Family, Friends, Feasting, and Forced Labor

This Thanksgiving we drove to Richmond to celebrate the holiday with my family. We left as early as we could get packed up on Wednesday and, two cats in tow, made the 4 hour trip in reasonable time. We were out early enough to miss most of the horrible traffic, though it seemed that those on the road were trying to make up for that fact by driving like idiots. Once there, the cats all got along well (Diana took a few days to actually come out of our bedroom), but in the end everyone learned to play and sleep in the same room, if not exactly "together".

Wednesday night, Brandy came over and Erin got in to town and we opened up a package of beading supplies I had ordered. We went through some of my dad's mother's jewelry and restrung, repaired, and reused beads and components to make some up-to-date additions for all our jewelry boxes. My grandmother had gotten into beading before her passing, and there were even some great strings of "never been strung" gemstone beads that we shared around. It was very cool.

Thursday was rainy. Because Brandy had to work that afternoon and couldn't be there for dinner, we figured that was excuse enough to have 2 Thanksgiving feasts. I mean, what else are you supposed to do?! So we had a huge spread for Thanksgiving breakfast and repeated the process for dinner that night. :) It was great. Some friends of my mom and dad came over with their son and we gorged on all sorts of yumminess.

On Friday morning, for the first time in years, Brandy was able to join us for the annual American hajj to the mecca that is a shopping mall. It worked out even better because she recently moved to an apartment adjoining the shopping center of our choice. So we had a place to go back to and have breakfast, regroup, bandage our wounds and such. Very cool. We managed to get in and out of several stores on our lists and scored some GREAT deals. There's nothing like being drug out of bed at an ungodly hour by a screaming alarm clock and then driving through traffic and wading through brawls of soccer moms for the chance to wait in that far too long of a line with the holy grail that is that perfect Christmas gift (on sale for half price) to put me in the Christmas Season Mood. I like to think of it as doing my part to relive the trek of the Maji. It seems like it takes 2 years of traveling in a slow line, following the yonder star...or is that the light over the check out ringers' aisle? Either way, once the morning sleep gets out of my eyes and I have some good breakfast, I have acquired gifts that need to be wrapped. And the wrapping DOES put me in a good mood.

After the morning activities, we came back to my parents' house, at which point I laid down for a nap. That 2-year trek took a lot out of me. And all the stores seemed plum out of camels to help carry my load. After the nap, Brett and I headed outside to help my dad on the deck. My dad has been building a new deck on the back of their house for several months. The time it has taken is in no way indicitive of his motivation. He's just doing it by himself and it's hard to do even the simple tasks (measuring, screwing, etc) without someone else there to hold up the other end of the board. He had all the beams and posts secured, so we got out there that afternoon and got the joists for the upper level put up.

It was hard work, but we had a great time (and it didn't hurt to at least attempt to work off some of our two feasts from the day before). The next day we stayed later than we had originally anticipated so that we could get the lower level joists up as well. It has all the makings of a deck now!

Brett in the News

This morning I was talking on the phone and flipping through the online version of the local paper and who is on the front page? Brett. Last week he had been called by the RU PR people to have his picture taken at the campus studio, but never actually found out why. I guess now we know. I even think it's a nice picture. Unfortunately the link is broken, so when you try to enlarge the thumbnail, you only get part of his face. But still, this is pretty cool. :)

Beer making

This weekend, Megan and I made some beer.... 10 gallons of beer to be exact. We haven't made any beer since before our wedding and we have over 4 cases of empty bottles downstairs. So, we sat down and tried to work out what beers we should make to fill those poor lonely empty bottles. We decided to make a cherry stout and a kölsch. For those not in the know, kölsch is a pale beer made only in Köln (Cologne) and is sort of a mix between ale and lager. It's fermented at fairly cool temperatures, but not really lagered. Our local homebrew supply store closed down, so we ordered some kits for these beers from Northern Brewer. We've ordered from them before. (In fact, it was from them we got the Belgian raspberry puree to make the mead we had for our wedding.) The kits came late last week and we made the beer on Saturday and Sunday. Using our big propane burner that came with our turkey fryer sure makes things go faster than on the stove top!

Fermentation has just started, but I'll move these to the secondary fermenter probably tonight or Wednesday night. I imagine we'll be bottling the kölsch in maybe a week and a half and the stout after another 2 weeks or so. Then they'll have to bottle condition for another 3 weeks or so. Should be ready right about Christmas or so! You can see more details about the beers at my homebrew page.

Trick or Treating - Jerry Springer Style

Brett's Pumpkin.













Megan's Pumpkin













So this Halloween, we decorated far more than we ever had. This wasn't driven by some desire to really "do up" the holiday, but rather, I have, each year, become increasingly annoyed with the kids that run from door-across-the-lawn-to-door. The sidewalks around here go straight out the front door to the street. So the logical path of well mannered kids is from the door, down the sidewalk, down the street, down the next sidewalk, to the next door. Our sidewalk is lined with flower beds. There are spaces to sneak through them built into the design, but they certainly aren't obvious to the sugar-crazed kids stampeding around in the dark. So this year, we waited until Walmart had orange and purple lights on sale, and bought a couple strings. I put some stakes in the ground to mark off appropriate paths, and now our azealas still have the same number of branches after Tuesday than they did before. It's amazing. :)

With all the decorations, I thought we'd get swamped with Trick or Treaters. I mean, if I were ToTing, I would assume that people who put up orange and purple lights would also have good candy (which we did). The night started later than usual, but the number of small herds of wild creatures was increasing to a peak when suddenly, a woman started screaming in our front yard. We stopped what we were doing and listened, to make sure everyone was ok. Well, everyone was...sort of. The screaming was intense and frankly, scary. My first thought was "oh no, someone's been hit by a car". I reached for the phone to call 911. Then I heard what the screaming was about. A woman was ToTing with her 3rd grade-ish son and her 2 year old daughter. The son was excited about the festivities, and had ran ahead to our sidewalk (it was his first house he was going to hit). The mother thought that extreme verbal abuse was the way to deal with the child for his insensitivity to his toddler sister's leg length. Yes. You read that right. She was having a one-sided throw down with a 9 year old because he got excited and left her to walk with her 2 year old up the hill to our house. The child was sobbing during all this and finally his mom insisted he go take his tear streaked face up to our door and get some "#$@*# !#%#* candy!" Bless his heart. The kid had literally messed himself. It was horrible. I gave him some extra candy, since I figured ours would be the only door he'd go to all night. Needless to say, NO ONE would come NEAR our house for a half an hour after that (the houses are tightly packed and kids 2 blocks away identified what corner the screaming was coming from). It was like we had been infected with the plague. We watched hordes of kids come towards our end of the block, then do an abrupt about face.

In the end, we were happy to give extra candy to anyone who bothered to come to the door. This included more than one group of high schoolers. I actually gave candy to a guy with a mustache. A real one. Not even peach fuzz! And I'm so ok with that if they're escorting little kids, but these were honest-to-God groups of 17 year olds out for free candy. Then again, when a masked kid with a baritone voice says "trick or treat", I think I take the threat of the trick part more seriously. :)