Skip to main content

Holiday Prep

For Thanksgiving this year we've invited some guests from Oliver's mom's side of the family, so I have to start prepping now to get the house in shape for the big day. The first major thing is having the carpets cleaned, which we've scheduled for next week. This weekend I'll be cleaning out four rooms to get them ready for that.

I started with my front dining room, which I use as my sewing room. It was kind of a mess already, so it felt good to get everything cleared out.

We'll be having ten people at dinner plus two babies, so this will give me a chance to figure out how to arrange two tables in this space.

I think this will be my last time hosting a big Thanksgiving gathering. Mike has started his family with a lovely girl who has a huge, close-knit family of her own, while Katherine will likely be off at grad school out of state for the next several years. I'm also not getting any younger. My guy and I will always celebrate Thanksgiving, but probably with a dinner just for us, or join in a gathering at someone else's home. So I definitely want to make this dinner a memorable one.

Now I just have to find a thirty pound turkey. Hopefully soon. What are you doing to get ready for the holidays?

Labels

Labels:

Comments

nightsmusic said…
I had a whole response typed out here and it just disappeared. I'm crabby today anyway so I think I won't try again. I will later though.
November 10, 2019 at 8:48 AM
Maria Zannini said…
It looks like we'll be hosting this year ourselves.

PS I've read that if you need a large bird for dinner, you're better off buying two smaller birds. More leg/thighs, plus the meat won't dry out as much on smaller birds.
November 10, 2019 at 11:10 AM
nightsmusic said…
So, what I said earlier was, you should buy two, fifteen pound birds. They'll cook more evenly than a giant bird.

I haven't decided what we're doing yet. The girls are usually at their in-laws for Christmas and since even their husbands admit their mom's aren't very good cooks, they whine that they'd rather be here. So we might invite the two pair for Christmas day. We'll see. Or it might just be hubs and I Christmas day. I'd have no problem with that either.

I have the kids coming today to celebrate Thing One's birthday, which is Tuesday.

I'm crabby today in part because there was an order delivered today and the dog, rather than jumping off the front of the couch which he usually does, jumped over me, knocking my coffee all over my laptop. While the keyboard is very water resistant, the touchpad isn't so nothing is working right on it now. I really don't want to have to buy a new laptop this time of year and replacing the touchpad doesn't always give good results. I've tried that before. *sigh*
November 10, 2019 at 11:29 AM
the author said…
Thanks for the advice. Now that the rugs are finally dry, we
re going to measure the oven tomorrow to see if we can fit two roasters in there. :)
November 13, 2019 at 8:50 PM
the author said…
You ladies are both so much wiser than me.

I'm sorry to hear about the laptop spill. I've had that happened more times than I care to count. I limped along with one laptop with a non-functioning keyboard by plugging another one in by usb. Could you do that with a plug-in touch pad, if there is such a thing?
November 13, 2019 at 8:52 PM
nightsmusic said…
No touchpad, but I could use a wireless mouse. I managed to get things working again for now though. But this laptop is six years old and that's a long time for a windows laptop. It's a Toshiba though so I'd expect it to last at least that long. They made real workhorses. They got bought out though so I don't know what I'll do when I actually have to replace it. At least I can swap out the hard drive with a new laptop so I wouldn't lose anything.
November 14, 2019 at 2:57 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Other Stashes

Along with clearing out the spare bedroom and tidying my office and our guest bedroom, I decided to reorganize some of my stashes. This is all the yarn I have on hand, sorted by color. It looks like a lot, but lately I've been using up a minimum of half a bin every month, so this is approximately a year's supply. All of my solid color cotton perle thread. I go through a lot of this every year, too. I need a container in which I can fit all of it together, but I haven't found the right one yet. I won't show you all of my fabric -- I'm still reorganizing this stash -- but I went through everything and donated two bins of fabric I won't need to the local quilter's guild.
Post a Comment
Read more

Downsizing

This was my fabric stash once I sorted everything -- 22 full bins. I spent a day taking out and boxing up what I could part with, with the goal of trying to reduce it by half, so I'd have 11 bins. I was very strict with myself, and removed everything that for one reason or another I was sure I wouldn't be able to use. This is what I ended up with -- 12 bins of fabric that I'm keeping. It's not quite half, but close enough. Half of what I took out went to a local quilter friend, a school and Goodwill. These four tightly-packed bins will be going to the local quilting guild once I make arrangements with them for a drop-off place. I am relieved and a little sad and now determined to control my impulses to thrift more fabric. I don't want to do this again, so until I use up six bins, I can't for any reason bring any new fabric into the house.
Post a Comment
Read more

In Progress

I promised myself I would show you the good, bad and ugly of my cleaning this year. This is what it looks like when you dump thirty years' worth of stashed fabric on the floor -- and oy, what a pain in the butt to pick up again! This is what it looks like after it's been sorted, folded and placed in containers, which took me about a week. Now the hard part is to downsize my stash by at least half, I think (that's my goal, anyway.) I've already e-mailed the president of the local quilting guild, a local friend who is a quilter, and a public school art teacher I know to see if I can donate some of the excess to them. The rest will go to Goodwill. Already I've reduced my vintage textiles from two bins to one, and my scraps from three bins to one. It's probably the hardest clean-out I've done, which is why I saved it until last. I know I have too much fabric, more than I can use in my lifetime -- but at the same time, I love it. So I have to...
Post a Comment
Read more