthy and quick labor from here on out! Good luck, Jesica and Chris. Your life will never be the same, but in a good way. I'm excited for you!

On to important event number two, though this one is not nearly as exciting. It's more annoying than anything else. Someone stole my credit card number! Yes, I've officially been a victim of credit card fraud. I was at Star Market on Sunday night buying our week's worth of groceries and I slid my card through the little card reader at the self-check out lane. Five seconds later I get a message that reads, "This card has been declined. Please use another card." Well, I don't have another card, not one that I use, anyway. That card was my credit/debit card, and I use it for EVERYTHING. I don't like to use real credit cards. Don't have good experiences with them. So Doug, who doesn't have his wallet with him, tells me to try to use it again. Maybe it didn't read right. So I do. And it's declined again. My immediate thought is, Great! Someone stole my card number and wiped out the money in our checking account (this is where our card is linked). And Doug had just gotten paid that Friday, too, so that would have been awful. Doug told me to not worry about it, that once at Panera his credit/debit card was declined and it was because the cashier ran it as a debit but didn't enter the pin or something like that. Anyway, I go home, put the groceries away, and then go online to check my bank account, and there were no suspicious charges. So I figure that Doug must be right, it must have been an issue with the card machine at Star. So then this morning I go to use the card to get Marieke a Christmas gift online, and I get a message saying, "Card declined. Please try ordering with a different card." This is weird! I am getting irritated now, so I call my bank and I tell them that my card is declining; I'm then told that there is a hold on my card because of suspicious activity. I am transferred to someone in the fraud department, and the nice lady asks me to confirm or deny some charges. December 2nd, $35 at Target in Watertown, MA. Yup, that's me. December 4th, $50 something dollars at some gas station in Georgia. NO! Not me. December 5th, $150 at a Target in Virgina, December 7th $250 at a Target in Virgina... she named some others, but by then I was not really hearing her. I denied all the charges I didn't make in our lovely southern states, and then learned that these charges will be deducted from my checking account, but I can contest them. I have to go to the bank and fill out some kind of fraud affidavit, which will take 10 days to process, but once it's processed the monies will be placed back in my checking account. Not to mention the fact that my credit/debit card is now useless, as it's been decommissioned, and I won't get my new one until next week sometime. Looks like I won't be doing any Christmas shopping this week! This is so inconvenient, and really annoying. A little scary, too. I mean, how did someone get my card number? I blame PayPal. I bought something for Doug on eBay for his birthday and paid with my credit/debit card via PayPal. That was the last purchase I made with the card before it was stolen. I am glad that my bank was smart enough to recognize that I probably wasn't buying a whole lot of gas and goods at Target in Georgia and Virginia last week, but still, why did they wait so long to put a hold on my card? This is just the wrong time of year to be out that kind of money, too. Good thing Doug had just gotten paid, otherwise I probably wouldn't have had the funds to cover this stupid fraud.

Anyway, I'm done venting. I should have written more about Jipty and her baby... that's such a good and happy event. Instead, I filled up a whole book about how my credit card number was stolen. Why is it that the bad always trumps the good? It's no fun being a Grinch. But by next post I'll have more news on Jesica and Chris's baby, so that will be good news at least. I want more good news.

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.

Roast me and carve me up... I'm stuffed!

Why is it that I continue to stuff myself silly even though I'm still full from Thanksgiving dinner? I'll never understand my mind's hold on my stomach. Anyway, this Thanksgiving was quite the whirlwind tour. I took Wednesday off from work and spent much of the morning baking. You'll see here that my kitchen was quite the disaster zone (I had a flour explosion in the Kitchen Aid mixer), but after about 4 hours and three different dish-washing sessions, my kitchen was back to normal and I had about 80 cookies to divide up and pack away. I made two recipes from the new Better Homes and Gardens Christmas Cookies publication, and they really came out well. This little book is really good - I highly recommend it if you're looking for Christmas cookie recipes. All of the recipes are pretty simple, though some do involve a few hours of chilling. I avoided those. The two cookies I made (Lime Shortbreads and Ginger Crinkles - don't they look yummy?) were very quick to put together, and are delish. Really. I brought some to the Siskos, some to my parents, and I even have some leftover for us here at the house. Though not for long, I bet.

We spent Wednesday night through Saturday morning at Doug's parents' house in Monroe, CT. This is Doug surveying the new homestead. Where is Monroe? Somewhere near Trumbull, Newtown, Fairfield, Brookfield... in an area of CT that I've never really explored. We got to know it a little better this trip. Thursday was spent eating, basically. Doug's grandfather came over at about 1 o'clock, and at about 3:30pm we all sat down to eat. At left is a picture of me and my giant plate of food. I like peas; can you tell? Dinner was great - thanks, Mrs. Sisko! She quickly put it together, as the day before Doug's Uncle Bruce called to say that he was sick, and Mrs. Sisko decided that we should not go to his house for dinner. Poor Uncle Bruce is now stuck with 22 pounds of turkey all for himself. Personally, I can think of worse fates, but perhaps he isn't a fan of turkey like I am. Anyway, after dinner Doug whipped out his computer and showed his grandfather some photos and video he had on his hard drive. Then we all had fun with Photo Booth. Doug's grandfather got a kick out of the computer - "How do the pictures get onto the computer, Douggie?" Computers always amaze older people; they're a great conversation starter. That and talking of the old days. I don't think Grandpa will ever tire of talking about how Fairfield looked when he was younger. He's seen quite the changes in his lifetime; after all, his first car was the kind that you cranked to get started. After show and tell, we all ate dessert. Doug's grandfather enjoyed his cherry pie (he took the rest of it home with him), and then we all sat around the television watching a James Bond movie - The World is Not Enough. Can I say that I think Denise Richards is probably one of the most vacuous of the Bond women? Maybe I'm just biased against her, but she's really a ditz.

Let's see. Then on to Friday. Friday was a day for touring around Monroe. We headed out to an errand with Mrs. and Mr. Sisko in the morning, then went from there to see the new James Bond - Quantum of Solace. We saw it in Danbury, and I had never been to Danbury. And no offense to Danbury, but I don't see a real reason to go back. The James Bond movie was a little disappointing - where was the plot? I know that the point of a James Bond movie is not the story line or the character development, but the point of this movie seemed to be how many fights James could get into, or how many explosions there could be. I think Daniel Craig is a great James Bond (and yes, I admit to thinking that he might be the most attractive James Bond they've cast), but he didn't get much of a chance to really showcase his talent in this movie. But enough of my review. On to the rest of the weekend. After the movie we grabbed lunch and then Doug and I headed off to Milford to see if there were any great bargains to be had on Black Friday. We found none. We finished the day watching the Mork and Mindy marathon on the SciFi channel and stuffing ourselves with leftover Thanksgiving dinner.

Saturday (yes, I promise, the play-by-play of the weekend is almost over!) morning I woke up feeling so slothful that I made Doug find us some kind of nature area to walk around. We found Wolfe Park in Monroe, which consists of a man-made lake and some walking trails, along with a playground and some soccer fields. It was nice. Doug and I walked around the lake twice, stopping along the way to swing on the swings and play on the playground, of course. Here Doug shows us his hidden equestrian abilities, and I prove that you're never too old to ride a dolphin. There's really great fun to be had in Monroe! After our walk, Mrs. Sisko stuffed us with sandwiches and snacks, and then we were off to central CT to visit our friend Adam. Why don't we have photos of Adam? I don't know. We should have taken pictures of Adam - he showed us a good time. We hung out in his house, saw some photos, surfed the internet, then went out for pizza in Windsor Locks, lattes at the Windsor Locks Starbucks, and came back to Adam's. Adam made us some homemade scones - very tasty! Doug and Adam also enjoyed a drink of blackstrap molasses. Blackstrap molasses are very high in iron, protein, and calcium, so if you're ever looking for a healthy snack just drink some molasses. Adam does, and I bet Doug will now, too. I have blackstrap molasses on my grocery list right now, actually. I just hope Doug doesn't let the molasses sit like he lets his vitamins sit. The key to life is follow-through.

Anyway, now we are both home. Doug's putzing in the basement with his musical gear and I'm up here blogging and getting ready to go to the grocery store. It's a wonderful November day outside - gray, brisk, and misty. This is a great way to end a satisfying Thanksgiving weekend. There's something about gray and November that go together like turkey and cranberry sauce. Love it!

Seven gables and twenty five leaf bags.

Dear Diary,

(Why do I feel like this is my new journal? Next thing you know I'll be talking about my crushes and complaining about how my parents are so mean for making me clean my room or something.)

This weekend was a fun one, but also a very cold one! Doug (I won't even bother to link to his blog because why waste the time?) and I jammed it with good things. Saturday went like this: Curves, car dealer to get the oil changed and car inspected, lunch at High Street Cafe in Dedham Square (would be a good place to take my Dad for breakfast, and we can even walk there if we are ambitious), then on to Salem. We had no destination in Salem; we thought maybe the Peabody Essex Museum, but neither of us had the stamina to stand around and look at art that day, even if it was really cool art. We went to a couple of antique stores and then headed down to the water. We ended up at the House of Seven Gables, apparently the 9th most visited house museum in the United States. I have never read the book and neither has Doug. As a matter of fact, before we went there I didn't even know that there was a book called The House of Seven Gables. I thought the places was just a neat old house, which it is, but apparently it is the inspiration for Nathaniel Hawthorne's book by that name (even though at the time that he wrote the book the house only had three gables. The family living there had actually removed four of the gables in an effort to make the house more modern, match the style of the times). Anyway, the house was very cool. There is this secret stairwell built into the chimney that we all traveled up. It's a crazy staircase. One of the men on tour with us refused to go up it because he was claustrophobic; they took him up the alternative route. The staircase was put into the house because the lady who opened the house up to tourists in the early twentieth century wanted to make it resemble as much as possible the fictional house in Hawthorne's book. Apparently it needed this staircase. If you ever visit this house, be warned - it's steep, narrow, dark, and a little creepy.

Anyway, I've posted some pictures from Salem below. There's the House of Seven Gables; me driving a fake boat in the yard of the House of Seven Gables (it was freezing that day! I was outside long enough to pose for the photo and then went inside the museum again); a water view from the yard of the House of Seven Gables; and Doug drinking a giant cup of tea in this little coffee bar we stopped at after the tour. We were frozen. We needed hot beverages.





So that was basically Saturday. Sunday went like this: I woke up, did an exercise video (Karen Voight's B.L.T DVD, highly recommended), fed the cats, etc., and then at about 8:45am decided that it could no longer be avoided... I had to start raking the sea of leaves in our backyard. It was about 20 degrees on Sunday morning, but at least the wind had died down. It took me a little less than two hours to rake the whole yard - back, front and sides - and by then Doug had woken up and came out to help me bag them. We had seven leaf bags at that point, but we filled all seven with leaves from the driveway and front yard. We didn't even get to the giant pile in the back yet (scroll down for photos), so we made a trip to Lowe's to get more bags and bought 8 packs of 5. We laughed about how many bags we were buying, but we used quite a few - about half. It took us until about 2:30 to finish bagging the leaves, and once done we had a total of 25 filled bags. Twenty five! Our yard is not even that big, but that's just an amazing amount of bags. My arms and back are definitely sore from the work, and my wonderful rake is now broken, too. Whatever. The leaves are raked, the yard looks as good as it will look until spring, and that project is now done. One more thing checked off the list! Maybe now I can concentrate on indoor projects, though if our rain barrel ever melts we'll have to drain that, too.

Here are some photos of leaf mania 2008: This one is of our sea of leaves, pre-raking. This does not include the leaves in the front or on the sides that needed to be raked.

This is of the pile of leaves that I had raked in the back yard. The pile was very tall and very long. It was more like a leaf wall than a leaf pile.

Look! Have you ever seen so many bags of leaves? Twenty five in all, and that's not including the leaf bags that I filled the first time I raked, back in October. So how many leaf bags in total did we use this fall? Thirty? More? Wow. I now am VERY glad that we do not have a bigger yard.

Here is the backyard after all the leaves were raked. Looks much better, yes? Today there are more leaves out there littering the clean yard, but whatever, they can stay there. I am not raking anymore (not until next fall, anyway!).