Thanks!

For Thanksgiving this year I was obviously not going to go anywhere far (i.e. anywhere where my family is), so my parents came here (Jim stayed up in New England and went to Thanksgiving dinner with his girlfriend).

My dad had, of course, just been through on the annual North-to-South migration and had left on Sunday morning. Since they were going to be driving back on Tuesday, and their dog Kelsey is not a huge fan of the airplane, Kelsey stayed with us for a few days. The cats were all completely traumatized. Kelsey is not really that great at reading the cats cues: she thinks that hissing and whacking her on the nose means the cats are playing with her. Also, cats running away = something to chase. So pretty much the cats have been hiding all week.

On Wednesday we got ourselves prepared for Thanksgiving dinner and my mom and I did a little shopping and organizing of the baby room. We finished hanging the pictures and everything, so the room is all set up now. Oh. I should go take a picture of it for you. Be right back...




Thats pretty much it. The most wonderful glider chair is not pictured, because that is still hanging out in front of the PS2. Speaking of the most wonderful glider chair, Brian got my dad watching 'Arrested Development' so they've been up there in front of the TV. My dad loves the glider so much that he totally wants to get one for himself.

Anyhow. We finished doing the baby laundry that I had decided to do (all the newborn-sized clothes, many of the blankets, some other stuff) and put everything away. It turned out well.

On Thursday we had Thanksgiving dinner, of course. We had my favorite easy appetizer which is:

toast and chop some pecans
mix them in with blue cheese of some variety
spread this onto slices of french bread
broil
drizzle with honey
eat

Yum. Also regular dinner. Since my mom was the only one eating turkey (Brian and I both being vegetarian now and my dad not being a poultry person), she made a turkey breast and the rest of us ate the other Thanksgiving foods (and my dad had some leftover short ribs they had brought with them). After dinner we played Apples to Apples (I won both times!) and started in on the pie. My mom had made a pecan pie the day before and had used a different recipe that she had gotten out of Bon Appetit. It looked good. We cut into it and all hell broke loose. The pie looked cooked everywhere that you could see it, but the middle was just soup. As soon as she cut into it the soup started oozing out. It was totally bizarre.



We still ate it - well, I just ate the cooked top parts and left my soup on the plate. Afterwards I looked up the recipe on epicurious.com to see if anyone else had reported ending up with pecan pie soup and indeed they had. It seems that the recipe really made enough filling for two pies, even though it didn't really say that AND you could fit all of the filling into one pie, albeit a very full pie. Thats what my mom had done, and it was too thick to cook thoroughly. Though it was pretty hysterical watching the pie ooze out, something unlike anything I've ever seen before. I was laughing so hard I couldn't breathe.

On Friday my mom and I watched a What Not To Wear marathon on TLC. Hurrah! Brian and my dad worked on a project that we'd been talking about doing for like, a year - renovating our pantry. We have a nice sized pantry, but I hated it with a passion. First of all, its shelves (like all shelving we have in our house) were that crap-ass Closetmaid wire shelving. OMG, I hate that stuff. First of all, in a pantry? Horrible. Nothing stands upright on it. We had bought some sort of rolled out stuff that you put on top of it that is suppossed to solve that problem but it didn't. Its not much better in a clothes closet because it leaves ridges in whatever is sitting on top of it. I cannot stand it but unfortunately you see it in like, every new construction home. Anyhow. The other thing I hated about our pantry was that it was difficult to organize. The closet was pretty wide and the shelves went back into a recess in the wall about 14 inches on each side. You'd have to put stuff back there but it was hard to see and get to. And since the shelf went the whole length of the closet without a break, there was no way to really separate things. It was just a big disaster in there. So they took out all the existing shelving and put in wooden shelves on either side in the recessed part. Now its like a walk-in pantry. The shelves are a little less deep than they were, but I like it better now. I thought they were too deep before. And now there are many smaller shelf areas so its easy to organize. We got everything in there and we still have some room. They also hung up some hooks so we could hang up stuff like our pizza paddle.



And on Saturday we ended up buying a Christmas tree. This is our first time having a real tree - we usually have a fake one because we're not usually here at Christmas. But I like the smell of a real tree and I had always wanted to get one, so since we're not going anywhere this year we did. I know its a little early to put up a real tree, but we figured that we'd better do it now in case Studs decided to come a little early and we didn't get a chance to do it later. So its up but not decorated. I might do that today after I've worked on my grant.

They left this morning and took Kelsey with them, much to the joy of our cats who came downstairs almost immediately. Hope the cats don't get too complacent though because they'll be back pretty soon when its baby time!