Holiday Review

We had a lovely, restful New Year. To know why restful was lovely, you need a sense of our holiday season.

(A new house provides a new setting for your old decorations, so they can look both familar and fresh)

Okay, the first part of the season was the normal holiday craziness. For instance, we invited a couple of couples over for Thanksgiving. This is a first in our married life--we've always been the guests. We're pretty good at being guests. This time we tackled the turkey.

The smallest turkey I found was a 13-pounder. We could've gone for just a turkey breast (I realize now), but we like the dark meat best anyway. We decided to brine it, but even in our largest bowl, major portions of bird stuck out. So we invested in a stock pot (and shoot, since we were getting specialized kitchen equipment, we also got an electric knife. Power tools for the kitchen. Can you tell Uchenna was the driving force behind these purchases?). The next step, of course, was finding a place for the big pot in our fridge, along with all the other feast food. It took some rearranging, including removing the fruit and vegetable drawers, but we made it fit.

(The big pot is resting on the floor of the fridge. Turkey + brine = too heavy for fridge shelves.)

I think it took another week to eat all that food. Uchenna doesn't want to see any more turkey, not even hidden in tetrazinni, until at least next year. At least.

For another first, we put up Christmas lights outside our house. This turned out to a project. To prepare, I bought lights and an outdoor timer socket to plug them into. Pretty snazzy.

So the first Saturday in December we got up bright and early to create our masterpiece in lights. As soon as we walked outside we realized why everyone on our block had put up their lights the week before. Okay, they probably hadn't known that while Thanksgiving weekend was beautiful and balmy, the following Saturday would be grey, freezing, and WINDY. But that's how it was. We perservered.

(Turns out this random pipe sticking out goes to the sprinkler system. Not exactly insulated.)

(See on that short, fat bit of pipe pointing down to the right, the line along the top? That's a crack, that's not supposed to be there. We'll have to replace that nobbly thing before spring watering.)

Actually, the first thing we saw as we stepped out the door was water spraying everywhere.Did I mention it was freezing out? I mean that literally, because the water in our sprinkler system had frozen and burst its pipe. Turns out you have to shut off the water and drain the pipe BEFORE the first hard freeze. Just when we think we've got this homeowner-thing down, we get new opportunities for learning.

Anyway, after that, and discussing our different creative visions, we put the LED lights around the two little trees, and the traditional lights along the bushes (it seems the different kinds of lights have different color palattes). It was immediately apparant that we needed more lights, more extension cords, and--I think--about three trips to the store. We never did get the string of snowflake lights to attach to the brick arch. It was a long day, but we liked the result.

And finally (I don't mean finally for the holiday, just for this posting, which is getting out of hand), we went to the company's Christmas concert by Aaron Neville, which was a lot of fun, especially from our second-row seats.

(Our local Community Center, with a large and lovely auditorium. It reminds me of the auditorium at T.J. High, which you may recall was impressively large and professional-looking for a high school)

I think one of the best musical deals around is a hitman who hasn't brought out a hit for a while: they're seasoned, professional showmen, but they don't command an exorbitant ticket price in some huge arena. So the audience gets good music for a lower price in a more intimate setting. And since the company hosted, it was free for us. Even better. There were a few Christmas songs thrown in, but mostly this was a jazz concert. The saxaphonist (Aaron Neville's brother, apparantly) was especially awesome. So not a typical Christmas concert, but great fun.

Stay tuned for our next exciting episode, in which we take our Big Holiday Trip.