T Stands for Winter, Turkeys and Cows

 Hi everyone. Hello to everyone and especially to all the lovely ladies who stop by for T day.

We're into the waning days of November. I think winter is actually here at my house. (Oh no!) Last week was round 3 of November snow. ❄ We do get snow at this time of year, and at least none of these storms was a huge dumping (and we've had those around Thanksgiving before). But I don't remember getting 3 small storms so early in November. The ground is basically frozen though, and even when the temperature gets to 40 (degrees F/around 4.5 degrees C)  it doesn't feel warm anymore. I just hope an early winter means an early spring, but too bad the 2 have no connection.  😏

I hope everyone who celebrated Thanksgiving had a nice day. We went to my sister-in-law's house over in Maine. It was a fun day. My sister-in-law's husband is a chef so we had a delicious meal, which I didn't get any photos of. 😒 But I did manage to get some photos of my drinks and the fun we had.

One of the nieces picked up these color your own turkey placemat sets, and so while the chef was doing his cooking, most of us  had a drink and did some coloring. However, even the chef stopped long enough to color a turkey  because  we were all having too many laughs and he didn't want to miss out. (And I don't blame him.)  All these assorted drinks in this post are my ticket over at Bleubeard's and Elizabeth's blog     blog for T this week.

Originally we all started using colored pencils. Then one of the nieces found a box of crayons. I said if I'd known we were coloring I'd have brought along some markers. My daughter had to razz me and tease that I'd have brought along a whole bunch of supplies to make some wild and crazy turkeys. 😏

After we finished coloring, all the turkeys were hung on the wall and my mother-in-law, who didn't know who colored which turkey (because she was asleep in the living room),  picked the winner. 

I've mentioned before my mother-in-law is now living in a memory care unit now as she requires a lot of care. Everything from someone cutting her food to helping her get dressed. Plus, she gets confused.  It's sad to see how much she has changed just since spring. Even though these changes have been coming on  for a few years now, they seem to have accelerated since Easter time.

 However, she enjoyed spending the holiday with her family. This next photo makes me smile because my sister-in-law, who was excited when my MIL picked her turkey  as the winner, was showing my MIL a little love.

After dinner one of the other nieces made these fancy pre-dessert martinis. I don't like regular martinits, but a chocolate one is really delicious.

And while we sipped on our martinis we all played a game. 

The cow in the box wasn't quite as pink as the one in the photo I took of the game off of Amazon.

The general gist of the game was that if you answered simple questions the same way as most other people, you won cow tokens. The cows on the tokens made me smile.

If you answered the question in a unique way, you got the big pink cow. You had to hold onto that cow until someone else had the lone unique answer. At the end of the game,  the person with the most cow tokens  won, unless you had  the big pink cow , then you would lose even if you had the most cow tokens.

We had a lot of laughs.  After the game we all barely managed to put a bit of dessert into our tummies, and then it seemed like it was already time to go home. 

And now we're full on into the end of the year  and that holiday season.

I hope everyone has a lovely T day and week ahead.

T Stands for the Holiday Weekend

Hi everyone. Happy new week everyone.

It is time again for another T day over at Bleubeard's and Elizabeth's blog .  It is also now Hanukkah so let me wish all of you who celebrate a wonderful holiday of lights.  And lastly, since it is the final day of November, I want to thank Leah for hosting another wonderful month of Art Every Day Month.

My last piece of art for this monthly share over at AEDM Day 30! are the  mittens I first posted back on Day 6 of the month.  They are now finished and ready to wear. 

Here's the front.

And the back before I blocked them.

I hope everyone who celebrated Thanksgiving had a wonderful day. My husband and I went to my sister-in-laws over in Maine. Here's a group photo, minus my husband who was the photographer. That's me on the left  front  scrunched up (so my sister in law wouldn't be block by my head) with the scarf. 

The man at the head of the table is my SIL's husband Dave. He is a professional chef and baker so the meal was quite delicious.  He not only roasted one turkey but smoked a turkey too. 

My ticket to T this was this drink which was not wine, but a festive pomegranate sangria that Ally, the girl in the grey near the head of the table made. It was quite delicious.

It was a relaxing and fun holiday weekend. Besides eating too much for Thanksgiving, my husband and I went out early on Friday to cut our Christmas tree before the rain started. 

Not cheap by any means, (buying a fresh tree is still a tad but more),  but it is always fun to go find and then chop a tree. Plus the tree farm  is located in my town and it is always good to help support a local small business.

Here's my husband with the tree once we'd picked it out and before we'd chopped it down.

We had just paid for our tree and put it in the back of his truck when it started to rain.  Since the rain was supposed to, and did, turn to snow later in the day, we put the tree in our garage until Sunday and then wrapped up the weekend by putting it up. 

The other weekend project was to finish winterizing the bees.

You might remember I wrapped them in an insulated waterproof blanket. I also put an insulated hive box on the top under the cover. You can see the insulated bee blanket (it is the black layer), and the insulated winter hive box is the yellow box on top.

We wrapped the base and lower boxes with some landscape fabric and then went and picked up some hay bales. The bee blanket and insulated hive box should be good, but they don't insulate the open space under the hive. That's what the  hay bales should do. Now, I just have to keep my fingers crossed that all is well in the hive and wait for warm weather next spring before I find out how they fared. 

 I left the hive openings uncovered, so the bees are able come out on a warm day.  

It was a low key but nice weekend. And as usual, it flew right by. Next up, Christmas.  Unless time slows down, it will be here before we know it.

I'll  have some more California photos to share with you next week for T.  

Have a great week and a happy T day too.

 

T Stands for Thanksgiving Weekend

 Hi everyone.  Tuesday and T Day have rolled around again, and today's post is a bit long for me. Just warning you!

For T, I thought I would share some snippets from the long Thanksgiving Holiday weekend in my world. It was a fun escape from the usual: my house got really messy, I ate too much food, I didn't get online very much, I relaxed and I got some major exercise. 

The quote in this first photo is true for my house both on Thanksgiving and the day before. It is the only room I seemed to clean up after the Thursday.

I recently bought a split pie plate that makes 2 halves  of 2 different pies. This way  I could make more flavors of pie and not have huge amounts of each. Normally I would make full sized  pies, but with this stay home Thanksgiving, it was just my daughter, my husband and myself. I wanted to be sure 

I made half pumpkin and half black bottom pecan. I had a bit of extra pumpkin filling (as I made half of each recipe) so I baked it in a ramekin. You can also see my first drink related image here too.

I always measure dry ingredients with a scale, which makes it easy to use recipes in both English or metric. This is drink reference number 2.

I also made these sourdough dinner rolls with a recipe from King Arthur. They were ok, both times I tried them. I would have prefered a roll a little lighter in texture than these came out. 

And I did make an apple pie. This one was full sized because it is the only pie everyone eats. I do wish however I made the pumpkin a full sized pie though. My daughter who told me about 10 times she does not like pumpkin pie, changed her mind this year and told me she liked the pumpkin better than  apple. Go figure.

If you are wondering why the top of the pie looks lumpy it is because I made my top crust by cutting our leaves with a cookie cutter and overlapping them.

Onto Thanksgiving.

That  day was a bit chaotic at first. When I got up and found my husband on the couch, he told me  that he had been sick a few times. Not knowing if it was something he ate or one of those covid symptoms (because I know that's how it started when my mom got sick), I wasn't  sure if I should even make the traditional turkey dinner. My daughter then decided she was going to go home so she wouldn't get sick. Luckily when she left she phoned her beau, and he talked her into coming back. I was really down when she left, especially since my husband, who had been up half the night, went back to bed.

(Originally my daughter and her beau were going to visit both his parents and then us on Thanksgiving.  With covid so bad here right now, my daughter decided it was best to skip her boyfriend's family and just come home. Some of you may not know my husband had a kidney transplant in 2017, and he is really immunosuppressed because of that. My daughter was trying not to come into contact with other people before she came here for Thanksgiving.)

I spent Thanksgiving morning disinfecting out of paranoia.

Once Katie (my daughter) returned, I cheered up. She and I made dinner, even if at that time we thought it would just be the 2 of us eating it. 

She is NOT a cook, so I love seeing her in kitchen helping me out.

My husband got up around one feeling much better.  He even carved the turkey. 

We all had a wonderful meal and NO ONE was sick. I think my husband must have eaten something on Wednesday, and his lack of much immune system got the better of him.

And in this photo above is my drink reference photo number 3. 

Friday we went and chopped our holiday tree and also put it up. Then my daughter left. (I wrote about this day here Christmas Tree if you are interested.)

My last big weekend plans were on Saturday morning when I met 3 of my work friends, and we went for a hike. Now that I am retired I don't see them that often, and it was great to catch up.

The plan was to walk up to the Stonehouse Pond overlook and then take the rest of the loop  back to  the parking area where our cars were. The landscape was rolling, and the trail was nice, although in some places it was covered with a lot of leaves. 

The overlook was quite pretty.

After an apple break, we headed  back. Not too far on the opposite side of the loop we came to a fork in the trail  There was a bright yellow sign with an arrow showing the trail going right, and some logs and branches down on the other branch of the trail more or less blocking it.

So we turned right and walked on. Luckily my friend who coordinated this walk realized she had never been this way before. (This trail is close to her home and she has walked it a couple of times before.) We pulled out our phones and yup, we were heading in the wrong direction. Not that trail maps online are always accurate, as we discovered when we each pulled up the online map. Each of us had the blue dot  showing our location at different points. Mine even had me standing in the middle of a nearby lake. 

Of course we had walked a mile off trail before this point and had to walk a mile back to the right trail.

Good things we had 4 smart brains to figure this out. Ha-ha.

We needed to go around all the branches in the trail and head that way.  I don't know what those branches were all about, but they could have been a really bad thing, (and  not just for us) had we walked a lot further and ended up far away from the parking area.

We passed a few bogs. 

And lots of  forested rolling hills.

Along the wrong trail we did pass this large glacial erratic rock covered in this really cool lichen.

And later on we saw this great lichen too.

Finally we came to this sign for the SELT trail. We knew we were back on track.

Even if we did have quite away to walk still. This sign was half way down the right trail.  We were heading to the Merry Hill Road Trailhead.

We did make it back to our cars though. We ended up walking about 8 miles, or just under 13 km. I checked my fitbit when I got home and at that point I was over 21,000 steps.

 My husband made me a yummy grilled cheese, I showered and then decided to lounge on the couch and watch  Jurassic Park:The Lost World. We'd been talking about that Jurassic Park sequel while walking, and I hadn't seen it for awhile. It seemed a good way to wrap up my day.

And if we don't get snow, one of my friend's birthday is on December 12th, and we are talking about another hike that day. I'm keeping my fingers crossed the weather holds a couple more weeks. 

OK, this is probably way too long as it is. Don't forget to stop by   Bleubeard and Elizabeth's    blog            and join us for T.

And Happy December to all of you!

Already the End of the Weekend

The long weekend is flying right by. Way too fast.

Of course.

I can't believe it is already Saturday night.

This weekend has so far been about food, shopping, some cleaning and lots of laughs.

My husband's sister's husband is a chef so we had a delicious but way too much food dinner on Thanksgiving. 

Of course there would have been more stuffing but one of the dogs got into it. :)

I guess he wanted dinner too!

 And I didn't do any baking for Thanksgiving. It made it really low key. And very NICE. My niece Ally, seen here below, was playing budding pastry chef. Guess she takes after her dad the chef. But my daughter and I did make another cranberry vodka with a splash of orange turkey shaped jello. It was a lot better with the splash of orange. Here's the link to the turkey jello post earlier this week Holiday Weekend.

And even though we didn't go out until 9 AM on Friday, we did do some Black Friday shopping and got lots of good deals. My husband is hooked on Black Friday shopping. And he hates to shop. But a few years ago he discovered the big chain hardware stores have good manly deals. Like drills and tool boxes and that kind of stuff.

My daughter and I went out Wednesday evening to do some girly shopping since the holiday deals were already up. (And no one is shopping then either.)

I've always wanted to put a Christmas tree in my dining room kitchen area. But it is not a big space and most trees wouldn't fit. But I found this pencil tree (on a good sale too) Friday. 

I need to decorate it still but I put it together this morning.

This makes me smile.

I think tomorrow we are off to the Christmas tree farm to cut a real tree for the living room. 

And after shopping Friday my daughter and I went out and met a friend of mine who was up from North Carolina. You can see my friend's reflection behind me in the left corner taking this photo.

We chatted, had drinks and had more food. I am ready to get back to normal amount of  food again.

And I am shopped out now too!

And I am finally getting close to getting my studio finally purged, reorganized and picked back up. Today was rainy and made a good cleaning day.

I need to get it finished because cleaning it isn't as fun as it was when I started.

And I want to get back to some art play!

Its been a nice weekend so far though. Warmer weather, and maybe nothing too adventurous but fun holiday weekend activities.

Better than last year- Thanksgiving 2014!  We had this the day before the holiday and lost our electricity for over 48 hours.

Thank goodness we didn't get any snow this year.

That's all for me. Thanks for stopping by to visit.