Little update...

4 days and 1 skein of yarn later... Joel's scarf is half way done. :) My hands HURT. The second half will commence after a few days rest... as long as I can talk myself into holding off. :)

Happy Thanksgiving!!!

Well, it's all over, and I am feeling very happy. Yesterday was a long, but very good day. We spent most of the day cleaning up the house, then cooking, and finally enjoying an enormous bounty. It was really great. I love playing hostess. I love seeing people having a good time. And I LOVE hearing the oohs and aaahs about my food! Hee hee! It's great! So, here is a picture run down of the day:

DS and KB came over pretty early in the day to start cooking. Primary concern for the lot of them was getting the bird in the oven. I concerned myself with other things. In the following series of pictures we see DS taking a break from food prep to knit (yup, she's the one that got me started, and we are both obsessed now!), while I work on mushrooms for my mushroom gravy and our "foreman" Joel plays cards.
So, here are the three of us:

And here is a closer shot of me and DS. Notice that DS is mostly shaking her head or rolling her eyes at Joel the foreman.

KB was very impressed with the massive amounts of mushies I cut up so he kept taking pictures!

And here is the whole lot of em. They were joined by oil, herbs, milk, flour and sour cream in the pan to create what was, if I don't say so myself, the best gravy I have ever made. :)

Meanwhile, Joel was feeling inferior at his lack of doing anything useful, and tried to act like a thug. Upon seeing the picture he exclaimed, "I'm not looking very thug." I answered, "That's because you are NOT very thug." Ah, but that is why I love him.

KB took a break to take all those pictures, but before that, he was elbow deep in a bird. I didn't try any, but from what I hear the combined forces of KB and DS created a masterpiece bird that was juicy and delicious.

Eventually the rest of the Smedes joined us and as you can see were VERY EXCITED for dinner to be served. (Notice that Matiss does not look at all like Matiss in this picture.)

Now began the mad dashing involved in trying to get all the food onto the table hot when you only have one small oven with only one rack in it (meaning, it could not be used for warming.)

Quick, take the corn!

And the gravy! Take the gravy!

Very important! Jem gets the wine.

Helping out in the end, Joel gets food on the table. His other very serious contribution to the meal was opening the tins of Oceanspray cranberry jelly. You know, the kind that slurps out of the can, and then stays in exactly the same form until you cut it? Yummy!!!

As is pretty normal, dinner took longer than expected to get on the table, and the little ones just couldn't wait any longer. Since they only ate bread and mashed potatoes anyway, Joel served em up while the rest of us got the rest of the food done and warmed up.

And finally, KB carves the bird while the rest of us chomp at the bit to eat. (DS and three more guests who arrived minutes later are unfortunately not in this photo.) Unfortunately because we were all SO hungry, we ate in about 5 minutes flat and then all complained of painfully full bellies. But, the food was great!

After the formal eating in the dining room we had pumpkin pie, carrot cake and brownies all top with whipped cream or ice cream in the living room. By 10:30, or 11 (or what time did you guys leave anyway?) the kids were running wild, desepratly in need of sleep. The adults were all near comatose on the couches or floor. We sent everyone off with leftovers and kept a bunch for ourselves too. Joel and I stepped up the challenge and had the whole house cleaned up, all dishes washed and put away by midnight. It felt great to go to bed with a clean kitchen.

Today, as per my plan I have been on the couch watching bad tv and knitting. My hands kind of hurt (probably a combined effort from knitting and mushroom chopping), but otherwise I have no complaints. Pretty soon it might be dinner time, and all I'll do it warm up some leftovers. Ah...the joys. :)

I hope that wherever you were, and whenever you got to celebrate that you enjoyed your Thanksgiving as much as I did. See you next year! :)

Look what I can do!

No, my name is not Stuart, and I'm not going to do a little dance for you... but, look at what I can do!!! :)


Tonight I had my very first knitting lesson. I have wanted to learn how to knit for a long time actually, and I finally found the right friend to teach me. My friend Diana is being taught by her friend Ilze, so...I joined in the fun, and here we are learning together.

I picked out the yarn today after school with Joel in mind. When I got home and showed him what already existed of his scarf, he was quite pleased. He wasn't all THAT impressed...come on, I will never compare to his amazing mother in this respect! But, it's a new skill for me, and one I have to say I am excited about. I already feel quite confident in what I am doing, and since coming home from Diana's tonight have already fixed one mess up by myself. :) Luckily, since it's the first scarf I am ever making him, he HAS to like it! :)

I'll post a picture of the finished product whenever it appears... hopefully before the end of winter since it's a scarf for Joel...but then again, we have about 5 more months of winter...so I think I have time!!!

Oh, and yes, you might have noticed the paw in the picture. I got one without a paw, but, frankly, since it seems his paws will be around my knitting pretty consistently, I figured I would just go ahead and put in the picture with Bumbi's paw. No, he's not helping. :)

Seriously

Wouldn't life just be better if this was me?:See how the bear is smiling? That is because it's cold and yucky outside and the bear is warm and fat and sleeping through it all. Please let me come back as a bear in my next life...

That said, I want to stay awake through the weekend. In America my relatives will be celebrating a day of thanks on Thursday. I SO wish I could be at my uncle M and aunt L's house for dinner!!! Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday ever. So not because of the fake story about pilgrims and natives (that soooo didn't happen the way they would like us to believe!)....but because I just LOVE the idea of a whole day to give thanks. A day to get together with family and friends, cook together, laugh together, talk, share in life...just BE together! And, all you have to do is eat the bestest foods ever (mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce, vegetable casseroles...oh my!) and you don't have to worry about the pressure of presents. It's the most immaterial holiday there is in my opinion, which makes it the best. I even like Thanksgiving better than my birthday (except that on my birthday Joel takes me to Venice, and for Thanksgiving we're staying home...Venice would be better!).

Anyway... since we all have to work on Thursday we will celebrate Thanksgiving on Saturday. I will start cooking Friday night (we'll see how a pumpkin pie turns out with Latvian pumpkin), and great friends DS and KB will come over early afternoon Saturday to preside over the bird funeral, while I prepare most of the rest of the feast. Joel's family will come for dinner as well bringing even more goodies (very important ones at that...the sweet potatoes!). Dinner will hopefully take hours, the kids will be crazy with boredom trying to drag adults away from the table (and let's be honest, they'll succeed in pulling Joel away for sure), and hopefully all will go home pants unbuttoned. :) Most who know me know that I do not endorse binges these days, but for Thanksgiving I make an exception. Bring it on.

I hope that those of you celebrating on Thursday have a wonderful day full of peace, love and community. To those of you who don't celebrate this day, I invite you to give thanks anyway for all the wonderful people and experiences you have in your life. To those of you coming over on Saturday...bring your appetites!

I've been told it's time to post again...

It's not that I don't have anything to say. Or maybe it is. More likely, it's that I don't really have anything nice to say, and my mom always told me to keep it shut if I didn't. So I haven't blogged in a while.

What's been going on you might wonder? Why haven't I got anything nice to say? Well, it's entered that time of year again that is a challenge for me no matter what way you slice it. It's cold, and it's dark. The leaves are gone. It's not yet snowy (thankfully), but it's not dry either, which means it's rainy. It's that time of year when you just want to warm up by curling up with a mug of hot chocolate, or mulled wine and read a book, or watch movies. When feeling satisfied means eating warm, rich, thick foods. When sleeping 24 hours a day doesn't sound like a bad idea (didn't I say once before that I should have been a bear?!? Hibernation seems like the smartest idea I have ever heard!)

All of this wouldn't be so bad if I wasn't a girl (a grrl? A woman? A womyn?) that dealt with so much other stuff. Eating and sleeping curled up 24 hours a day would be great if it didn't pack on more pounds than my average life already does. Doing all that would be nice if I didn't have to go to work. When it comes down to it, I just don't know how to positively deal with this weather.

I would REALLY like it if someone that knows me really well (like someone who knew me before I moved overseas) would leave a comment vouching for the fact that I have always hated winter (Mom??? Every year when it was Christmas time and time to get together with your relatives, everyone always wanted to meet in Colorado to go skiing, right? Except who? ME! Where did I want to go? California!!! Come on, back me up!!!).

Joel thinks winter is cool. He thinks it's neat. He finds it enjoyable. I say it's because he grew up in Brisbane where it never got below 15C, and he's had enough warmth and sunshine to get him through a few horrible Latvian winters. When my younger brother (whom I owe a huge apology for forgetting his varda diena! Sorry MDP!) was looking at universities, he specifically searched for one in a warm climate, where sunny days exceeded cloudy ones...and he only ever lived in Michigan. Come try Latvia! Michigan winters are enough to depress people, and that is where I spent most of my first 23 years. Then I got two years reprieve in Shanghai, and now I'm here. All I want is a place where the sun shines more than it doesn't. Where summer is enjoyable not because it is so short that you better not blink or even think about not enjoying a moment of it because it'll be gone if you do or don't, but because it just is. Or where, even if I do have to deal with some cold weather and some snow or something, at least it is over in like 4 months, instead of lasting more than half the year. Is it so much to ask? Apparently it is.

There you go...are you feeling glum yet? Or happy that you don't live where I do? Well, in an effort to alleviate some weight, some excess baggage from my life, I finally decided to clean out my closet. Here is what I got rid of:

Now what you need to know is that most of the clothes in those three large garbage bags have not been worn in at least two years. This is only my third year living in Latvia, which means, you guessed it, many of them come to Latvia from China or America. And the reason they haven't been worn? Because too many potatoes and beer don't do a girl good, and they don't fit. They didn't fit when I got here, and more potatoes and depressing winters have only led my body further away from ever fitting into them again.

One might wonder, why have I held onto SO MANY clothes for such a long time? Why have I moved these clothes from apartment to apartment the 5 times I have moved in Riga? Well, I tell you what, it's hard to admit that you might never be a certain size again. It's hard to give up the trousers that made you feel like a million bucks when you fit into them. It's really hard to know that so much money has been spent on clothes that didn't get to wear out, because you just got too big for them...and I'm not talking growing taller.

Today is a sad day as those three bags stare me in the face. I'm trying not to feel like I have given up on ever being fit again. But I know that opening my closet and seeing it so full of clothes that don't fit was only depressing me more than this weather already is. So...out with the old. Hopefully as we approach the new year I'll be in with something new...maybe something better... one can only hope, something smaller.

Speaking of small things. There are lots of good things that come in small-ish packages. This big lug of a cat is one of em.

Bumbulis is an ever present joy in my life. Did I ever write the story of how I almost lost him? It was long and complicated, and for a while we didn't even really know what happened...but turns out somehow he got locked out on the balcony, and he managed to jump or fall off our 4th storey balcony on to the concrete below. Luckily he must have landed mostly on his feet, because he suffered only a large scrape across his face (which took off quite a bit of fur and some whiskers) and a slightly broken lip. But he didn't break any bones or teeth or anything. That was lucky. I'm pretty sure the lady who cleans up around our apartment building saw him fall, and let him back into the building. Although my neighbor almost chased him away, when I got up that morning (it was a Sunday) I heard him outside the front door and let him back in. The poor guy was beat up good...as you would be after falling 4 storeys! He barely moved for the next two days, and I worried a lot about him, but in the end he nursed himself back to health and he is fine now.

His favorite things to do are run around the house like a total loon, swipe at Joel, attack the dooner, sleep on my chest, sleep between Joel and me, and tear holes in his food bag if he decides he's not being fed often enough. The little pig.

But, who can resist a face like this?

That's it from me today. Let's end on a cute note. :)