Found my photos!

I had lost some Thanksgiving photos and really was in a quandary about where they went.  They were not showing up on the memory card of camera and didn’t show when I reviewed the photos directly from the camera.  Then one day, when I had the memory card inserted into the computer, I turned on the camera and there they were!  I don’t know why they saved directly to the camera’s small, built-in memory, but there they were.  Also don’t know why I couldn’t see them or download them before. 

I took out the card tonight and downloaded them using the USB cable, and voila!  I won’t post the food pics, since we are nearly 3 mos. from the event, but here are some good pics of my shawl project.  I rarely make anything for myself, but this project really inspired me and I wear it whenever the temps are in the 38-60 range and not blowing too much.  The open spaces allow too much wind to come through, so it’s not good for a cold/windy combination, but just perfect on many fall days.

I am currently basting the “quilt sandwich” on a quilt for my grandson who will soon be 14.  I promised this quilt nearly two years ago, so I’m really trying to get it done.  It’s got lots of woodsy, nature prints and I think he’s going to love it.  Will post those photos in a few weeks when it’s complete.

Oh my gosh!

Since I posted the last Snowy Day photos, we have had two more huge snowfalls.  In fact, last weekend we got 10″ and this weekend we got between 14″ and 20″ (depending on your source.)  We only average about 3-4″ per YEAR here, so we are all kind of stunned, to say the least.  Kids are missing school, businesses are losing profit, we are all getting cabin fever.  The place where I work is opening 2 hours late tomorrow, which is unheard of.  I suspect that the people who couldn’t have gotten there by 8 will not make it by 10 either.  Especially since schools are closed, meaning that there are a lot of roads unplowed and driveways unpassable. 

The most amazing sights were actually late Friday night when the trees were iced up and loaded with heavy snow.  I got these  then, just before a stint of rain happened.

The first one shows, in the background, a huge holly tree totally laden with as much as it can hold.  The one below it is our iced up lilac bush.  Unrecognizable, but still beautiful.  Then the rain came and the wind blew all night, gusting up to 50 mph.  It blew most of the snow off the trees, so they didn’t look so impressive at all.  But this brief time was a winter wonderland.  The wind blew the snow off in clumps combined with clumps of pine shats.  The yard looked like a hurricane happened on top of the snow, with pine shats and limbs everywhere Saturday morning.  And then the snow started up again and covered everything with about another 6.”  This snow was light and fluffy, so it didn’t stick to the trees the same way.  It was easier to shovel the top layers (so says my husband) but underneath was icy and heavy.  It’s been a mess.

Lucky for me, my car was in the garage and husband run the big truck up and down the driveway to make a nice path for me for going to work tomorrow.  I’m not happy that it’s Monday already, but I did have a productive weekend, making two loaves of homemade bread, chocolate chip cookies and homemade chile.  It’s the first time I’ve cooked the beans from scratch (dried kidney beans) and it came out great.  It’s more time and trouble, but it is cheaper and it made me feel very virtuous <grin>.  I got lots of fiddlin’ practice in, too.

Snowy Morning

Let me first say that I am not fond of snow.  I hate driving in it when it’s slippery and dislike it half-melted, slushy and dirty.  I am also not a morning person, so getting up early to go to work is my least favorite time of the day.  Put a snow day together with a get-up-early work day and you would think I was going to be in a really bad mood, right?  Well, first of all, it was Friday, which helps immensely.  I woke knowing that I would have two days in a row to sleep in after this one. 

On this snowy Friday morning, I left for work with a smile on my face knowing that if I hadn’t needed to get up early for work, I would have missed the beauty of THIS morning:

These photos don’t do it justice, but it was the best I could do in the few minutes I had to step out on my deck and do a few clicks of my camera before hustling off to work.  The ride to work was breathtaking as the snow was still falling.  Even two hours later, the beauty of it was gone.  The wind came up and blew the fluffy flakes off the trees and the sun melted much of the rest of the coating that was on the trees and shrubs.  I guess that’s why the view at 7:30 was so special–it’s just so fleeting.

Holiday leftovers

Now that title doesn’t really sound appetizing, but what I really mean is that I’m catching up with my posting and I realized I didn’t post anything at all about my holiday.  It got busy, of course, and so I’m catching up the important things now.  We had a quiet holiday (didn’t go out or entertain for New Year’s), but we did spend some time with our family and it was fine.  Good food, fine people.

We had brother Dave and his wife Linda over the day after Christmas for some dessert and Scrabble.  Also joining us this time around was Linda’s brother Dale, who lived with us for a time when he was in his teens.  It was a great visit. 

Food looked like this:

And then like this:

The game was played with 3 teams of two people each.  (I begged off because I was tired, so I got to take photos and watch without pressure.)  These photos show the intensity of the play.

What the photos DON’T show is the fun and silliness involved in this game.  We laugh a lot when we play Scrabble, even though there is some serious competition going on…at least for some of the players.  I am not a competitive person and neither is Linda, but the others are seriously trying their best to win.  Somehow, it all dissolves into a lot of laughter at various junctures along the way.

Hope you had some good family time, some good food, and some serious silliness to relax you in your holiday times.

Miscellaneous stuff

I had great Turkey Day photos for everyone to see what I cooked and who came to visit, as well as photos of my latest project, but for some reason I have not figured out yet, all of them disappeared.  They were on the camera….I saw all of them.  And then when I plugged the SD chip into my computer no images were found.  Nor were they found on the camera anymore.  It must have been something I did, but just don’t know what.  Either that or my camera is about to die.  Hope not, since I’m not ready to buy a new one just yet.

I will retake the photos of my project at some point, but in the meantime please check out some blogs I recently found.  Sew I Do is a great sewing blog and she’s running a giveaway right now that crafters and sewers will be happy to win.  Please check it out here http://verypurplestuffs.blogspot.com/ 

If you like to sew, you may also enjoy Trudy Callahan’s blog http://sewingwithtrudy.blogspot.com/ and do check out her 9 year old daughter’s blog http://sewingsister.blogspot.com/ .  She is learning to sew and blogging about her adventures.  I’m doing my best to support another generation of sewers.

I’m off to do some cleaning on this ugly, dreary, rainy day.  It’s still better than being at work

Happy Thanksgiving

Like many of you, I have been cooking all day in preparation for tomorrow.  I should have been cleaning, too, but I’m having foot issues and have to sit down for periods of rest in between cooking sessions, so I’m doing the best I can here.  I’m hoping to do a little late night cleaning now….just before bed…and finish up in the morning.  Our guests won’t arrive till 4:00 pm, so I really have time.  I just hate to be cleaning on the holiday itself.  There’s already enough to do and I will end up totally wiped out by day’s end, as always.

Back to the cooking fun!  I made whole berry cranberry sauce, which I discovered only in recent years is totally easy, but impresses people no end.  It IS good.  I don’t even like whole berry sauce in a can, but I like my own.  I did that in between two pies–pumpkin and apple.  Let me say that I have beautiful brand new ceramic pie plates that I was dying to show off.  It makes the pies look so wonderful.  One of the dishes came with its own recipes for crust and pies.  I used the crust recipe for both of my pies.  I’ll let you know how they taste after the big dinner tomorrow, but they have cream cheese and baking powder in them, neither of which I’ve ever seen in pie crust before.  They should taste wonderful. 

The pumpkin pie was made from pumpkin that I cooked myself last month from local pumpkins.  I’ve made one “test pie” with this pumpkin and it was fine, so I’m not worried about how it will taste. The apple pie, however, called for macerating the apples in a mixture of lemon juice, white and brown sugars, cinnamon and nutmeg, and then letting the juices drain off for half an hour.  You then use those juices and butter, cook it down till it is caramelized and put it back on the apples that been very lightly coated in cornstarch.  It sure smelled good!  And I think it looks great, though certainly not up to Martha Stewart standards.  I don’t think my family will give a flying fig, do you?

You can see by the 2nd photo that it’s not as dark as it appears in the first one, but you can also see I wasn’t being modest about it being not perfect.  It smells like caramel apples, so I’m looking forward to eating it tomorrow. With whipped cream, of course.

I also have made my dressing, which is one from Barefoot Contessa (Ina Garten.)  It’s got lots of onions, celery, apples and rosemary, parsley and sage.  The recipe didn’t call for sage, but I can’t imagine turkey dressing without it, so in it went.  It smells wonderful and it is already in its baking dish in the fridge.

I made gravy today,  trying out a new recipe from Barefoot Contessa that doesn’t require me to wait for the turkey to be done.  Anything I can do a day ahead gets automatic high ratings from me, unless it just isn’t good at all.

This one uses butter and cooked onions (the fat from the butter replacing the fat from the pan drippings) and chicken broth for the liquid.  It also uses a teensy bit of brandy (or cognac, which I didn’t have in the house) and the options of white wine (I didn’t use it) and heavy cream (I did.)  It came out wonderful, though slightly salty for my taste–probably my fault, as I eyeballed instead of measuring.  I have to dilute it a bit anyway, when I reheat it for the dinner, by adding some more broth.  I’m sure it will be fine when I’ve done that, since my broth is low sodium.  I had gravy sauce mix in packets as a “Plan B,” just in case it didn’t turn out well, or if I need more than what I’ve made.  I could have bought gravy in a jar….I’ve done it more than once…but I really wanted to be as homemade as possible this year.

Let me just say that my reason for using jarred gravy on some occasions has nothing to do with being lazy.  Mostly it has to do with the fact that I’m not consistantly good at making gravies.  I’m totally underconfident about it, as I’ve had mixed results through the years, and I’d rather not worry about at the last minute, when I’m tyring to get the dinner on the table and enjoy my guests at the same time.  So when I saw Ina Garten making this one the day before, the little light bulb when off in my head and said, “Oh!  Now why didn’t I think of that?”   I think my days of jarred gravies are over, along with worrying about it at the last second.  Amen.

Tomorrow I still have to do the turkey, a veggie casserole that we all love, sweet potatoes done in the crockpot (with apples, nuts and raisins) and bisquits.  Julee is cooking the white potatoes, mashed with the skins on and some cream and sour cream added (maybe some cheddar, too.)  I think that just about covers it.  Would you believe I’m only cooking for six people?   

Wishing everyone safe travels, and a totally wonderful day, filled with the company of loved ones and lots of good food.  I hope you all have as many blessings to be thankful for as I do.

Favorite tree revisit

I didn’t remember to take photos of this tree in the summer as I had promised to do; neither did I get a chance to photograph it during the fall colors.  It must have changed quickly and I blinked and missed it.  Next thing I knew, it was naked in the late November sky.  It is still a thing of beauty in its November starkness.  Check this out in the late afternoon, just before sunset:

Successful Reiki day

Yesterday was the day that I offered 10 minute Reiki sessions all day at my workplace.  I didn’t have as many people as I would have liked, but everyone that came was a newcomer to Reiki and everyone left relaxed and thankful for the brief period of stress relief in their day.  Some were really awed and surprised by the effects.  I had a couple of people tell me that they can never relax and have a tough time sleeping, but that they were very relaxed and could have probably gone into a lovely nap if they were allowed the time. (People had to use their 15 minute break time for this, so there was no option for staying longer.)

Some of the people scheduled for early in the day went back to their office and told others how great an experience it was, so I got people added onto my schedule who were not on it when I printed it out.  It was way cool!

What was really odd, though, was that the first two people I worked on were my boss’s boss and HER boss.  They (and most of the other clients today) are nurses.  It is good that their minds are open to other methods of helping people besides traditional medicine.  Our U.S. society is gradually coming around to alternative methods of healing, and that is a very good thing.  I didn’t promote this as a “healing” thing, though, just as relaxation therapy.  I didn’t want anyone to come in expecting me to heal them.  Reiki CAN and does sometimes heal things, but that is not what I was offering for today.  (Hey, if anyone got rid of a headache or something, all to the good, but it was just not what I was aiming for today.)

I am glad I took my leave time to offer this.  People were relaxed and grateful, and I felt happy to have been the one to offer the service.  I’m planning to offer this again in a few weeks, and I’ve had a couple of inquiries about doing it for other groups. Some would be free, like this one for my coworkers; for some others, there would be a small fee.

I think I wound up with 10 clients today and, of course, I would have wished for more, but one thing I know for sure is that when it comes to Reiki, the practitioner has to leave ego behind and trust that the people who were supposed to get Reiki got it.  And everyone left with one of my business cards, so there is a good chance of being called by someone to do a full session at home.

Pizza experiment

Results and conclusion are mixed.  I tried the olive oil dough recipe from “Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day ” and it was great.  Texture, flavor, appearance, couldn’t be beat.  However, it was my first time using this method with the pizza stone and a peel.  That’s where I ran into trouble.  The assembled pizza is supposed to slip off of the peel onto the stone.  HA!  Not mine.  I used plenty of cornmeal as recommended, but it wasn’t budging.  It took my daughter and I three spatulas and four hands and we lifted it off and it was all bunched up and messy, but it came out tasting great.  Sauce, cheeze, caramelized onion, sauteed mushrooms and green peppers, and sausage chunks.  Oh my, it was good.  Ugly, but good.  Husband pronounced that he’d never had a better pizza anywhere.  How can you ask for more praise than than that?  He cut his own slices (I was busy making the 2nd one) and then blamed me for making him eat too much.:) No photos are available of the ugly pizza.

Julee put together the 2nd one, which was a Florentine pizza.  We had only slightly more luck getting the pizza off the peel, but it did look pretty good when done.

Isn’t it beautiful?  A work of art and quite tasty.  This one had (no sauce) mozzarella, feta, ricotta, spinach, sliced fresh plum tomatoes and Italian herbs. 

To make two pizzas you really need two peels and two stones, which is, of course, ridiculous for an occasional pizza maker, so I will either not make it when we have guests (oh the mess–I had dough, flour and cornmeal EVERYwhere)–or find a way to make the crusts ahead and partially bake them before freezing them.  I will need to figure out how much to pre-bake them and how to finish them.  So much to think about, but it would be such fun to invite my guests over for a pizza party and have all sorts of toppings ready to go so they can put together whatever they are in the mood for, as we did today.

Yes, I know I can buy ready made pizza crusts or frozen dough, but then, it’s not MY homemade pizza.  Just have to figure out how important that is to me.  I was kind of liking my own crust.

Is it just a bit….odd?….

Sunday morning treasure hunting netted me a 100-year-old song book, which is totally falling to pieces.

I bought this with the idea that I could find some good old songs for future fiddling.  I’ve already found quite a few familiar tunes, just doing a quick look-through.  This book is arguably a treasure, but for me there is no question at all.

The next purchase was a Hamilton Beach hand mixer, still with its original box and manual and a warranty that says it was purchased on 8/8/67. 

It works perfectly and I paid $2 for it.  My own small mixer was having trouble with the beaters and even though Jim thinks he can fix it, I didn’t want to to chance being without one. I have a huge KitchenAid stand mixer, but there are some jobs just too ridiculously small for it and $2.00 was cheap insurance.  Can you imagine an inexpensive mixer made today that will still be working in 42 years?  This one still had a sticker on it that said it was guaranteed for 5 years and it even had a screw still in a sealed plastic bag that you can use to hang it up.  I’m sure it’s been sitting unused for a long time,  but still.  Incredible.

Now lets move along to later in the day.  We went to Best Buy and bought a brand new laptop–so new that it has Windows 7. 

Comcast doesn’t even have support for Windows 7 yet!   It will play CDs, DVDs (and burn them), load and play music and video downloads and basically do anything else I can do on my full-sized desktop computer…and do it FAST!  It even has a built in camera and microphone. I went back today and bought a wireless mouse because I couldn’t stand the built-in thing (even playing Solitare was causing me stress and that’s just wrong.)  I also bought a tray that sits in my lap comfortably and is big enough to use the mouse, so I can be totally lazy and decadent and sit in my recliner while I use it. In fact, this blog post is my first done entirely on the laptop, including downloading my photos right from my camera’s memory disk.  Way cool!  The only negative I’ve found with this new toy is the sound quality.  It’s really the pits. I may download for my iPod and I might burn an occasional CD, but I won’t be listening to my downloads on here or playing the CDs. 

Husband has recently become an online gamer and I have no problem with that.  He’s retired and he has earned the luxury of playing games for hours a day if he so desires.  HOWEVER, it was putting a serious crimp in my own computer time, so we moved up a purchase that was probably going to happen anyway when we put our camper in the mountains.  The Dell Inspiron laptop is my early Christmas gift (he said he might buy me some socks too ) and I’m quite happy. Dude, I got a Dell!

However, all this being said, I thought about my Sunday purchases that night and had a bit of a laugh at what I had chosen in the space of about 3 hours.  One item 100 years old (the song book)….made during a time when the writers could not even have conceived of television, let alone computers; one item 42 years old–still very useful and practical in 2009; and an up-to-the-minute technological wonder called a laptop. 

I’m still trying to figure out if it’s ME that’s odd or just an odd set of circumstances.  I have my feet planted firmly in–uhhh—well—maybe one foot in the 1900’s and the other in 2009 (I’ve lost my iPod and I’m going crazy without it, for example.)  I believe I’m a typical fifty something.  We’ve seen two centuries and a huge technological growth spurt.  We also have a nostalgic interest in times before our own, which seem paradoxically romantic and simple.  Of course they were neither. I’m all over the map in my interests and passions. I don’t think I’m all that unusual, but then, maybe it’s just the internet “company” I keep.