Have you given any thought lately to the sheer volume of “stuff” you have in your home? I have recently become acutely aware of this as I have been helping my oldest son prepare for and actually move out on his own. He is starting with NOTHING and building from there. This is an experience most of us only have once if we are fortunate. But what a learning opportunity! The ability to pare your possessions down to a few essentials and gradually add the most important things as you are able…the extras like tv stands and grandfather clocks and nicknacks…they come later when and if you are able.
Helping my son…while it has been quite bittersweet…has also been a useful opportunity for me to look at my own surroundings with a different eye. An eye that can see more clearly the things we could do without…
Do you maintain a website? Most people I know have some kind of a presence on the Internet. With this presence invariably comes the maintenance of a website — which is a whole new learning experience for many of us. Once you have a website up and running, your thoughts often turn to things like Search Engine Optimization, Page Rank, and directory submissions. What is a directory submission, you ask? An Internet directory is a compiled list of websites within a certain niche or subject. When people search for content online, these directories are a useful way to find information. If your website is included in one of these directories, you will often receive traffic when people search for content that you include on your website. This is why submitting your website to free directory lists is a great way to increase traffic to your website and increase your site’s standings.
Do you even HAVE a gardening to do list for November and December? No?
Many gardeners are enjoying a much-needed respite from dirt and seeds and focuses are turned elsewhere during this time. We are coming up upon the darkest day of the year…and then the good news is we start moving our way toward longer days immediately!
Are you ready to start thinking about the new gardening season that will be here in a few months? Some time of eager anticipation and planning will do wonders for getting you in the mood…I promise!
You could still even be planting spring bulbs if your ground isn’t frozen yet!
Or…how about starting an herb garden indoors under a grow light? Or…forcing some bulbs indoors? My paperwhites are within days of blooming and I cannot wait!
It is definitely time to make sure that everything is cut back the way it should be and that your tender plants are tucked in with a good layer of mulch if you haven’t done so yet.
THEN…treat yourself to some dreaming and planning. Get out those gardening catalogs and magazines and start thinking about the great things you might grow next season. Maybe you want to make a new flowerbed or rearrange things somewhat. It’s always a good idea to change your vegetable garden layout from year to year and now would be an ideal time to plant next season’s planting layout. Peruse the catalogs and find something new you’ve never grown before. Oh…the possibilities are endless!
The more you dream the faster the winter will go!
When we go down south every autumn on our annual trek, we always talk about how nice it would be to move on up to a new level and try some kind of motor home instead of our large extended 15-seater van. The gas mileage wouldn’t even be that different between the two but our comfort level would improve 100-fold. Of course, we’d be forced to face many additional expenses, like motorhome insurance and whatnot…but one of these years we may just have to take this leap!
Thanksgiving is steeped in tradition for many households, ours included. Traditions are something that keep us grounded and give us security…they also provide a benchmark as we go through the years keeping the same special traditions. Children, especially, seem to thrive on traditions. In our household, a new tradition can often be born from doing something ONCE that the children especially enjoyed. They have a way of doing this. Anybody else?
We have many traditions involved in our annual Thanksgiving observance. Many surround food, many surround family, many surround the preparations for this day. Here are some of the big ones:
- Two big turkeys. Instead of one HUGE one, we roast two big ones. One in the oven and one in the roaster. They each turn out a little different and various family members prefer one or the other. We couldn’t do without either, though.
- More food than we know what to do with. I bake and cook for days to make two kinds of stuffing, cranberries, four kinds of pie, appetizers, caramel corn, vegetables, cider…any traditional Thanksgiving dish you can imagine. There *must* be enough leftovers to repeat the Thanksgiving meal several times, also. That is a RULE.
- Thanksgiving decorations. We break these out in the beginning of November. Pilgrims, turkeys…the works.
- Thanksgiving crafts…lots of them! A new one each day…and these add to our Thanksgiving decor around the house.
- A new Thanksgiving movie that no one has seen yet. This year, I believe the kids have voted for “Ice Age 3.”
- A Thanksgiving performance. The kids all play instruments and we sit and listen to them play their best pieces after dinner.
- Thanksgiving parades in the morning while the turkey begins to fill the house with delicious aromas.
- A family parlor game around the table after the meal is over and while people are digesting.
- A “blessing tree” which is really just a stick inserted into a container full of sand. We make autumn-colored paper leaves for the tree and everyone writes what they are thankful for on the leaves. The leaves are then attached to the tree with twine for a “blessing tree.”
- Charlie Brown Thanksgiving – need I say more? Must watch this every year! We have raised our kids with the good sense to appreciate Charles Schultz (LOL).
Please share your traditions! We are always looking to add more to our collection!
Have you studied your face lately? I mean…really studied it? I’ll prepare you…if you are anywhere near 40, you probably won’t be entirely jazzed about what you see when you take a moment to really study your face.
But then…you need to consider all of the experiences and wisdom you have added along with those wrinkles. Wrinkle cream may ease those tiny lines…but it cannot take away the hard earned lessons you’ve learned over the years. It cannot steal from you the memories that make you who you are today.
I know the wrinkles are not all that pleasant to find…but they are hard-earned. The laugh lines speak volumes about a happy and content life. The worry lines are a testament to the hard times you’ve survived. Consider the wrinkles a road map and an outline of…YOU!
My college-freshman son just made a splurge that he is rather proud of. After extensive shopping among many different laptops, he finally settled on a Dell that was delivered last week. This is especially important to him because he earned and bought this laptop with his own money. He had it built to his specifications and it even has a Brewers Baseball outer shell that makes it especially “him.”
I’m proud of him. He earned this!
Do you serve sweet potatoes at Thanksgiving? I am about to share with you…THE.BEST recipe I have ever found for sweet potatoes. It’s all in the spices…so I am also letting you in on my little spice secret. It’s called Penzey’s Spices and I purchase quite a lot of my spices from this store.
Anyway…if you like sweet potatoes, you’re gonna love this!
* 2 lbs. sweet potatoes
* 1/2 c maple syrup
* 1 tsp. SWEET CURRY (from Penzeys)
* 1/2 tsp. GARAM MASALA (from Penzeys)
* 1/2 tsp. salt
* 1/2 C chopped pecans
Peel the sweet potatoes and boil them until tender. Drain and mash the sweet potatoes when they are cooked. Heat the maple syrup, the curry powder, the garam masala and the salt in a small saucepan. Simmer for 1-2 minutes. Add the syrup mixture to the sweet potatoes and mix well. Sprinkle with the pecans and serve.
Seriously…YUM!
Anyone beginning to think about Thanksgiving preparations yet? It’s about a week and a half so I consider this coming week the calm before the storm. This is the week I will try to do some deep cleaning, sprucing and making a few things ahead to freeze to simplify cooking and baking next week. We will have 19 loved ones in our home next week and I absolutely cannot wait! Of course, I’m going to need to seriously consider something like myrtle beach vacation rentals after this is all over with, but for now the anticipation is increasing.
Is your household gearing up? What will you do this week to lighten your load next week if you are hosting?
We learned an important lesson this week…and it’s a vital one if you own a freezer stocked with expensive food. Allow me to share…
One of my kids left our upright freezer door ajar on Monday afternoon. I did not discover this unfortunate event until approximately 36 hours later on Wednesday. By this time, there was a puddle in front of the freezer, a mess on the bottom of the freezer (thawing meat…blood…ick!). I placed a thermometer into the freezer and found that the temperature was still about 40 degrees. Cold enough that the food was still safe…yet rapidly thawing.
I closed the freezer and said to myself…”WHEW! I’m sure glad I found that near disaster…now we’ll just let it refreeze and all will be fine.” Sound good? I thought so…
Unfortunately…every time I went downstairs to check the freezer, the food was not refreezing as I expected it to. I told myself that the freezer simply needed to catch back up and it might take up to 24 hours. The temp in the freezer by this point was about 30 degrees F.
By the next day, the situation had not changed. Temp still 30 and food still not refreezing. I googled and googled and found nothing about what to expect when a freezer is recovering from being left open. Finally, I called the manufacturer and spoke with a service tech.
What I was told was that we needed to manually switch the freezer into a defrost mode by turning a screw in the back of the freezer. Doing this would turn the freezer off for 30 minutes and during that time any ice that had accumulated would melt and the freezer would then be able to recover from being left open and would be ready to freeze again.
Well…we did that and decided to use that defrosting time to clean it out. We actually ended up switching it back into the manual defrost mode two more times (the freezer was off and melting for 1.5 hours total) and by the time we turned it back on it was completely defrosted and spic and span inside.
We refilled it, turned it back on, crossed our fingers and said a prayer.
Within about two hours the temp was down to about 15 degrees F and it was cranking again. At this writing, everything is rock hard again and we averted disaster.
Lesson? Freezers need help to recover from being left open. You cannot just close the door and expect them to resume freezing without defrosting all of the partially defrosted ice that accumulates when this happens. Nowhere was this information readily available, either online or in the instruction manual. It took calling and speaking with a service tech to learn about this.
File this away in your little mental filing cabinet if this ever happens to you! May save you hundreds of dollars in valuable freezer items!
