Thanksgiving 2010

 moving the food out of the kitchen

post dinner lounging

 wild children

the prep crew prepping veggies

The acorn tree

the loooong table

 between the extreme lameness of Blogger, taking 25 minutes to upload ten photos, and my camera's settings being all wonky, making most of the photos blurry, this will be a short post.

We had a big Thanksgiving dinner, with twenty people and lots of crafting on my part.   My name tags were not exactly what I wanted, but they were close.

Thank you  to the fabulous artist, Katherine for helping me realize my vision.

Things went well, the food was great, lots of friends helped and brought things and that made my work pretty simple.

Holidays are always hard for me.

I am childish in my inability to ever get over having my own family of origin being all screwed up and fractured.

It messes with my head and causes me a great deal of pain around times like Thanksgiving.  I wind up feeling a lifetime of loss all over me and it often feels difficult not to cave in or be swept away by those feelings.

Thank goodness I have managed to accumulate a great and amazing body of lovely people that help insulate me from all that pain and make it feel somewhat manageable.

Thank goodness for my husband that totally gets me, and will tolerate me asking a million times "do you love me?" and will answer a million times, "yes I do."

the kid table

twenty people is a LOT! but they look pretty good by candlelight.

the pie and some cakes

the one year old's dad had to sit at the play table, to get her to eat.
It was fun to have a little one around, but she made me tired, just watching.  I am glad my children are bigger these days!

the leaf garland was lovely

the guests watching Maxwell's movie

baby wrangler's doing dishes

the turkey and the ham

Heidi wayyyy out of focus, damn camera

Don and Freyja

I need some inspiration

the stupid living room that I hate,  yes I do need those giant speakers, because I like to listen to records, rather than CDs. 

 Our house is large, which I like, but we have this really stupid living room that is an odd shape with a fire place and big windows, that make furniture placement really hard.
I am not one of those talented design people, either, so that contributes to the problems, as well as a the fact that our furniture is old and funky and shitty and ugly.
The livingroom is making me insane, just bothering the hell out of me every time I walk into the room.  The giant wooden box, with the curtain, is hiding the tv.

The living room  becomes an issue for me every year around this time, when I am about to host people. 

I feel ashamed of our crappy living room, and the shabby furniture and become totally overwhelmed with schemes to make things better.  I have washed all the curtains and slip covers this week, which makes things slightly less dusty, but hardly better looking. 

the sun room, with windows on three sides, and the green sofa that Mark will not let me get rid of, despite the fact that I hate green.  In his defense, I do like to lie on that sofa and read sometimes.

 The living room is attached on one end to what is supposed to be the dinning room, but we use it as a sort of library / playroom for the kids, we use the sun room for our formal dining room, and mostly dine in the dining area in the kitchen.

Freyja and the dog have nothing to do with this post, she is just demanding to be shown, in return for letting me type.

looking into the playroom, and seeing a king's ransom worth of Playmobile houses and castles, people and animals. 
The arch is making the ceiling look low, it is acually a nice high ceiling,
which almost makes up for the lack of decent overhead lighting. 

Some day my children will be older, and I will not have to have toys in the playroom and then perhaps I will use the dining room to dine and the sun room to read and bask in the sun.

another birthday cake

lanterns drying on the "lantern drying racks" AKA bowls

 I am preparing for Thanksgiving, my big holiday, my thing, and this year I am making paper lanterns for the table.  They are simple to make, with tissue paper and glue. 

I forced Mark and Maxwell to help me one evening, and Mark's came out the best.  

Who knew?

the finished product with candles

 I had to do a birthday party for a friend last week.  I made a very fancy complicated dinner, and a very fancy complicated layer cake, with a Bavarian cream filling. 

 It was all going well, until about 30 minutes before dinner, when I peeked in the fridge to check on the cake, only to discover that it has split down the center and had started to list to one side, rather pronouncedly. EEEK! 

A baker's worst nightmare! 

 I whipped a lot of cream, added some chocolate powder, used it to spackle the crack, then had Rolf hold the cake together, while I tied a grossgrain ribbon around it, to anchor the top layer, and make it look as though I had intended it to be that way... pretty freaking BRILLIANT if I do say so myself.  AND I do.

chocolate Bavarian torte with raspberry sauce

I have a crackling, barking cough. 

I never cough.

I have aches and pains, and the occasional shattering migraine, but never coughs. 

I associate coughing  with weak people, pigeon chested and snot nosed or dirty smokers. 

I think of myself, arrogantly, as strong and tough and free from coughing and sniffling.

Just one more indicator that things are not always as they seem, or as I need them to be.  

I am sitting in the office cruising fabric websites, feeling sick and worrying that my nose might rub right off the next time I blow it, and Freyja walks in wearing an aligator costume...

"Mommy can I ask you (she means tell me) something?"

sure

"I love you & this suit is choking my neck and scratching my neck"

There you go.  Sometimes things make perfect sense. 

just not good enough, I guess

Since November 1st, I have been unsuccessfully trying to login to

Apparently they really, really don't want me. 
I can't get signed in, and when I go through the considerable hassle of getting a new password, I can never get the page to load and finish.  I have wasted a fair amount of time on this, the more I am denied, to more I want it to work. 

Why do I allow something so foolish to annoy me so deeply?

It has been that kind of week. 

Lots of doors slamming in my face, a big dose of betrayal and a stupid head cold to top it off. 

This crappy week of waiting and disappointment reminded me of the very excellent Kevin Gilbert song, Waiting- and wondering what became of the CD the song was on?

I'm waiting for the apple, I'm waiting for the fall
I'm waiting for a renaissance to electrify us all
I'm waiting for the mailman to bring me news of friends
I'm waiting through the middle just to see how it will end

I'm waiting for the confidential files to be released
I'm waiting for the index on my fear to be increased
I'm waiting for the judgment of the living and the dead
I'm waiting for the Pagan times that surely are ahead
I'm waiting for the show to start, the one I paid to see
I'm waiting for the good things that are coming back to me

I'm waiting for the man made gods to do the will of men
I'm waiting for the CIA to cover up again
I'm waiting for the militants to lighten up a bit
I'm waiting for the mafia to make this song a hit

I'm waiting in the shadows with a chain around my wrist
I'm waiting with my best friend held firmly in my fist
I'm waiting for my heroes to tell me what to dream
I'm waiting for my neighbors to tell me what's obscene
I'm waiting for the apple, I'm waiting for the fall
I'm waiting for a renaissance to electrify us all

I'm waiting for love to come
I'm waiting for you to run
and I'm waiting for wonder to return.

Witchy woman

 

Freyja and I getting ready to head out for a cemetery tour at Lone Fir Cemetery. 

The tour turned out to be very cool, despite my nervousness about crowds and lines and my general ongoing social retardation that makes this sort of outing nerve wracking for me. 

Poor Maxwell drew the unfortunate lot of having his outdoor school land on Halloween (I know! What kind of idiot scheduled it?) so it was just the two of us, tagging along with some friends who live in the neighborhood and were gracious enough to invite us along.   

Mark stayed home to man the candy distribution, and keep the cat from harm.

Once again blogger is acting goofy and putting the photos in random order... 

our friends- a witch and a wood nymph, waiting in line for the walk

a good excuse to use that white manic panic powder purchased nearly 20 years ago on impulse.

Freyja and a friend running though the graveyard!

The founder of this cemetery and his wife.

 Along the tour there were actor preforming little vignettes, related to the grave.  This one was a fellow by the name of Mitchell, that was a musician, killed by a speeding horse cart, sometime in the late 1880's.

a lovely house along our trick or treating way.

spooky lights!

home again, for some "mile high apple pie"

and some ginger pear cake too.