Four days of thankfulness

I love four day weekends. Love them. I wish there was a way to just have a life that consisted of one four day weekend after another. Though I think that might be called unemployment. I hear the pay for that isn't great.

The feeling of freedom when I got home on Wednesday was indescribable. It just bubbled up with giddiness akin to the last day of school, sometime in my elementary years. I didn't even mind the drive home, which, thanks to some foresight on Tim's part allowing us to leave at 2, really wasn't awful. I think it only took about ten minutes longer than average. For this area on a holiday in the rain that's just simply unheard of. It started off the weekend on just the right note.

Wednesday evening I decided to try and get some things made for the meal that either would really benefit from chilling overnight or that would at least not be damaged by chilling overnight. So I made the cranberry salad (yum!) and the gingerbread-pumpkin trifle (eh - too much gingerbread. If you like gingerbread, you would probably enjoy this, but I'm not a huge gingerbread person to start out with) and the cornbread for the dressing and then I prepped the greenbeans so I just had to toss them in a pot when it was time. That took probably three hours, all told, but it helped so much on Thursday.

Thanksgiving morning, mom, dad, sis and her hubs showed up at 8:30 for waffles. Somewhere along the line we developed a tradition of early morning waffles and vanilla sauce on every holiday. (They've always been a family tradition, but not one necessarily tied to a holiday.) I only made one batch of waffles so as not to start the day completely stuffed to the gunnels. That seemed to be just right and we had neither waffle nor sauce left over. Once breakfast cleanup was finished, it was time to pop the rib roast in the oven and put the chicken on to boil.

The chicken recipe had me curious. It was meant to be a roasted chicken, but you boiled it for 2 hours first. So I did as instructed and then set the pieces on top of the dressing mixture (it was pieces because it fell apart when I tried to pull it out of the pot - definitely tender) and then baked the conglomeration for 45 minutes. Wow that chicken was tasty. The baking helped crisp up the skin and take the stewed texture out of the meat, but it was still amazingly tender and juicy. And the dressing was the best I'd ever made, I think. (Even my brother-in-law, who is normally a StoveTop or nothing kind of guy really liked it.)

All in all, thanks to the prep on Wednesday night and my sister's help on Thursday, it was one of the least hectic Thanksgiving meal preparations ever. And that is a good thing.

Tim's family showed up just as we were dishing things into serving dishes. My sister's friend never did show up or call - so we're hoping she found a better offer for her Thanksgiving meal. Tim's mom wasn't well, so they left shortly after the meal - before dessert. No one actually felt like dessert until supper time, so we had dessert with a little graze of left overs as desired for supper. Very laid back. The boys spent the afternoon killing things in the basement (computer games) and the girls read and half-watched the marathon of The Closer. (Amusingly I actually enjoyed the show - I had watched an episode or two when it first started and wrinkled my nose. Now I may have to give it another chance as it's actually kind of interesting. As I'm about ready to give up on House and The Amazing Race, I may have some room in my TV schedule, so I'll have to see what happens. I know it's an off-season show.)

Friday morning we put up our new Christmas tree. It's fake - but it looks better than the real one we bought last year. I'm very pleased. Plus, it's pre-lit and while in future years we may string some more lights on it, for this year I think it's really quite well decorated and I will toss my White House ornaments up and maybe some colored balls and call it done. I want a more tidy look this year - the last few years have been so jumbled and hodgepodge that I'm hankering for order. We had planned to try to get the outside lights up, but, well, homework was calling and we figured it was better to work first and play later.

As it turned out, this was definitely the right order for Tim as he spent the next two days at work putting out fires, coming home at 1am on Saturday and 3am on Sunday. Nice restful vacation for him, I know.

Friday was also the day for measuring how much water our little camel-dog has been sucking down. Turns out this number is somewhere right around 11 cups a day. Saturday, as I labored along with my paper (finally knocking out a draft, though there appear to be some significant holes in it that I need to fix) I also had to monitor the water situation. Sunday after church I intended to get working on my next paper, but ultimately decided that I didn't have the energy, so I read two books and watched TV instead.

In all a good weekend, though I'm already ready for another just like it.