This morning I finally finished the latest using-up-lemons recipe – candied lemon peels. I’ve seen quite a few recipes online, but I liked the look of this one the best, primarily because it did not require me to actually *peel* anything (especially since I intended to use the juice from the fruit for something else), but instead just chop the fruit in half, squeeze out all the juice, and then toss the rinds into a pot.

I did the three rounds of boiling the peels on Wednesday night, but did not get a chance to do the next step – three hours of simmering in simple syrup – until last night. And then I laid all the (very sticky) little strips of peel out on the racks of my dehydrator to dry, and this morning I rolled them in sugar and was finally done.

I suspect normally I wouldn’t be all that thrilled with a recipe that takes so much time to complete, but they turned out really tasty – about the consistency of a gumdrop, but with a little stronger bite to the taste – so I suspect this one is likely to join the annual rotation of how-to-use-up-lemon recipes as that little tree just keeps on getting bigger and producing more fruit.

Lemon peel candy-making aside, today has primarily been all about cleaning. Yesterday morning while eating breakfast I sat down with a pad of paper and scribbled up detailed lists of everything we needed to do, room by room, to get ready for tomorrow. We headed off to Woodland for haircuts, then swung through Costco on the way home to stock up on soda and paper cups and apple cider and hot chocolate, and we stopped by Panera on the way home for lunch, but after that, it was time to get started on the cleaning.

Even with six hair-shedding, dust-tracking, hairball-hacking cats, we usually manage to keep the house in pretty good shape, so I knew that preparing for tomorrow really wouldn’t take us all that long. But when one is hosting an open house specifically to show *off* one’s brand new kitchen and other renovations, it’s the perfect excuse to do all the little nitpicky deep cleaning things that every house needs at least once a year.

Richard went off to pick up a pizza for dinner (since neither of us felt like trying to actually cook anything); or rather, he started to leave, at which point I looked at the clock and realized that if I was going to get the package into the mail for my little sister and her family for Christmas this weekend, time was rapidly running out. So there was some mad scurrying around, wrapping presents and stuffing things into a box, and surrounding them all with piles of shredded paper in the hopes that the breakable things make it up to Seattle in once piece. He made it to the UPS store with barely a minute to spare, but at least the package got into the mail, and that is one more thing to check off the rather lengthy To Do list.

Tis the season for Holidailies!