Tag: sticky buns

Sunday Epiphanies

On any given Sunday, you’ll find me awake before sunrise.  Old, very old, habits die-hard.  I embrace being a morning person.  Only causes an issue when I want to toast in the new year since I generally turn into a pumpkin around nine o’clock.  Today was no different from any other weekend.

Yesterday was Twelfth Night, the official end to the Christmas season.  When Dickens was a youth, Twelfth Night was ‘THE’ biggest day of the winter holiday in England.  Between his Christmas Carol and Prince Albert’s importation of German Christmas traditions (namely the Christmas tree), Twelfth Night began to fade out of fashion during Dickens and Queen Victoria’s lifetimes.

I did not stay up late celebrating or hosting a Twelfth Night party.  I had servers to upgrade and test bright and early on January 6th, also known as Epiphany.

I woke up before my alarm (I almost always do this; my alarm only woke me up once in the last six months) and got logged in and ready to upgrade a server.  It went much smoother than the last time I tried, right before Christmas, and I was done within 20 minutes (leaving an hour forty minutes of my maintenance window unused).  Server patch testing took another fifteen minutes so I was done ‘working’ before seven o’clock, still before sunrise.

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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.