Catch Up

So, I disappeared for most of the month of November.  I’m mostly back now, and doing cleanup in these last few November days so that I can be more present and functional in December.  Plans may be thwarted, but I have hope.

We had an awesome Thanksgiving.  Drew’s parents and his sister’s family stayed with us, so we had nine people in our house.  It worked out better than I expected.  I cooked my very first Thanksgiving dinner, with turkey and stuffing and giblet gravy and the whole bit.  (Drew made the mashed potatoes.)  Also, three kinds of pie.  I didn’t let anyone help, either.  (Really, there wasn’t anything for more than one person to do at any given time.  Except the mashed potatoes.)  I’m dang proud of that dinner.  Turned out very well.  Mostly it was just nice to spend time with everyone without an agenda.  I even got up at 3 AM to go laugh at Black Friday with my mother-in-law and sister-in-law.   Good times.

Sunday brought us six inches of snow, and a lot of wind that blew the snow around in drifts.  We have a drift resembling a wave on our front walk.  I’m reticent to shovel it, because it just looks so cool.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen snow actually drift before.  We usually don’t have enough snow/wind here to see that happen. 

It’s my ambition to not go anywhere until the snow melts.  That way I won’t have to clean off the car.

We decorated for Christmas.  We have an actual full-sized (hand-me-down) christmas tree this year.  It’s fake, but it’s pretty.  I downgraded our little tree and put just our Nightmare Before Christmas ornaments on it.  It’s the ugliest thing ever, just like it is every year.  I find all Christmas decorations tacky, so my goal is usually to make them as tacky as possible, to go with the theme.  The big tree is mostly failing, but the little tree is succeeding wildly.  Our housemate contributed an actual Charlie Brown christmas tree, which adds up to a tree for everyone in the house.

Book news: I have actually seen and read a contract.  All 31 pages of it.  So that’s progress, at least.

Garden Ninja news: We are swamped.  Swamped.  Having too much work is a good problem, though.  We’ll take that problem over the alternative.

Goals for December are to help Drew stay caught up with work, give priority to my church assignments, and finish that (sketchy) first draft.  I’m already aware of a couple of things that are probably going to fall in my lap and demand attention, so I’m trying to keep the month reasonably empty.  If my draft gets pre-empted by other, more important things (like revisions), so be it.