Elf Yourself

Jeff's secretary made this for his group today (he's second from the right). It's hilarious! You can go make one for yourself here.

The rest of the holiday weekend

I spent Saturday afternoon cleaning up the living room and dining room and I put out all our holiday decorations, with the exception of the Christmas tree. I really love decorating for Christmas. I know I suck at it compared to some people who put out fresh greens and go all out, but I think our stuff is cute, so there. :P We have some neat decorations that we brought back from the Christmas markets in Germany that we really enjoy seeing every year.

Saturday night, we watched the disastrous KU-MU football game. Oh well, it was bound to happen. We still managed to have the best season in KU football history this year. I’m kind of proud of our team for that. I am also relieved that I no longer have to keep track of two sports at once. We can focus on basketball season now!

Sunday we went to church, then spent the afternoon cleaning our bedroom and moving the furniture in there in preparation for our soon to arrive piano! Yay! I’m really excited to finally get to play again. I hope it gets here this week, but I don’t know for sure when it will.

We finished out the holiday weekend by setting up our Christmas tree and decorating it together. This year, we decided to put a moratorium on ugly hand me down Christmas ornaments and only put up the ones we like. It’s a little sparse, but it works for us.

Thanksgiving at the Grandparents'

We spent a relaxing Thanksgiving holiday at my grandparent’s house in Manhattan this year. I would really have rather stayed home for a holiday with just Jeff and the pups, but my grandparents had been expressing a desire to see their grandkids for Thanksgiving for some time, and as my sister and brothers already had plans, it fell to us to go see them. (I’m sure you’re all familiar with these command performances.) We drove up on Thursday morning, and about an hour and a half into the drive, Fang started to pant and tremble. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him, so we rolled the windows down to try and cool him off a bit, and I held him for a while to soothe him, but he didn’t seem to get any better. We finally figured out what was wrong when he peed all over his pillow in the back seat of my car. Poor little guy. I still don’t know what was wrong because he’s ridden for three hours at a time many times before. We pulled over in the middle of nowhere with 30 degree temps and a Kansas wind to clean everything up and Errol managed to pick up a bunch of stickers in his fur while playing at the side of the road. I was plucking them off him the rest of the drive. Sigh. We finally arrived at my grandparent’s house and settled in for a nice lunch of spaghetti. We spent the afternoon chatting and playing the piano and playing Scrabble while dinner cooked (prime rib roast, yum!). We watched The Incredibles on television after dinner, which I think is a fun movie. It turned out to be a pretty nice day. We spent Friday there, too, (out for a big breakfast, more piano, more Scrabble, a walk for the dogs, wine hunting in Manhattan (a total disaster) and even more cooking and eating) and then came back home Saturday morning. We got a couple inches of snow overnight Friday, and woke up to a pretty winter scene. It melted off the roads pretty quickly, so there was no trouble driving back home.

Pork Chops with Camembert Sauce

This is beyond yummy and super rich. We like to have a nice acidic German Riesling or Champagne with it for dinner. We soak up the extra sauce with some plain rice.

2-4 pork chops, pork fillets, whatever pork you want
1 tbsp butter
3 tbsp dry white wine
1/2 to 3/4 cup heavy whipping cream or creme fraiche
1 tbsp chopped fresh mixed herbs such as marjoram, sage and thyme
1/2 wheel Camembert cheese (4 oz), rind removed, sliced
1 1/2 tsp Dijon mustard
freshly ground black pepper
fresh parsley, to garnish

1. Melt the butter in a heavy pan over medium-high heat until it begins to brown, then add the meat. Cook for 5 minutes, or until just cooked through and the meat is springy when pressed. Transfer to a warm dish and cover to keep warm.



2. Add the wine and bring to the boil, scraping the base of the pan. Stir in the cream and the herbs and bring back to the boil.



3. Add the cheese and mustard and any accumulated juices from the meat. Add a little more cream if needed and adjust the seasoning. Serve the pork with the sauce and garnish with parsley.

Happy Birthday to Me

Jeff got me a really neat birthday present this year. It's a Full Moon Maple Leaf Lines shadowbox from an artist named Booker Morey. He takes real tree leaves of all different varieties and skeletonizes them and then paints them and mounts them in shadowbox frames or coasters. I first saw these on our trip out to Colorado last fall, and I thought they were really cool and really pretty. I really wanted to buy one when we were out there, but because we always feel the need to comparison shop prices we ended up not getting one then, but I kind of wished we had all year, and whenever we'd talk about what we were going to put on the one bare wall in our bedroom, I'd joke about how that's where my Leaf Lines would go. Jeff actually contacted the artist a while ago to get more information on the different leaves and he ended up commissioning one through this gallery for me for my birthday. It's a 24"x36" one, and it looks really cool on our bedroom wall. I kind of lay in bed at night and gaze at it. LOL Unfortunately, it's impossible to take good pictures of the thing without removing the glass from the front of it, which I won't do until it's time to clean it in a couple of years. Until then, you'll have to deal with these.

Experimental Cooking

You know those little fried wonton pieces that you get with your soup when you buy takeout Chinese? We never eat ours. But a few days ago, I kind of started to munch on them after dinner, and I was thinking how good they'd be with some chocolate and some powdered sugar on them. So here you go, wonton desserting a la House of Boy and Girl. Melt some dark chocolate with some brandy (just a touch, or use butter or cream if you don't want the alcohol), drizzle over the wontons, dust with powdered sugar, and serve with some vanilla bean ice cream. This would probably be even better with crumbled up fortune cookies. Yum, if you're into that sort of thing...

Bummer of a day

Today wasn't the funnest. I was feeling kind of under the weather all day, nothing was going right for anyone at work today, and we were all a bit run down. We closed the sale of my mom's house today, so I started feeling this sense of loss of my childhood home, and was reminded that I'd never again spend time with my family or with my mom there. Then on the way home from work, I got stuck behind a series of blue Honda CR-Vs, which is the car my mom drove. Finally, when I got home and went to get the mail, I realized that the registered mail package that Jeff had stopped to get at the post office on the way home was most likely my mother's ashes being returned from KU Med. So, I had a nice big cry while I waited for him to get home.

I am really happy that everything went smoothly with the sale of the house, but it still kind of sucks to see it go. We actually got a full price offer on the house less than 24 hours after we put it on the market. It's going to a young couple from Hays. Our realtor was awesome (she was our neighbor when we were kids), and my aunt and uncle handled all the paperwork and negotiation during the selling process.

So now it's all over and done. There's nothing left to do but help my siblings figure out their taxes next year. I'm relieved that all my tasks are done, but now there's nothing to hide behind or to keep busy with to push the grieving process away. I guess the next thing to do is figure out what to do with mom's ashes. She didn't have any specific requests for what we do with them. I'm thinking we'll gather together and scatter them at her church with friends and family in Hays. It's where she spent most of her time and energy outside our home.

Sorry for the morose post, but it can't all be food and puppies and Islamic Jihad... haha. :)

You Are Everything

I so cannot get this song out of my head!

You Are Everything by Matthew West

It's even inspired me to go piano shopping so I can start playing at home again!

Jeff is complaining because I keep playing it over and over and over and over and over and it's unabated and there are repeat performances and it keeps playing again and again and again... LOL

Vocabular Rice

I found a cool website today. Test your vocabulary, and feed the world:

FreeRice

It's pretty fun!