Happy Turkey Day!

I love Thanksgiving because it is a holiday centered around food and family, two things that are of utmost importance to me.
— Marcus Samuelsson

A thankful heart is not only the greatest virtue, but the parent of all the other virtues.
— Cicero

The funny thing about Thanksgiving, or any big meal, is that you spend 12 hours shopping for it then go home and cook, chop, braise and blanch. Then it’s gone in 20 minutes and everybody lies around sort of in a sugar coma and then it takes 4 hours to clean it up.
— Ted Allen

If you live in Canada, today is Thanksgiving. If you live south of the border then today is named after that guy that didn’t really discover America. LOL But either way, today is a holiday.

We had our big turkey dinner yesterday, but the prep work started Saturday. I did the turnips, carrots, broccoli, and sweet potatoes, which were easy to store in the fridge in foil containers that could got into the oven when the turkey came out.

This year’s turkey was a Butterball, which I’ve never tried before. Normally I go for one of the cheaper utility turkeys, but I guess I waited too long or something (no room in the freezer for one) and it took me three stores before I found one. Walmart only had little ones (although I heard later they got some big ones in), No Frills had none! What kind of grocery store doesn’t have an abundance of turkeys at Thanskgiving? I finally found a large, unstuffed, turkey of considerable size at Metro. It was a little pricey, but worth the effort.

And instead of green beans (I’m still kind of beaned out from the explosion of them during the summer) I decided to try peas. Fresh peas. Which foamed when I cooked them, so I rinsed them before putting them in their designated container, and they smelled really off – how can fresh peas go off? So, not wanting anyone to be sick from my dinner, I sent the hubby off to the store for some frozen ones. LOL

Today I can bask in the glory of another holiday dinner done right. The house is clean, more or less, and the leftovers all fit in the fridge. All I have left to do today is the lemon cheesecake for the daughter’s birthday tomorrow.

Happy holidays, wherever you are!

Mimosa Monday

mimosa ~ a mixed drink consisting of champagne and orange juice

Happy Canada Day to all my fellow Canadians who have the day off today! And to all my American friends – sucks to be you! You have to wait until next weekend for your holiday. LOL

Traditionally this is the true start of the summer, complete with sunscreen and swimming, parades and barbeques. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, our town hosts an annual arts and crafts fair we call the Waterfront Festival, which draws a large number of people to our small town, swelling the population and mucking up the traffic.

A great deal of the beach was still under water, but Thursday they brought in the heavy earth movers and cleaned up as best they could. I have not been down there yet, but I’m assuming they got the job done.

Not to be out done in the barbeque department, we had one on Saturday for some of the husband’s family that came down from Ottawa. It went very well, if I do say so myself. Everyone seemed to enjoy the food and there were no leftovers – be still my heart! Normally I overestimate the food.

The cousins all get along famously, especially the two little ones. Together with Grampy/Uncle Steve they christened the new pool. The granddaughter especially enjoyed the pool – she’s been dying to get in there since they took down the old one. And she’s absolutely fearless in the water – must be the Aquarius in her.

I don't know how well you can see it, but the grandbaby’s face matches the unikitty on her dress.

Now excuse me while I go sit on the deck with my feet up and have a mimosa.

Magirics Monday

magirics ~ art of cookery

A very happy Memorial Day to my U.S. friends. Even though we had our holiday weekend last weekend, I’m still a little jealous that you guys get today off and we don’t. Am I the only one who thinks that all weekends should be three days?

I had a productive weekend, although not in the way I expected. I had planned on buying the bedding plants for the gardens on Friday and then spending a good chunk of my time gardening.

However, Friday was pretty wet, and it was supposed to rain off and on for the rest of the weekend, so I didn`t get my plants Friday evening. Wouldn`t you know that although Saturday started drizzly, by the afternoon things were drying up nicely. And Sunday was so nice I had the deck door open.

But I had no plants to plant, so instead I started working on a christening gown a friend is having me make for her grandson. No pattern, just a couple of pictures to go by. And she ripped out the sleeves from her mother`s wedding gown and could I please somehow include these in the gown? Along with dress sleeves, she gave me some lovely satin material and yards and yards of satin ribbon. Challenge accepted.

Once the sleeves were ripped apart and ironed flat, I had two medium length, oddly wedge shaped pieces of material. A snip here and a snip there gave me two more uniformly wedge shapes. Although they would have been long enough for an ordinary dress, this is a christening gown. So I sewed a 10 inch piece of satin to the bottom of each panel, then cut a piece the entire length for a center panel.

This is where I’d normally post a picture, but despite spending the bulk of my weekend on it, it’s not done yet. I still have the hand sewing - hem, basting down the bodice lining, and buttons - to go. I repurposed the row of buttons and corresponding loops from one of the sleeves for the closure at the back. In retrospect, although it was a nice idea to make further use of the sleeves, eleven buttons is a lot of buttons.

Because the gown is for a baby boy, I didn’t want to make it too froofy, and my friend requested that it be plain, so I used the satin ribbon to trim it at the top and bottom. No bows or flowers. It’s actually turning out better than I expected, I just hope it fits. :-D

Sunday the daughter invited me to go to lunch with them so I took a break from the sewing long enough to celebrate burger day with a Perseus burger from Olympus Burgers. This is from their secret menu, which can only be accessed online - fresh beef patty, crunchy onion rings, aged white cheddar cheese, Olympus bbq sauce, lettuce, tomato.

As part as an art awareness program, there was a gentleman dressed as a Canada goose lurking around and the granddaughter turned out to not be a fan.

Here’s a picture of her hiding behind her milkshake. It was actually a friend of the daughter’s in the goose suit, and it was kind of amusing the way the granddaughter avoided him. She didn’t cry or make a fuss, she just pointedly wouldn’t look at him. It was like, “If I don’t look at him then he can’t hurt me.”

The weather forecast for the week ahead is so up and down I have no idea what to expect, but the only plans I have, other than finishing the christening gown, is for writing, so in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t really matter.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. ;-)

Myasthenia Monday

myasthenia ~ muscular weakness or debility

It’s the 24th of May
The Queen’s birthday
And if we don’t get a holiday
We’ll all run away

Happy Victoria Day to all my fellow Canadians. I’d wish you Yanks a happy holiday too, but yours isn’t until next weekend. You’d think someone, somewhere, would sync these two holidays up.

Anyway, as per usual when we have a holiday Monday, I kind of forgot that it’s actually Monday and I should have had a blog post up already. Oops! But I’m here now, and that’s what matters, right?

I have to admit, weather-wise this was a waste of a weekend. Saturday was okay, a little on the cool side but at least the sun was mostly out. Yesterday was also cool and rainy to boot. Today looks to be more of the same. Although the weather network, and we all know how accurate they are, is saying that it’s supposed to be sunny and warm this afternoon. I’m not breaking out the sun screen until I actually see the sun.

Traditionally, this is the weekend people open up their cottages and take care of their gardens. We usually try and get our bedding plants in over the holiday, but it’s been such a cold, wet spring that our gardens aren’t ready yet. Hubby spent Saturday uncovering the roses and cleaning out the pond, but the rest of the weekend has been too wet to work outside.

As for myself... I bought three sweet potato vines to go in an indoor planter where I planted the sweet potato I’d been growing in water (the one that promptly died once was in dirt). The idea is to have them grow up a small trellis to block the cats from getting at the other plants in my dining room. And I found a perfect planter for my kitchen window sill for my two English ivies (the ones I’d bought originally to replace the sweet potato before discovering they’re toxic to cats).

And I really have to show you the fairy garden I created from all the great stuff the daughter and granddaughter gave me:

Isn't it cute? And the best part is, the cats haven’t touched the artificial moss! I had so much fun doing it, I immediately wanted to do another. And then I recalled my gnome garden. A couple of years ago, I turned a large aquarium into a terrarium.

Doesn’t it look lovely? It was so green and pretty ... for such a short time. It sits on a bookcase in the upstairs hallway and gets pretty much no light, and is real easy to overlook when it comes to watering the plants. It didn’t take long for it to end up looking like this:

It never occurred to me to use fake plants in it - you’d never know the moss in the fairy garden isn’t real, why not use some in the gnome garden? So I made a trip to the dollar store to see what they had in the way of “stuff” for my garden (which admittedly wasn’t much), then I cleaned all the dead foliage out, broke up the hard dirt, and went to town. And this is what the gnome habitat looks like now:

Admittedly it’s not quite as pretty as the original with the live plants. It could use a few more mushrooms, but the white rocks glow in the dark and are supposed to mimic a stream. It’ll do until I get to make a trip to the craft store.

Have a happy holiday!