Category: Thanksgiving

Massaging My Misty-Mossy Menu

It occurred to me this morning that people receiving my Christmas cards this year may be wondering where exactly I’d hidden my annual Christmas letter in this blog.  So I did some quick rearranging and reconfiguring of categories to make it easier to find all my posts related to the Holidays (especially Christmas and Thanksgiving).

As you can see, I’ve condensed my blog menu and added a section just for Holidays.  Each menu heading contains at least two or three submenus for my most frequently used categories.  Musings and Mutterings appear under the Home menu.  Family and Rottweilers appear under the About heading.  Any reviews I write and post here can be found under Reviews.  And anytime I see something strange in the sky, you can be assured to find it under Astronomy.

All posts are full-text indexed soon after they are posted so please take advantage of the Search box at the top of the right-hand pane if you are looking for something in particular.

This concludes my public service announcement on navigating around my blog.  I now return you to your regularly scheduled life.

Just one more day until the Winter Solstice and four more days until Christmas!

Giving Thanks

North Texas Thanksgiving II

And so I’ve reached the penultimate day in my ‘Thirty Days of Thankfulness‘ series.  No, it’s not the final day, since this marks the twenty-fourth posting with six more to go, but it is the traditional holiday date to give thanks for all my countless blessings.

I’m extremely thankful that I didn’t actually have to roast a turkey.  Thanks to a friend of my daughter’s, we had an exquisitely smoked turkey as well as a marvelous spiral cut ham to go with our many traditional side dishes.  We did somehow manage to leave the cranberry sauce in Denton but no one is pointing fingers as to who rushed who out of the apartment.  He did make an excellent gravy.

We’ve just cracked into the pies.  The sticky buns batch I made this morning disappeared within a few minutes of coming out of the oven, so the pies are all that’s left to fill in whatever gaps might be left in our stomachs.

Rachelle and Terry seated at Derek's Transformer-like Table

We had some lively dinner discussion topics around my son’s interesting dining room table.  Their apartment’s kitchen is a vast improvement over the one they had at the other apartment.   The chairs are very comfortable and we enjoyed the food and the debates with equal relish.  Some of us have drifted off into a food coma, others watched a movie, or played video games or, in my case, snuck off to write this quick blog post to recap the highlight of my November for the last three years.  The long drive to North Texas from Northeastern Kansas is well worth the backaches and road hypnosis to spend a few precious days with my kids.  No matter how connected we may think we are thanks to the Internet, or technology, or cell phones, or tex messages, it just can’t beat the up-close and personal reach-out-and-hug-your-loved one kind of experience.

This may be our final North Texas Thanksgiving gathering with both kids attending.  It will all depend on Rachelle’s graduate school auditions and selection process.  Next year, I may have to decide between a Colorado or Chicago Thanksgiving with Rachelle or returning to North Texas to visit Derek and Royna.

But I won’t dwell on a situation that doesn’t yet exist and may not be an issue as I just remembered that we will be in Texas next November no matter what for the inaugural Formula One race to be held at the Circuit of the Americas scheduled to occur just four days after my husband’s birthday.

Today, I’m just thankful to be here with my kids, their significant others and my husband, all together under one roof.  If only Roxy and Apollo could be here as well, then my life would be complete.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family and friends. 

Post-Thanksgiving Wrap-Up

Before falling asleep Thanksgiving evening, I remembered to turn off my weekday alarm on my cell phone.  When Terry and I finally woke up, we discovered a house transformed (see photo to the left).  Being gracious guests, we refrained from comment and chortles.

Rachelle cooked her dad an egg-white, ham and cheese omelet and I sampled her beer biscuits.  Derek and Royna fell asleep on the couch so they woke up after we ate and came along with us for a short ‘painless’ shopping spree on ‘Black Friday.’

Our first store was Rachelle’s old employer, Ross, where I found a new purse and wallet, an electric razor for Terry and some reasonably priced extra virgin olive oil for Rachelle.  I had a thirty percent off in store coupon for Barnes & Noble, so we trekked all the way across the Golden Triangle Mall.  Unfortunately, I didn’t find the appropriate gift I wanted to use the coupon for, but I did spy a newer version of the Lightwedge that’s now rechargeable and thinner and lighter.  Oh, well.

Next, we stopped at Hobby Lobby pricing small air compressors for Derek (a requested Chrismtas gift wish list item).  The prices were mind boggling, so that item will be bought online.  Rachelle prowled around for fabric paints and aprons for a Christmas gift idea.  She was disappointed in the selection and variety of fabric paints so we eventually made it to Michaels near Bed, Bath and Beyond, where Terry and I found our next hopefully dog-proof stainless steel trash can (no, we didn’t buy it and haul it back here to Kansas from Texas; we’ll buy it at our own local BB&B).

By then, the morning had melted away so we stopped at Paulio’s Pizza Cafe for lunch.  We ordered the King and Hawaiian Sunrise (my favorite pizza bar none!).   After lunch, we returned to Kent’s ‘Redskins Christmas Extravaganza’ where he and his significant other spent the rest of the daylight putting up the exterior decorations.  After Nic returned from work (and Derek and Royna returned to Plano), all four of us (Terry, Nic, Rachelle and I) spent the evening wasting time playing Peggle on the Xbox 360 in the spare bedroom.  Rachelle and Nic left ‘early’ to create spring rolls for tailgating on Saturday but Terry and I toughed it out and made it to the credits by 1:00 a.m.

After a quick and meager breakfast of English muffins and almost oversleeping (one o’clock in the morning is way way way past my bedtime), we joined Kent and several others for tailgating on the University of North Texas campus in a parking lot near Fouts Field stadium.  This football game was the last ever to be played in the old stadium since the new stadium on the other (south) side of I-35 will open next spring.

Can you guess who was invited to play against the UNT ‘Mean Green’ Eagles?  Oh, the irony!  The Kansas State Wildcats!  Quite funny, if you think about it.  Here’s our daughter, sporting her green UNT T-shirt (the girl on the left with short blond hair and white framed sunglasses) prior to the flood of purple pouring down from the north.  You couldn’t have asked for a more perfect day for an outdoor party and a final college football game for UNT, providing a great game but ultimately a victory for the Wildcats.

We returned to the house, Terry took a nap, and I read a book while everyone else watched several college football games (sometimes simultaneously) on Kent’s amazing LED HD 3D television.

Sunday morning, Terry and I quickly packed the Bonneville and headed north, pushed relentlessly home by another stiff wind.  Our gas mileage on the routine trip was nothing short of miraculous.  We stopped in Wichita for a couple of hours to visited some old friends but still made it home before seven o’clock.

Monday I relaxed and recovered from all the driving and almost finished the latest Wheel of Time novel published last month.  I’m within one hundred pages of finishing The Towers of Midnight.   Terry and I went to pickup the Rotts from the kennel around noon, but the groomer hadn’t given them a bath yet, so we went back at two o’clock for some squeaky clean excited Rottweilers.

What a great time we all had, including Roxy and Apollo.  Just wish there had been more time to spend with everyone.

Happy Thanksgiving from North Texas

Thanksgiving Dinner with Nic, Raya and TerryTerry and I drove five hundred miles in record time against a stiff south headwind yesterday to visit our offspring and their significant others.  Even though we left over an hour later than I had planned, we arrived in Denton before the sun set and to a balmy 84 degrees.  We were so early, Rachelle and I had time to make our first of three trips to the largest Kroger store in Texas (just five minutes away from her residence).

After Terry and I retired to the spare bedroom, Kent (Rachelle’s landlord/homeowner) decided to decorate for Christmas.  We woke up to Christmas a la Redskins (I’ll let Rachelle explain that one to you.  Or, if you’ve seen the DirecTV commercial about Cowboys and Redskins fans, you’ll have some idea of what I’m talking about).  I forgot to reset my cell phone alarm, so I was up by five o’clock since it’s technically a weekday.

Terry, Derek and Royna hamming it up over the turkey. I only had to make two more trips to Kroger before I got the turkey in the oven.  This year Derek had requested a ham instead of turkey, so I also had to juggle warming up a sprial cut ham with the usual side dishes and the family tradition of sticky buns. Derek and Royna arrived from Plano just shortly after noon, as the turkey was cooling and the ham was in the oven.  Everything turned out well and we all sat down for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner.

Everyone pitched in to clean up and we soon had the kitchen back to normal and sat down to enjoy Toy Story 3 on Kent’s amazing Samsung LED HD 3D sixty inch television.

Here’s hoping all of you are having as great a family gathering as we’re having here in chilly north Texas this Thanksgiving.