Tag Archive | personal: weekend

Christmas and Traditions

Dec29

This past weekend was Christmas, and, if you hadn’t guessed by the number of Christmas reposts I’ve been putting up, I’m kind of fond of the season. It’s a lot more work than when I was a kid, of course – that shift between primarily being a recipient of gifts and being a giver of such (Which, in itself, might be a nice metaphor for adulthood…) – but I am one of those people who gets a blast out of people liking the gift I gave them (And, luckily, so is T), so it’s a different sort of the same warm feeling.

(I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’m an only child; I still get pressies. This year was long-sweaters and leggings a la 1989, warm socks and scarves and a long down jacket. We live in the frozen North!)

There was vegan cake (possum-free!) and vegan soup (and tasty bread) for mom and dad, spices and breadpans, warm hats and flashlights. There were dogs helping, because they do that. And for a moment, when I walked into my parents’ living room and saw the tree all lit up and the presents underneath, I was a kid waking up on Christmas again, and Santa had come overnight.

Christmas traditions have shifted over the years for me – when I was young, it was Maternal Grandparents’ in the morning and Paternal Grandparents’ place in the afternoon. When I was older, it was just Maternal Grandparents. And then, after my maternal grandparents had both passed, it was – well, that’s when I started doing Christmas Eve with my parents and my husband.

I like traditions. I don’t particular like change, if I’m being honest. And so when something we did once, twice on Christmas, thrice and it started turning into a trend, I held on to it like a tradition.

Movies on Christmas. I can’t remember what movie started it, but I know that Sweeney Todd and Emperor’s New Groove were a couple of the more memorable Christmas-Day movies. Back in Rochester, sometimes we’d go out to Denny’s or some such – someplace willing to be open on Christmas, someplace we could sit and chat, someplace with free coffee refills.

We moved down to Ithaca, and movies-on-Christmas-sometimes-with-friends became movies, the two of us. We skipped a year or two, but it felt wrong. Like Christmas wasn’t right anymore, without a movie.

This year, we put of seeing Rogue One for a couple weeks so we could see it on Christmas. We went to the sushi place across the street from the movie theatre. We drank free ea refills and ate maki rolls, and all was right with the world.

When I was little – three years old, five years old, fifteen, when my grandma was still alive – the kids would pass out the presents and everyone would dig in. My cousins have kids now, older than we were when that tradition started…

But on Christmas Eve, T & I meet Capriox at Tim Hortons (the one in the plaza where I went grocery shopping with Grandma as a kid), and we open presents with my parents and my parents’ dogs (I still pass them out), and on Christmas Day, we watch a movie….

I guess what I’m rambling around about is, I miss my grandma. I always will, I think. And I miss the way Christmas felt when my grandma was telling me about Santy Claus, when I knew I’d get a new ornament from Grandma and a new National Geographic book from my Aunt. But I’m pretty fond of my new traditions, too.

Now all I need is a cute red dress for next Christmas.

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Weekend Recipe-testing: Now with Vegan Possum

Dec20

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsSo yep. That was my weekend: possum frosting.

(Turns out, if you google possum and chocolate, what you get isn’t a whole lot of good information on if possums are able to eat chocolate. You get mostly possum recipes. Oops.)

We were testing vegan frosting to go on a vegan cake for a vegan Christmas present for my vegan father (help I can’t vegan stop). The cake turned out great, actually — a Depression-era “crazy cake” recipe with no eggs and no butter or milk (“no eggs no butter, no flour no sugar” says the woman on the bus whose parents probably remembered the Depression). And the frosting — once we scraped off the top where the possum had gotten his nose into it — that turned out surprisingly tasty.

This week is all the vegan food-testing and making: soups for mom, cake for dad, and the bread might not be vegan but it’ll be tasty too. It’s the time of year where I’m making a lot of bread, trying new recipes or just throwing stuff in the mixer and seeing what happens (“either not enough molasses or too much” last week; this week turned out pretty good). Bonus of all the baking: it heats up the far end of the house, where the wood stove’s heat doesn’t really reach. Bonus of making soup in the winter: cooking it on the wood stove and making the whole house smell like soup.

The weather outside is frightful — by turns freezing and raining, snowing and blowing — but the fire is burning hot and the candles are lit in the windows. I’ve got silk poinsettias for my vases and bandanna-patterned wrapping paper for my presents, cookies for the baking and fresh bread hiding in the microwave (Otherwise the cat eats it).

Happy Holidays, my friends. It’s a wonderful life here in West Nowhere, NY.

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Weekend with Merit & Merit Badges

Dec15

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsYep.

That was Sunday.

Our kitchen sink leads out – via at least 2, maybe 3 right turns – to a dry well (covered by, I shit you not, a Bell Telephone manhole cover (rather like this)), which means that when it clogs (which it does, on average, about once/year), it’s easiest to snake it from the outside (less turns).

So there I was. In the snow. Snaking a drain.

There really ought to be merit badges for things like that.

“While baking bread” is a little disingenuous; the bread was rising at the time. My first time without a recipe, and I think the only real fail was that the molasses I used to sweeten it overwhelmed the amaranth I added in as a test flavor. It’s a hearty, half-wheat-flour loaf with little amaranth crunchies, quite nice.

This was one of those weekends: haul firewood, wash dishes, snake the sink, bake some bread. T made a pressure-cooker (InstantPot) ham-hock soup with yellow lentils and black/white Urad Dal, which was super tasty with the bread. The house smelled of bread and soup all day Sunday, which is just about the most awesome way for the house to smell.

It’s nice, sometimes, just hunkering down and staying inside – or, at least, at home. You come in, you stand in front of the fire for ten minutes, and you’re all warm again.

And Merit – our feral cat, or at least the one who started that way – clearly agrees. Sometimes in the winter, you can see her look outside and remember what the outside was like when it snowed or rained. Then she curls up by the fire, too, everything in her body language saying It’s good to be inside.

It’s good to be inside. With the bread baking and the sink draining properly. It’s that sort of winter.

*purrs*

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Weekend Blog with Patreon, Holidays, and more!

Dec6

A two-day weekend feels rather short after a five-day “weekend”, but, on the other paw, I didn’t have to go anywhere all that far away, we didn’t have any major cooking (Barely any cooking at all!), and it turned out to be quite relaxing.

I got a new wobble stool for Black Friday (among other purchases), so this weekend, I tested it out, and found it fun, if a little surprising for my back and thighs for the first couple hours. Mobile computing! Or, at least, computing and being mobile at the same time! It’s actually a lot of fun.

We saw Fantastic Creatures this weekend, too, and that was fun, too; it’s not the most deep of movies, but it was visually beautiful, fun to watch, and has already got me spawning worlds of fic in my mind. I’ll call that worth the matinee ticket price.

Other than that — I wrote, we picked apples, we cleaned up the house a bit, hauled some firewood, and went out to lunch at our local Italian bar food restaurant (fish fry and enough Stromboli for three meals). We made cookies and the last of the turkey broth and… well, pretty much chilled. It was a peaceful weekend, and I’ll take it.

In other news, my Patreon has reached the $40 milestone again! I’m excited to get Nimbus out of the tree and see what adventures she gets up to next! (what, I’m supposed to know? I barely know how she’s getting out of the tree! <.<)

I’m contemplating doing a live-writing something sometime during my ~week plus~ work holiday at the end of December (a whole week! And then a Monday!) Details to follow, if there’s interest.

And if you haven’t checked out Selena Page yet, both the Hallowe’en and Christmas stories are available on Smashwords for free: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/SelenaPage

Speaking of the holidays, Christmas is coming, I’ve finished my re/watch of the Librarians, and I’ve started watching Elementary, which might prove to be good knitting-tv (I hope so; I have a few projects to knit on relatively short deadlines!)

And Baking! I think I’m going to try making “fancy” cookies for my foodie aunt & uncle who are in ailing health. I can’t give them wine anymore… (not kindly) so cookies it is! Anyone have a favorite “Fancy” cookie recipe, holiday or otherwise?

I hope you, too, had a peaceful weekend, and that the week is fun and productive for you.

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Weekend Blog and Thanks Giving

Nov28

Oh my, let me tell you… five day weekend. Five. Days.

The last time I had that much time off in a row, we were driving to/from Raleigh for my cousin’s wedding. It’s, uh… It’s been a while.

And I took full advantage of it in as hermitty a way as I could manage & barely left the house.

🙂

Oh, we went out a few times. we both needed a haircut. We took a last-minute Black Friday trip to BJ’s for a new tablet (mine still works, but with a cracked screen (Dropped it on the pavement at a bus stop, sigggh), I don’t know how long it’ll last, so go go Black Friday sales.

(As a note… I really like the Black Friday complex. It helps that mostly we buy online, and that we live in a very small town that doesn’t get nearly the news-worthy crowds — I mean, we don’t get crowds at all — but man, for $100+ off small electronics, totally worth it.)

And we went to the nearby (hour away) outlet mall with my Mom for Christmas shopping on Saturday, because family tradition, because deals, and because Mom. It appears I want all the sweater-dresses… 1989 me wants her wardrobe back <.<

Other than that? We hauled firewood and made turkey and dressing and gravy, we made pumpkin pudding and apple crisp and ate far more food than we needed, we watched Victorian Bakers and made bread.

In the spirit of the season: I am grateful for the times like this, when I can catch my breath. I’m thankful for all of you, for all my friends and all my readers (and all your enthusiasm and all your questions). I am thankful I live in a modern era, in a modern world, with stand mixers, oil furnaces, and, of course, the internet.

And kale. Strangely enough, I’m thankful for kale.

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Weekend, with Car Repairs, weighty conversations, and deer

Nov15

It’s, in theory, Autumn, although the weather has been very up and down lately. We’re getting 10-degree shifts for a day at a time, 3 days at a time, and then dropping back a little bit lower and lower every time it drops.

This weekend, on a pleasant day, I drove up to Rochester (about 2 hour drive, half Thruway and half 2-lane roads) to visit my parents, and to have my dad help me fix (replace) my rear wheel bearing.

This, it turns out, is not exactly more complicated than fixing/replacing brakes, but it does involve a lot more swearing, a tool called a slide hammer that looks like a ShakeWeight’s more obscene older cousin, and a lot of Thrust (or some other lubricant, but hey, there’s a theme here).

It also involved puppy kisses from my two “kid brothers” the lab-mix doggies, a vegan “Reuben” sandwich (with homemade bread! also homemade vegan “cheese” and homemade sauerkraut!) from my mom, and a couple uncomfortable conversations.

All I’m going to say about the political discussion is: we managed not to have a fight. I’ll take it.

The other conversations were harder — talking to my dad about things I’d been holding on to, talking to both parents about end-of-life plans. I don’t want to know, I didn’t want to confront Dad…

…but I’d rather do it in the garage where I can hug them both and move on than do it later, in a hospital, or be shouting at a gravestone some day.

On the way home, feeling thoughtful and pensive and a little bit pleased, a little weight-lifted, I saw about a dozen deer in the Seneca Army Depot (but no white ones! Sad)… and then, in my front yard, two deer snacking on our apple tree.

They don’t symbolize anything, the deer, but they’re there, because it’s November and they’re always there, and it’s not like we needed all the apples, anyway.

Oh, and there was a supermoon. Which was just about gorgeous hanging over the Finger Lakes.

Little disjointed today, but that was my weekend. Hugs to you all.

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Weekends in the Finger Lakes

Oct17

This weekend… we drank beer.
(note: I started this last week. I’m a little behind on weekend blogs. So… The weekend before this past one… We drank beer)

I’m serious, that was almost the entirety of Saturday.

Rewind… So, probably a couple years ago (we don’t drive this road very often), a place that had been selling Amish furniture and barns (“Thee Amish Market,” sigh) went out of business, only to be replaced with… a beergarden?

On the Finger Lakes Wine trail, this has been happening more and more over the last couple years – wineries go under, but breweries are going up everywhere – so a place to taste all that beer seems not all that unreasonable. But T. and I had only stopped by once, and kind of forgotten it.

Until he send me an e-mail: “Brewfest.”

Brewfest.

We haven’t hit a wine festival this year. We’ve hit a lot of wineries… but only one or two breweries, and no festivals.

Well, the year is almost over… time for beer!

So, we showed up at 12:30, got our little ½-pint (technically 3/4 -cup) glass &12 tasting tickets each, and stared at the 20 tables of eager local breweries, just waiting to get us tipsy.

*cough*

Or maybe a little drunk?

Local breweries have, pleasantly, gotten past their “all hops all the time” thing, which is nice, because I am not actually a fan of hops. At all. I had some nice pumpkin ale, some very nice hefeweizen, some stout, a really good rum ale…

…after that it gets a bit blurry. We also had tacos, kielbasa, and maple sugar candy, walked around the place about 20,000 times, and tasted at least one hard cider.

It was pretty awesome. And it was also pretty much all of Saturday. We hit the grocery store, we got home, we napped for an hour… and it was dark.

Then we had some dinner, etc, and all was good with the world. All in all, a pretty awesome way to spend a Saturday.

And clearly, it left me beer-hazed for a week, and I totally forgot to write a conclusion and post this.

So… This weekend. Well, this weekend, we made like homeowners. We went to Lowe’s. We cleaned up the house. We organized the garage. (We ate at China Buffet). And I burned brush. So much brush. I can almost see my squash patch again.

And now that I’ve found my squash patch (almost), I’m planning on covering it with coffee grounds, eggshells, ashes, and cardboard. Oh, and peat moss.

Maybe next year we’ll actually grow squash again. 🙂

And maybe next weekend, I’ll remember to post a blog post in a reasonable amount of time….

Well, let’s not get crazy.

So: that was my October weekends so far. How about you guys?

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Autumn is Here, and a weekend of weekend-ness

Sep26

Autumn is here, in fact as well as in name.

I can tell not only because my apples are coming ripe and the grapes in my hedgerow are sweet and full, not only because every store is selling pumpkins and my dash is full of Hallowe’en, but because between Thursday and Friday the temperatures dropped precipitously.

Both highs and lows are 10-20 degrees F lower than they were at the beginning of last week – from low 80s and low 50s (28°C/12°C or so) to low 70s-> mid 60’s down to mid-40s at night(18°C-4°C or so). It came on literally overnight, and here I am, hoping the chimney sweep and the furnace check-up guy get here soon. Brrr!

In the meantime, we’ve been chopping brush to burn, hauling firewood into the house, moving firewood around the garage… cleaning the garage so we have room for the firewood (that’s mostly T)…and pulling the gutters down on the short front of the house.

(Our house has two sections: a one-story section that houses the kitchen & utility room (and dreaded foyer) and a two-story section with the rest of the house.)

The gutter was… interesting. When we pulled down the rotted board BEHIND the gutter, we found about a jillion dead wasps nests, some dead wasps… and a skeleton mouse. Yay nature~

Autumn is here, ‘though the leaves haven’t started to change yet. Home repairs are going into overdrive in anticipation of the cold that’s coming, and the cats are growing an extra coat of fur for the winter. “Winter is coming,” Oli insists, as he devours an extra helping of food.

“Winter is coming,” I agree, and stack some more firewood.

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Weekend, with E.mc and Big E.

Sep19

Weekend Holiday!

This weekend, we drove up to Troy (Albany) to see our friends E. Mc & Kris. It’s about a 4-hour drive, so not one we make all that often (maybe 2-3 times a year).

On the way, we finally hit Black Bear Winery, a “grape-free winery” so far out in the middle of nowhere and so very far off any of the NYC wine trails that I’m not sure how they survive… and only a 15-minute detour off our normal route to Troy.

We eventually, slightly tipsier and with three bottles of wine-like product in the trunk (tasty stuff!), ended up in Troy, where we found out we were going to see a comedian at the Troy Music Hall! We saw Jim Breuer, who… well, he wasn’t my style, but his opening act was awesome.

The next day was the planned main event – the Big E, as mentioned last week.

Oh mannnn. We were there for seven hours. We ate so much fair food (fried dough! my favorite~. Lobster rolls! (That was new). Maple Milkshake… Nom!). We bought Flannel! From Vermont! (of course). We saw cows and goats and sheep and … no chickens, though. There was a tiny historical village! There were ~~So Many People~~. There was ~so much music~. It was a bit of sensory overload…

…and I’m not really sure what happened after that. Well, the road ate Kris’ car, keeping with the current curse-of-the-visiting, there was a very good brunch the next day, and we went to a genuine mall, something I don’t do much in Ithaca, since we don’t really have one of those.

Also, we bought booze. This seems to be a theme.

I’m back, it’s Monday, and I have Trip Hangover. Can’t wait to do it again!

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Weekend! With Cap and Morn, Sledgehammers and firewood

Sep14

I have to say, I get a kick out of walking in to a hardware store in my girliest outfits and buying, say, a sledgehammer…

It’s been a lot of yardwork and then some more yardwork lately. Moving firewood around, re-organizing the barn to better fit more firewood in there – and to be able to cut large piece of plywood and 2x10x10s, so as to make a bedframe…

And also, I got to smash a toilet to bits. That was fun. 😀

Somewhere in there, though, I drove to Rochester to see [twitter.com profile] capriox_b and [twitter.com profile] psygeek at Capriox’s house! (Also, there were cows, dogs, kitties, and a cow-milking robot!)

It was awesome to see old friends (Cap) and new friends (Psygeek) and to actually meet up with interwebs people. Also, in a nice coincidence, Cap lives just a couple blocks from my parents and my aunt & uncle, so I squeezed in a little extra visitation while I was in town. It made for a very very nice weekend.

Also, I discussed the definition of “necessary shoes” and “ridiculous boots” (https://www.instagram.com/p/BKMBtO3BFqT/), thought about winter wardrobes, and fixed my clothes steamer whilst researching water softeners. Anyone have one they really like?

This weekend, we’re going to The Big E. No idea what to expect, but I hear it’s fun!

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