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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?

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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
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