Waiting

. . .for curtains?  'Am still looking for the right shade of green for the gingham ones I want here.

Behold the Clever Cat

Dear Stuffed.  ♥  

Home Tonight

♥

An Early Thanksgiving

Mike and I decided Monday afternoon to have a Thanksgiving dinner together on Tuesday.  Since I work this Thanksgiving and Mike will be home with his family for the holiday--their first Thanksgiving without his dad--we hadn't made plans to have a just-the-two-of-us dinner at all, and I had kind of figured I'd just miss Thanksgiving this year.  Monday afternoon, though, that seemed stupid:  I had the next day off and wouldn't see Mike again until next week, so why would we not just celebrate on Tuesday?!  Last night was our little Thanksgiving, then, and it was a sweet one. 

It was the second consecutive Thanksgiving for this favorite vintage tablecloth of mine, a brown patchwork print that looks like something Holly Hobbie would throw onto her own table for the holiday.  I love it so, and it survived Mike's red wine with no damage, so all the better.  

As I did a couple Thanksgivings ago, I went with paper plates, which made things a bit easier.  I think 2013's simple orange-paper-plated dinner remains my favorite Thanksgiving table setting so far--the orange was just so warm and vibrant, as it was when we had an orange Christmas breakfast table last year--but this year's table was cozy even if a bit muted. 

We had turkey cutlets--neither of us like dark meat, so we never bother with a whole bird--Marie's zucchini gratin, our mushroom stuffing--that I just realized the recipe for is still in my list of posts as a draft, so I'll have to hit "publish" on that one soon--quinoa with just a bit of butter and salt and pepper stirred in, buffalo cauliflower because Mike wanted to try it, and green bean casserole.  Neither of us cares much about potatoes or gravy, so we skipped them, and since Mike was diagnosed with diabetes this fall, we went easy on flour-filled foods and bread products too.  Our mushroom stuffing was mostly mushrooms instead of the more equal bread cube-mushroom ratio it's been before, and we had no side-bread this year.  For dessert, we split a slice of chocolate tuxedo cake from the bakery.  Mike will be having his mom's apple pie and pumpkin pie tomorrow, so he'll be splurging a little more then anyway.

We watched Planes, Trains, and Automobiles over dinner, as has become tradition during our rather informal Thanksgivings here.  This was one of my and my younger brother's favorite movies when we were kids, and it continues to be, and now we all find ourselves quoting lines of it to each other throughout the year. It both tickled me and struck me as poignant to hear a few years ago that my brother and his wife were watching the movie while she was in the hospital to give birth to their dear Bianca--that this sweet film from our childhood was a part of those moments for him and his own family so many years later.  ♥ 

Stuffed didn't come near-enough to the table for pictures until after Mike and I had eaten and cleared things away, but he was his usual impossibly soft and adorable self all day, napping in just about every chair and even softly snoring while he did.  Love, love, love.  ♥ 

I added a chocolate turkey to our cake, as I did with our pumpkin pie on our first Thanksgiving together in 2007.  It took forever to find this tiny candy-turkey in the store; What seemed to be a hundred huge solid milk chocolate ones were displayed more prominently.  Is eating--or even just gift-giving--solid chocolate turkeys a thing that people do at Thanksgiving now?  At a Thanksgiving dinner I attended during my internship days in Wisconsin in 2004, one of the women invited arrived with a number of little foil-wrapped turkeys for all the children present, which struck me as such a thoughtful and fun offering, but the big--at least 6" tall--solid chocolate turkeys are new to me.  I'm sure they'd be gorgeous on a big-enough dessert or as part of a centerpiece, at least.  (And you can tell I work with children when Elsa's bust-topped Coronation Day cake is the first "big-enough dessert" that comes to mind.  :)

Mike did the dishes while I put away the leftovers, and another Thanksgiving had come and gone.

When I took my iced tea glass out to the kitchen sink, I found a soap suds heart dissolving before my eyes.  'One of my favorite found hearts, this one, and a fine finish to this Thanksgiving. 

A happy holiday to everyone celebrating, and a good day to you all.  ♥ 

Home Today

♥

Thanksgiving 2013

Our Thanksgiving was lovely and sweet and laaaaaaidback.  I had worked the overnight shift the night before, picked up a few groceries after work Thursday morning, since I had decided at the last minute to treat Mike to baked spinach-artichoke dip in a bread bowl and didn't have the ingredients for it, called my parents around 9:00 am to wish them a happy Thanksgiving while the store-bought frozen pies were in the oven ("Vally!  Why aren't you in bed?!  I thought you'd be asleep by now!" cried out my mom, as if she's never had to stay up too late or get up extra early to prepare a holiday), and finally went to bed.  Since Mike didn't care when we ate, my vague plan was to have everything ready by 5:00 pm, so you can imagine my near-terror surprise when I later woke up alone in a dark bedroom unsure what day time it was.  It was 3:30 in the afternoon, Thanksgiving afternoon, it turned out--"'It's Christmas Day!' said Scrooge to himself.  'I haven't missed it!'"--and he had let me sleep so long, Mike explained, because it was obvious that I was tired and needed it.  Righto. 

The turkey he had started in the slow cooker a few hours earlier was already almost done--Bless!--and the pies had been cooling since morning, so it was just a matter of making the spinach dip and side dishes--green bean casserole, our mushroom stuffing (a recipe I'll share before Christmas, the next time we'll make it--it is heavenly), mashed potatoes and gravy, a few heat-and-serve rolls for Mike, and Marie's zucchini gratin (another dish I could eat every day).  Neither Mike nor I like sweet potatoes or corn or cranberry relish, but rest assured that if you were joining us for Thanksgiving, we'd make them to add some color to your meal.  :)  I enjoyed a breakfast of cold spinach dip and sourdough bread chunks while I cooked.  I found a new Niece Bianca picture waiting for me on my phone.  Mike watched football and called his parents to catch up with them awhile.  At some point, I had decided it would be pictures of just the table this Thanksgiving and stayed in my pajamas.  Mike's been battling a cold the past week or so, so Casual and Comfy were two of the words of the day here. 

When the side dishes were almost done, I looked around the apartment for a few decorations for the table and ended up just gathering the angel from our mantel and a few pumpkins and a pinecone.  Our First Thanksgiving with Store-Bought Pies was also Our First Thanksgiving with Paper Plates, but I liked these bold orange square ones and they made life easier Thursday.  The idea of making a couple orange gingham napkin rings had occured to me, but the idea came and went.  We used plain paper napkins and lived to tell the tale. 

We ended up eating around 7 pm, and everything was wonderful.  "Hunger is the best sauce," as Ma Ingalls would say, but everything really was good.  Watching Planes, Trains, and Automobiles has become one of our Thanksgiving traditions, and surely, the amount we laugh during this film burns off half the calories consumed during the meal. 

And little Stuffed was in a strange mood all evening and could be found in a different spot every thirty minutes staring at who-knows-what but looking cute while he did it.

Love to you all, and a belated happy Thanksgiving.  ♥

Home Sweet Apartment ~ in Pink

Since bringing back from my parents' house the mantel my dad built for me and Mike last April, I've been painting it and fixing up the things that will surround it.  My treasured old "Home Sweet Apartment" needlepoint is the first piece I've revamped for the mantel-wall.  It was one of my very first eBay finds back in 2001, that most-miserable of years, and even though--or maybe especially because--I was unexpectedly living with my parents again at the time, I was thrilled when mine was the winning bid:  This vintage sampler, like a Field of Dreams-type "If-you-find-the-decorations-for-it-the-new-home-will-come" talisman,  gave me something concrete to work toward as a frustrated twenty-four-year-old.  

In the summer of 2002 when I finally had my first all-to-myself-with-no-roommates apartment, I delighted in unpacking the needlepoint and dolling it up, and what a year before had arrived pine green and maroon with an unfinished wooden frame became pink and aqua to match the little dining nook in my new place.  

"Home Sweet Apartment" behind me as I would sit in the corner seat under it there and work on school work for my second Masters program.  "Home Sweet Apartment" beside my newly-ex-boyfriend and I as we sat across from each other at this vintage tablecloth-clad table eating bowls of my homemade soup and awkwardly figuring out our post-breakup friendship.  "Home Sweet Apartment" above me as I bawled my heart out in this pink-dotted chair the following New Year's night after realizing we weren't ready to be "just friends" just yet and that we might never be able to in this lifetime.  The sampler over me and my mom when she showed up on a whim with two chocolate muffins from the bakery and listened as I made us tea and told her all about it.  The sampler over a whole bunch of us when I hosted both my first family dinner and first birthday party and relearned that as long as I had love to give--and gave it--I wasn't down for the count.  Before I moved out of this first "all mine" apartment, a former professor joined me for cookies and lemonade under the needlepoint and commented that I was good at making people feel welcome.  "Hospitality is your thing, isn't it," he thoughtfully noted.  And that's when "Home Sweet Apartment" really clicked for me:  I really had created a home here, not just filled and decorated a rented space. 

The pink and aqua needlepoint became a more subdued and not-very-Val-like red and yellow in 2007, so as not to overwhelm Mike with my pink-and-rainbow-loving tendencies.  Our studio apartment was so tiny, it was hard to do any real decorating in it at all, so the yellow and red actually didn't bother me too much.  When you can roll out of bed in your home-sweet-apartment and land on the kitchen floor, or open the bathroom door while sitting at the dinner table, the color combination of a sampler's matte and frame isn't your biggest homemaking concern.  Besides, the sweet sampler watched over me and Mike, this time hanging from the apartment's built-in mantel, during all our goings-on for four years the same as it had when it had been pink and aqua for me before.  Home was still love-filled and our favorite place.  Be it ever so humble, you know.   

Today it became pink again, though, and I don't see it changing after this.  It finally looks just right to me.  I covered the yellow matte with the dotted pink upholstery fabric that I had used to cover the captain chairs in my little circa-2002 pink and aqua corner.  I repainted the red frame black.  And I removed the glass-front since I don't trust this apartment's wall to hold its weight.  While I continue painting the mantel and fixing up the wall around it, at least this much is done.  That I figured out a way to incorporate the old chair fabric makes me especially happy.  

"Lighten up, Val--It's a sampler," I know, but when I look at it, I remember the journey it's accompanied me on and think of it as a witness to the past twelve years.  When Mike and I eventually move on from renting, I will pass it on to its next owners with a prayer for their own resilience and contented refuge in home.  

Sweet, indeed.  ♥