Thanksgiving 2020

Well, it's only a week after Thanksgiving...

We had a lovely holiday. 

Although I enjoy having people over, and I like cooking for people, I had pretty much decided not to invite anyone. Initially this was mostly because I couldn't decide who to invite—our new friends who have kids the ages of my older kids, or our dear friends who have a lot of little kids (and a few who are the ages of our younger girls). But then we were all being told we couldn't have more than ten people in our homes because of...

Well, despite that, I thoroughly intended to have Jason and Adreanna in our home (duh!) which brought our count to eleven, and I invited Bruce's dad, too. 

I never know if anyone will want to make the three-hour drive to come for dinner (we are three hours from everything), so I was delighted that Dad accepted our invitation. He came out on Wednesday, just in time to see our finished gingerbread house before we whisked it off to the contest. (Which reminds me—again—that today is the last day I can go retrieve it. I wonder what I'll do with it now. ?)

I did manage to make all the pies, and the baklava on Wednesday after the gingerbread house was turned in. This is largely due to my family cleaning up the gingerbread mess, and Dad buying us dinner from Subway that night. In fact, things seemed to be going so well that I ignored my planned schedule and got started on the turkey a little late on Thursday. So dinner was about an hour later than I had intended, but it was all good. We enjoyed the time visiting together while the bird was in the oven.

There I am, doing the last-minute stuff.
Or maybe just washing my hands.
Notice all the post-its on my cabinets?
Those are new recipes I've used
in the last year or so.

This year's menu was a little simpler than usual. For the last...three years or so I've thought that Thanksgiving dinner, while yummy, is soooo laden with ultra-rich foods that it's almost too much. So this year instead of a veggie tray accompanied by a creamy dip, I opted for a salad of spring greens, apples, bacon, and toasted pecans with a maple-dijon vinaigrette. Delicious! And instead of the traditional green bean casserole (which is always home-made, none of that canned stuff!)...instead of the casserole I made roasted green beans. It was just right; it lightened the dinner up just enough to make the desserts in the evening a little more enjoyable. At least I thought so.

Our table only seats ten. So we set up another table in the great room and seated six people at each table.
(You can see Dad in the top left corner, visiting with Bruce and the kids while they wait for dinner.)

After dinner Dad told us stories about when he was younger, and about his mission to Peru. And we sang (mostly Christmas songs) together. And then pie, and a little more visiting.

I fell asleep as soon as I got into bed that night. And slept in until ...maybe 8:30 the next morning. Dad stopped by a little later, before he headed back home (with some pumpkin pie and some turkey, of course!). We really enjoyed having him with us.

Traditionally the day after Thanksgiving is our "Decorate the House" day, but I think this year we were all a little tired out. We managed to bring the boxes up from the crawl space, and we got some nativity sets put up, and that's about it. We may have played some games; we may have watched a movie. Bruce and I did walk to Cobble Rock Park (about four blocks from our house) to pick up our prize for the gingerbread house. We had leftovers for dinner, and more pie for dessert, and I went to bed early that night. 

I think we finally finished getting the tree put up and decorated on Sunday. :-)

After going to bed around 9:30 Sunday, and sleeping in until almost 10:00 on Monday, I was fully recovered. Thanksgiving week was filled with long, long, busy days, but it's worth it. 

I love to spend time with my family!

What a Week!

What a week this has been!
It's been a good week, but what a week. I guess it all started last Friday (the 20th) with two online events/announcements: 

First, President Nelson did a special online broadcast about gratitude, and invited everyone watching to make social media their gratitude journals for a week. Thousands of people took that challenge and suddenly instead of the complaining, snarky, accusing, etc. political or covid (or whatever) posts I'd been seeing so much of, there was almost nothing but gratitude showing up on my facebook page. It was wonderful! I think Michael iterated it best when he said that instead of people just reposting memes or other things they saw, they were suddenly talking about their own, real lives (in a positive way!). This is what made social media fun, and nice, and interesting again.

Second, I saw the ad for the Holly Days gingerbread house contest. My family has gone to Holly Days every year since we moved to Vernal. They usually block off a main intersection and have firebowls there, serve hot chocolate or spiced cider, have free activities, etc. It's a pretty big deal around here. It was a little different this year, but they still had the gingerbread contest. Every year we've gone to see the gingerbread houses, and vote for the "People's Choice" award, and every year we conceited Norths have thought, "We could win this contest." But it has been so much fun to give our house to a family who has little children that we've been doing just that, and have never entered the contest.

But this year I thought it might be difficult to find a family who wasn't afraid of getting a house made entirely of cookies and candies for their children to eat. (Covid. >sigh<) So we decided to enter the contest.

Bruce was going to be home a lot, and he wanted to be more involved in making the house this year. So he started looking for designs on...Saturday? I think it was Saturday morning. And he chose this one:

It looked trickier than any other houses we've built, but I figured we could do it. I started drawing up the patterns Saturday night, but I was super tired that day, and didn't finish. (I had wanted to make the patterns on Saturday, bake on Sunday, and build and decorate on Monday. This would still give me enough time for all our Thanksgiving preparations. The best laid plans...)

Exhaustion seemed to be the word of the week for me. We finished drawing most of the patterns by Sunday night, but that morning I'd woke (woken? awakened?) at 4:30 a.m. and by night time I couldn't make myself stay up past 9:00. Monday I woke up at a more decent time—5:30—and finished drawing the plans, and started making the gingerbread. We were a day behind schedule.

This picture was actually taken after we baked most of the house. In the bottom left corner you can see the mold we made for the bottom of the turret. The point was molded onto an ice cream cone.

This year, after seeing a cookie recipe that Kim had posted, I decided to put cocoa into the gingerbread for the roof pieces so they'd be a darker color than the rest of the house. Just cocoa didn't do it; I had to add black food coloring, which made it turn a disgusting green, and then I added red food coloring to correct it. It did bake up to a nice, chocolatey brown. We had already decided to mold the round tower on a salt box, but how to make that tower roof took some figuring out.

The turret on the left is in two pieces; it doesn't look too bad from this angle, but there is a huge gap that would have to have been filled with a lot of frosting. I decided to try to make it all in one piece. And I was successful, except that I had covered both the base and the cone with foil, hoping that I could extract them from the inside of the turret, making the whole thing edible.
The base came out, but not the cone. You can also
see the salt box, cut in half and covered in foil,
with the tower baked onto it. (The molds came
out of those pieces easily.)

By bedtime (11:00) Monday night I still had a few house pieces left to bake. When I got up on Tuesday morning (5:00 wake-up time—not intentional) I thought I'd bake the rest of the pieces. And then I saw that pointy roof piece. I really didn't want the foil in there. So I got a fork and started picking at the cone to break it. And I was successful until about halfway up; then I poked a hole into the gingerbread. Oh noooo! Well, I still had some chocolate gingerbread in the fridge, so I patched the hole and stuck it back into the oven. Next thing I know, I smell burning gingerbread. So I rush to the oven, open it, and see that the tower roof had softened, fell apart, and some of it was burning on the bottom of the oven. AAAAACK!

My roof, in ruins.

Well, there was still gingerbread dough in the fridge, but not the chocolate stuff. So I had to get out the plain gingerbread and try to duplicate the color, and rebuild the roof. Fortunately I still had the mold for the base. This time I did not cover the cone with foil; in about thirty minutes I had a new tower roof that was completely edible. But it was a pretty good scare for first thing in the morning.

The windows were all put in by around 1:00.

I always put the Christmas tree in the front
window. And here I'm putting a wreath
into the tower door's window too.
Meticulous work.
There you see Kaylie and Bruce looking
at all the pieces with the windows done.

Finally, we could start on the construction.

We managed to get the lights into the house (that's the easy part), but we needed to make sure a few lights would stay in the little extensions next to the tower, plus we needed a light in the tower itself. We actually had all the walls up when we started, but the main front wall fell over (and was caught by some quick hands!) when we started on the lighting.

Ryan got all the lights in place, and here he is putting a reflector above the tower light. (His clever idea.)

There's the tower light. And if you look, you can see
the front walls are all in place too.

By now it was dinner time. And the kitchen looked like this:

Not just this counter; the whole kitchen looked like this.

After dinner, we still had to put the roofs on the house before we could decorate.

It turns out that this flat roof was the trickiest bit of construction...actual building. We had to trim pieces to match angles, and then we were afraid that putting the flat top on would make the rest collapse. I should have more faith in the royal icing—when it finishes setting up, it's as tough as bricks.

We worked on decorating for a little while, but then the kids went to play a multi-player video game with some friends who live out of town, and I was on my own. By 10:00 I was more than exhausted, and I finally gave up around 11:00.

Ryan puts PEZ bricks on a chimney; Kaylie is putting holly under and around windows.

The door to the tower. I decorated it and...
Do you see what I see on that tower?
(No, not me in the background. On the tower itself.)
I suppose it's only fitting after we spent two days calling that roof "the witches hat" or "the wizard's hat".

Wednesday morning. The house needs to be turned in between 1:00 an 2:00 p.m. Not a scrap of Thanksgiving cooking has been done. We all worked like mad to get the gingerbread house finished on time! 

close-up of the front door

right side of house

from the left-front (tower) corner

back and left side of house

front of house

This might be my favorite picture of the house.

On our way to the museum, at about 1:25.
Dad watches as Ryan and I maneuver stairs, a misplaced bench for the van, and the cat, while we take the house out to Rachel's car. (How often do you take the house to the car?)

This is what we left behind:

At the museum, to pay us for our conceit, we saw some really nice gingerbread houses—I knew at least two of them were serious contenders. And there were still more arriving as we left. 

I was sure this would be the winning house. It looks like it was done by a professional cake-decorator, with lots of airbrushing in the house and the landscaping.
It was amazing!

And I was pretty sure this one would win a prize too. You can't really tell from the photos, but the landscaping on this house was beautiful! I think everything was dusted with edible glitter.

When we got to the museum, our extension cord wouldn't reach the outlet. But the nice lady who worked there found us a cord and got everything plugged in and... it didn't work! Oh nooo! She found another cord, and it did work. Whew! Half the charm of our house is the lighted windows. We admired all the other houses, and then went back home to work on cleaning up and Thanksgiving preparations. (Thanksgiving was lovely, but this post is already too long. I'll write a short post about the holiday later.)

On Friday we got a text from the judges of the contest telling us we'd won second place! How exciting!

I thought the gnome house and the red house would come out ahead of us, and we would get third place—
if no other fabulous houses came in after ours.
I thought the gnome house would be first,
but the judges weren't sure it was entirely made
of gingerbread, so it got third. I'll bet it was though.
I could see that the roof was gingerbread, and
I'm pretty sure the candy rocks on the outside of
the house had to be "glued" on to some kind of structure; it would be nearly impossible to get such nice straight walls by just mortaring those rocks together.

Well, it was all pretty exciting! And exhausting. And now my only wish is that, after we pick up our house tomorrow, we could find a family with little kids who would like to have it—giving it to delighted little children is still more fun than winning a contest, fun as that was. 

Maybe someone will still take it. We'll see. We'll see.

Humpty Dumpty

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.

Humpty Dumpty...

This time I'm afraid it is political. (Sorry Kim. Sorry Santa.)
But, considering I practically live with a political pundit, it may be that it's inescapable. I guess there is always the chance that what I say will be removed because blogger is supported by Google, and... you know. Big Tech and censorship.

I'll tell you straight up, I do not vote Democrat, ever. I read their platform very carefully the first time I ever got to vote, and I disagreed with a lot of what they want to happen. And after thirty-plus years they have diverged even further from what I want. Does this automatically mean that I always vote Republican? Well, no.

Here is the prelude (it's a long prelude) to what I really want to say:

1. A few months ago Bruce was going back and forth with a friend of ours about some political thing. I don't usually step into these situations, but this particular friend unabashedly declared that he was, indeed, a "rabid Trump hater." Well, being rabid is never a good thing, to begin with, but I'm not going there.
I replied to this friend that whether you love or despise Mr. Trump, he is still the president of the United States (#heactuallyisyour president), and deserves respect simply because he is the president. And then, out of the blue, I get a response (on Bruce's timeline, mind you) from a relative that I almost never hear from. Now this relative and I are friends—we've visited together, had dinner in each others' homes, etc. Our meeting up lately has diminished to funerals and sometimes weddings, but we are friends. Still, I could practically hear his eyes rolling from nearly 200 miles away as he said, "Oh, please..." and proceeded to tell me how stupid our President is.

2. A friend admits (on facebook) that he believes "abortion is murder, but..." And later he is screeching (facebook screeching) "BUT WHAT ABOUT THE MOTHER?!!" 
This friend is going to defend "murder"—not just murder, but infanticide to his last breath because, "What about the mother?"
Well, that's weird. I've never heard of any other murder case where we have to consider the feelings of the murderer over the person who was killed, ignoring the fact that a life was taken in a brutal way. (Imagine if Mr. G.F., a few months ago, had had his body thrown in the trash can, and then everyone started yelling, "It was murder, but what about the feelings of the police?"
Hm. Wouldn't happen.)

3. My niece posts a list (on facebook, again) of the things President Trump has accomplished in 3 1/2 years of presidency. (I'll bet you're not aware of most of them because the news focuses on what a creep he is. More about that later.) She posts this, and a friend of hers demands to know, "Why are you worshipping Trump?!"
Um, she wasn't. She was showing that he actually did accomplish some good things. (Now, this rabid friend of mine might concede that President Trump did some good things, but he would also say that they were done for solely self-serving purposes. Question: Even if he did good things only to make himself look good (which I doubt) does that make the things he did less good?)

4. Let's get back to the press continually reminding of us what a bad man Donald Trump is:
What evidence have they shown us? Some allegations thrown his way? There have been allegations tossed at lots of presidential candidates. In fact, there have been women who have come forward and said that Joe Biden (who may have a giant smile and look like your grandpa, but he's not your grandpa) ...they say that Mr. Biden was "inappropriate" with them. (And that's putting it extremely mildly.)
And if we're going to play the misogynist card, what about Bill Clinton? The first time I ever heard that name was in an ad, where he and Hillary were snuggled up together on a love seat, he was holding both of her hands in his, and they earnestly told us that Bill had had an affair, but that was behind them, and everything was swell now. And I'm thinking, "Who is this guy?"  Future events proved that  it really wasn't behind them at all. (Unless you were talking about that one, specific affair.)
Or, hey! What about JFK? It seems to be pretty widely rumored that he was a philanderer.
So... Boys will be boys? Unless we are talking about Trump; he is a bad man, a playboy and a philanderer. Which explains why he is still married to a woman who could be a super model and who seems to support him.

Let me be clear:  I. do. not. support. "philandering" or being a "playboy" (which is just a term that makes a terrible thing sound cute and harmless). I think it's sickening. But if this is what we are pointing at to show us that Mr. Trump is a bad man, we'd better start looking at some of our other favorites; he might not be any worse than many other "men of the world."

"But he is a racist pig!!!"
Well, I've never seen evidence of that. (He's said some dumb things, but what do his actions show?) I only know what the news says about it. Hmm. The same news that makes 24/7 coverage his impeachment, but little (if any) mention of anything good he might have done.
Wait! Do they have an agenda?

"But everyone knows that he is an idiot with a single-digit IQ."
I'd hazard a guess that you need more smarts than that to be a non-stop liar, and fool at least half the country. Or maybe half the country (the half that doesn't agree with you) also has a single-digit IQ.
Nice. Thanks.

"But he was impeached!!"
Yes. So was Bill Clinton. Who also committed perjury at his trial.

What I will give you is that Mr. Trump can be kind of self-aggrandizing. And I will give you that he can say some really stupid things when he is unscripted. (This could be because he says what he thinks. If he had spent his life in politics instead of in building a business, he might have learned to look and sound just like he should, regardless of what he thinks. But if he is so unguarded in his behavior, at least we know what's really going on in his head—like it or hate it, as you will.)

Well, my purpose here actually is not to defend President Trump. He has lawyers for that.

Here's some more prelude to the actual point:

Even though President Trump was ahead in the polls until midnight on election day, Biden suddenly jumped up in the middle of the night and won the election. Amazing! But Trump suspects fraud and contests the win. This is nothing new.
A similar thing happened in the 2000 race between George W. Bush and Al Gore. In 2000 nobody was calling Mr. Bush "President-Elect" until the conflict was decided. Which was on December 12. So why are all the news and all the magazines talking about the happy days to come under President Biden?
It has not been decided that Biden won the election.

Yet I have relatives and friends who are so very happy that now we can finally have a "good man" in office. (You know, not a wicked man like our current president. Who, by the way, is still president.) There may be some evidence that this good man maybe isn't so good. It's hard to say because all the mainstream news leans hard to the left, and alternative news sources lean hard to the right; there is no middle ground. Whether he's good, bad, or somewhere in-between I wouldn't be rejoicing Biden's win yet.

I wouldn't be rejoicing over a Biden win because he. has. not. won. yet. The news can spin it as President Trump throwing a tantrum, but what he is doing is perfectly legal, and constitutional. Biden really and truly is not president-elect (and, by the way there is no "office of the president-elect"). He won't be president-elect until the courts say so.

But all the news, magazines, etc., as I said before, are telling us that he is. Not only that, but before this marvelous year's election, we were told that "Trump will refuse to leave office." As if he'd already lost the election months before it happened. And we've been told that he would probably have to be removed by (military?) force in January. There is no reason to believe this is true; it's ridiculous.

But THE NEWS has spoken:
1. Mr. Trump is a bad man.
2. Mr. Trump will lose the election.
3. Mr. Trump will refuse to leave the White House.
4. Joe Biden is the president-elect.
5. Mr. Trump is simply pitching the predicted fit.

And we all believe it.

And now, if you're still with me, I'll get to my real point:

Go to facebook. (With the exception of maybe three people, I know that if you're reading this post it's because you saw the link on facebook.) Go to facebook and type my name in the search bar. When I pop up on the screen, right under my name it will tell you what my relationship is to you: Friend. Sister. Cousin. Daughter. Not a single one will say "racist", or "misogynist", or "pro-mask", or  "anti-mask", or "Democrat", or "Republican". It won't say, "Political Opponent." You won't see any of those things. 

Friend.  Sister.  Cousin.  Daughter.  Friend.

But we are being divided into political opponents. We are being divided into enemy camps over every issue "they" can come up with. The news spreads this discord like wildfire. Facebook, which I thought was a platform for friends to keep up with each other, has become a war zone during election years. And this year they are all pushing and pushing and pushing to make sure that we know that Biden will be the next president, while covering up—or glossing over—anything that could prove this to be false. And here's what I think:

Humpty Dumpty was pushed off the wall.

No matter who wins,
Humpty Dumpty will have a great fall.

At this point I don't really care if it goes for Trump or for Biden. Well, I do care, but I care more about this:

No matter who you want to win the election, what happens next?
Do we weep and wail and gnash our teeth because it didn't go our way?
Do we spend the next four years slandering the president because we don't like him?
Or slandering the former president because we didn't like him?
Or because the news tells us to?
Is it going to be civil war? Brother killing brother because we are on "opposite sides"?
We are not! 

I hope we are better than this.

2020 Wish List

Well! I almost made a political post because I can hardly stand all the hoo-hah, but that might put me on Santa's naughty list. Surely posting my wish list today is much less naughty than putting more fire under the already boiling political pot. Also it's less stressful.

So here it is...

Loralee's Fancy Christmas 2020 Wish List:

The first thing I want is some New Dishes.

These dishes (2 to 3 sets). Yes, they are just the cheap ones Walmart sells to college students, but they are simple, and they match the ones I already have. (We have broken our dishes at about a rate of six per year since we moved into our house. I'm sure that we broke fewer dishes when my kids were little. Hm. Why is that?)

New Silverware. Well, not silver. Flatware—stainless steel (18/8 to 18/10) service for twelve to twenty. Although I don't know what design I want, so maybe a $200 gift certificate to Bed, Bath & Beyond would be better.

Lumber to build the buffet I want in the dining room—I've already got a design in mind. Hm. and some to build the drawers for my living room bookshelf. Although in this case a $100 Lowes gift certificate might do better.

Hmmm. I'm really stretching here. I suppose if you really want some ideas you can look at some of my previous years' lists. (2019, 2018, 2017). The truth is, I haven't really given it much thought; I'm having a hard time getting excited for the holidays this year. Maybe when Thanksgiving rolls around I'll feel it more.

I do  have a big project that I want to do for my family, and it's been pretty exciting to plan it, but that would require.. a lot more cash than I have right now. :-( 

So, for now, my biggest wish is that we will all have a fantastic holiday season. I am looking forward to spending some good, fun times with my family—that is always the best!

To my brother, Paul, who turned out to be a great guy

Paul and Melanie and me. And the dog. If I am two years old here, Melanie is seven and Paul is eight.

When I was little my next two older siblings took it upon themselves to really torment me. Melanie had been the only girl in the family (after five boys) for five years. She may have gotten a fair amount of attention in our family. And then I had to come along and spoil everything—not just a new baby in the house, but a new girl baby! So maybe Melanie had some excuse. A little.

There was no excuse for Paul. Yet those two ganged up on me when it came to teasing, or to making sure all of the games always went in their favor (and, face it; they were five and six years older than me; they had to be really good at this), or just excluding me from their games altogether. And while I mostly felt sad about Melanie—well, sadness alternating with frustration—I don't remember fighting with her. (She might have a different story to tell.) But I do remember fighting back with Paul at least twice.

First, I have an example of the utter meanness of Paul...because I am petty like that. 😉

Aside from the every-day annoyances I listed before, there was one day when these two older siblings told me I had to clean my whole bedroom...by myself! (This in itself seemed like the height of cruelty to a little girl.) So I worked on it. Every now and then I'd call them in to see how clean the room was, but every time they pointed out something else that I had to do—which I did, although not happily and probably not without some murmuring. Finally the room was really, really clean. I called them back in for one last time, and Paul dumped the contents of the laundry hamper in the middle of the floor and told me I wasn't finished; the room was still messy. Oooh! I hated Paul!

(By the way, I really am over that now.)

Anyway, I "fought back" with Paul at least twice that I can remember.

Paul looked like this when these stories took place. So he was between...what? Ten to twelve? Maybe thirteen? Which made me four to seven years old.

The first time, he was holding me in his lap in my mom's rocking chair. I don't know why, but given my reaction, I wonder if he was restraining me for some reason. Anyway, I don't remember what I was mad about, but I tweaked his nose, he let go of me, and I ran out the front door. I just knew there would be terrible repercussions, but when he didn't chase after me I just had to go back into the house and see what was up. And there was Paul, in the rocking chair, with a bloody nose! He told me that I was going to be in big trouble, but I don't think anything more came of that incident.

I recollected my second "fight" with Paul a few nights ago...well, early one morning. I was laying there in my bed, trying to get warm enough to fall back asleep after being up and about the house in the wee, small hours of the night. And as I lay there this little memory popped into my head and struck me as particularly funny. I was trying not to giggle...to the point of almost holding my breath, when finally it just had to escape, and I burst out laughing! So then I ended up having to tell Bruce about my naughtiness, which was this:

I don't remember why, but once again I was really mad at Paul. So I drew a picture of a poop ( my five...maybe six-year-old's rendering of what I thought of my big brother...) and left it on his pillow. Ha! I sure showed him! 

Once again he told me how bad I was, and that I was going to get in a lot of trouble for that, and then nothing more came of it.

Well, we were pretty little then. When Paul and Melanie got to be teenagers they had a group of friends their age and didn't pay enough attention to me to torment me any more.

My cousin, Nolan, on the back left; Paul is next to him. Then me, Melanie, and our little sister, Denise, in front. I was eleven and had friends of my own, and Paul and Melanie were teenagers; peace reigned.

By the time I got to be a teenager Paul and Melanie and I were all friends. In fact, after Melanie got married, Paul and I were best friends—at least he was mine. When I went away to school at USU, he went there too. We hung out together so much that people thought we were boyfriend and girlfriend.

Paul and me, picnicking, on one of our many road-trips to and from USU. (Man! We were young and good-looking!)

We hung out together a lot; I wrote to him on his mission; we were pals. 

Melanie and Paul with our parents
about five years ago.

Now we're all married with families of our own. I live in Vernal, Utah; Paul lives in American Samoa. We don't see each other, or talk to each other much. But Paul really is a great guy!

This is the most recent picture I have of Paul,
with—most of—his family.
(I stole it from facebook. His daughter, Lita (center) was Miss American Samoa when this picture was taken. His oldest son, Paulo, is living in Utah with his wife Ashlee and their children.)

I love you, Paul!