Every year or so, on the rare occasions when my whole family is all together in one location, we all gather at a photography studio and get family pictures. The last ones are a few years old, so my older sister made us an appointment, and this morning, all eleven of us met up at the Sears in Solano Mall to take some updated pictures. I was worried there might be traffic, so we headed out a bit early, and of course ended up with plenty of time to spare – time enough, in fact, to pick up a new belt for Richard and to even do a little browsing in the women’s department for me. We’d have had even more time, except that my dad called to tell me that the photographers were running early and had already started with my little sister and her family, and by the time we got up there they’d taken my parents in for their pictures, and we’d only had a few moments to sit before it was our turn. And by the time we were done, my older sister and her family had made it there, exactly on time for our original appointment, so at least the taking of the pictures went relatively quick. And the nicest thing about the whole process was that, since they now use digital cameras, we could see instantly how the photos turned out, which was good since it took us one heck of a lot of tries to get a decent picture of the entire extended family where everyone was smiling and facing the right direction and not looking like a complete dork.

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This morning Richard headed off to Campbell to spend the day with his family, and I headed back to my parents’ house to start the day with leftover pie and sticky buns for breakfast. My sisters and my mom and dad all wanted to go and do a little shopping, and since I didn’t really have any need to go to any actual stores, plus didn’t think I’d have the energy to do much in the way of mall walking, I went back home and took a short nap while they went out and hit the stores and did lunch.

I did manage to track down the blue Kool-aid at the one grocery store in town that was not actually open on Thanksgiving afternoon, so after they came back from their shopping excursion, I rounded up all the kids into the kitchen and had them help me dye yarn with Kool-aid. My niece, of course, chose pink, because she is very much into anything pink, and if it is sparkly, that makes it even better. My nephews wanted blue and orange. As we talked about what they wanted for their slippers, two of them decided they wanted stripes, and I had a momentary thought that maybe I should have broken the skeins into smaller balls to let them do more colors, but luckily, the niece wants blue and pink, the older nephew wants blue and orange, and the youngest nephew just wants solid orange. So it all worked out.

The dyes in Kool-aid are extremely bright if you concentrate them enough – we got a wonderful dark orange with four packets of the stuff, and the blue and the pink came out gorgeous too. We hung them out on the line in my parents’ backyard to dry, and my niece kept leaping up to see if they were dry all afternoon.

There was more playing of Twister by the small people, although us adults refrained this time. The kids were sent out in the afternoon to decorate my parents’ driveway with sidewalk chalk, and then we adults all trooped out later to check out the artwork (some of which was more recognizable than others, but that is expected when your artists range in age from five to eight). At one point we all headed outside for a ‘science experiment’, which mainly involved my younger brother-in-law dropping as many Mentos as he could slam into bottles of Diet Coke before they exploded all over him. He managed to get some impressive fountains, although nothing remotely as impressive as these guys achieved.

My older sister eventually packed up her husband and her boys to go home, and after my niece was put into bed I was just about ready to head home myself, when my little sister noted that my niece had been asking about the doll house in my parents’ bedroom, and wondering if maybe grandpa and grandma would let her play with it.

I should note that this is not some ordinary doll house. This thing is about five feet wiide, and about five feet tall and composed of nine rooms and an attic, all connected with doors with actual handles, built my my dad for my sisters and I when we were probably about the age my niece is now, which is at least thirty years ago. My mom and dad did not approve of Barbies, so my sisters and I had the Sunshine Family, which consisted of a mom and a dad and a little baby, and each doll or item of clothing purchased came with a little leaflet full of do-it-yourself projects for making your own furniture or other dollhouse accessories. My sisters and I spent hours playing with that thing, crocheting rugs, building chairs out of egg carton segments, beds out of tissue boxes, lamps out of empty spools of thread.

The doll house moved with us everywhere the Air Force sent us, until finally we ended up in California, and then we were all too old to play with doll houses, and eventually, when my parents moved to this house, they stashed it in their bedroom for lack of a better place to keep it, and filled it with miscellaneous boxes, and it’s been sitting there ever since. One of the things my mom had envisioned when they built the enclosed three-season porch on to their house a year or two ago was that the doll house would eventually be moved out there, so the small people could play with it. I guess my dad’s been resisting it, since there’s really no where to put it where it won’t be blocking some of the windows, but once my niece finally noticed it and my younger sister and I started talking about it, my dad got this look on his face that indicated that he knew he had finally lost this particular battle.

The first question was whether or not they still had the dolls and the accessories for it, so we started pulling out boxes, and I swear it was like someone threw my little sister and I into a time machine, because sure enough, they’d actually kept them. We opened up one of the boxes and pulled out the dolls and started diving down into the rest of it, pulling things out, do you remember this? Oh, remember when we made this, oh wow, I can’t believe we forgot about that. So then there was a very brief discussion about waiting until everyone else was there the next morning to try to move it, but then my dad figured if we were going to move it we might as well just do it right away, so before we knew it, we were clearing out all the boxes and vacuuming out years of accumulated dust, and then carrying it onto the porch. And then there was nothing to it but my little sister and I had to immediately sit down with the boxes of dolls and accessories and pull out every single one of them and try to get the doll house set up. Our excuse was that this way it would be ready when my niece got up in the morning, but really, it was just because neither of us wanted to put off getting a chance to go through those boxes again.

There are some of the pieces that are broken, and some where we weren’t entirely sure what they used to be. It took three of us to try to put together the farm kit, and even after we were done, we were not entirely sure we’d set it up correctly (because for some funny reason, the directions were never put back with it when it was last packed up, probably twenty five years ago). My little sister tried a quick eBay search to see if she could at least track down a picture, but she had no luck, so we muddled through the best we could, and figured that chances were likely the little kids wouldn’t really care if it was perfect anyway. And then we all stood back and looked at all of it – the little farm in one corner of the porch with the water trough that actually pumps water and the chickens that used to lay real ‘eggs’ (although we have long since lost their eggs) and the tiny little house that houses Holly Hobby – or rather, the original Holly Hobby with the gingham and the braids – and standing against one wall, that amazing doll house that had somehow survived all the moves and the changes of thirty plus years, looking now as if the three little girls for whom it was made had simply just left the room only moments before, instead of thirty years ago, and were going to come around the corner any minute, still with long braids or pigtails, two of them in glasses, the youngest barely able to reach up into the attic, each of them full of stories and adventures for those well loved dolls and those lopsided pieces of furniture they made so proudly, so very, very long ago.

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I feel as if I have spent a better part of today anxiously watching the clock to determine just when it is I can take more cold medication. I can feel when it wears off; the sinuses clog and the chills come back, but when I take more, it all goes (mostly) away for a few more hours.

We headed over to my parents’ house in the morning for the traditional breakfast of homemade sticky buns (made without salt, which means that the bread dough is always a bit sweeter than you expect when you bite into it) and then we all spent most of the day lounging around, reading books or knitting (well, I was the only one doing that), or lurking in corners typing madly on laptops (Richard was still working on Nanowrimo) or sometimes chatting. The kids pretty much kept each other entertained, playing with toys inside the house, or out on the back enclosed porch, or even taking advantage of the gorgeous sunny weather outside and dragging some of the adults out with them to go run around in the school playground across the street.

There was the usual assortment of fresh veggies and crackers and dips for a browsy kind of lunch, and then Richard and I headed off to the grocery store to see if we could find just the right colors of Kool-aid for the yarn-dying project I planned to do with the kids (and discovered that the blue Kool-aid is very hard to find – we couldn’t find it at either store we went to, and by then most places were already closed or just about to shut down for the rest of the day so we finally gave up). At one point I tried to go take a nap, but the combination of strange bed, stuffed nose, and the ambient noise of small people who really ever only talk at one (loud) volume) on the other side of the wall meant that I only managed to just lie there and snuffle miserably for an hour or so before I finally gave up and rejoined the rest of the group to continue on my knitting.

At one point in the afternoon, as it was getting closer to dinner time, and in order to keep the kids from getting more squirrely, someone pulled out the old Twister game from the game cupboard. The kids had never played before and they had a complete blast. They are all still a bit too small for the game, in that there were times when they just couldn’t stretch themselves far enough to reach completely across the mat after getting all tangled up with their feet and their hands. But they absolutely loved it – I think they could have cheerfully played it for hours, and the good thing about them all being so small is that all three could play at once. Eventually, of course, we all insisted that the adults take a turn, so first my sisters and I did it, although eventually I gave up because bending over for that long was making my sinuses go completely haywire, and then all three husbands did it, and that is when we discovered that my older sister’s husband knows how to play dirty. Here we and the kids were all being nice and sticking to our half or third of the mat, but there he was, stretching across the mat in front of the other guys so they’d have to work extra hard to get around him and I am not sure who was laughing the hardest throughout the entire game – those of us watching, or the guys themselves.

Dinner was, of course, delicious, and we all ate far too much, but that is only because there was too much to eat in the first place. My parents got a special turkey from the Co-op because most turkeys are injected with a salt water solution to keep them moist – fine for the normal person, but not remotely fine for someone on a low sodium diet like my dad. It turned out fine though – I’m not honestly sure any of us could taste any difference at all, which makes me wonder why they do the injections at all – and there was so much other food on the table that it wouldn’t have mattered if the turkey had tasted terrible anyway. My little sister made polenta with a marinara sauce for her and her family since they are vegetarian, but she made enough for the rest of us to try it too, and that is the first time, I think, that I have ever had polenta. It’s pretty darn good, actually, and I am going to have to have her send me a recipe or three to try, since cornmeal is Core, and we (Richard and I) are trying to follow that diet again (although he is the only one going to Weight Watchers meetings because I am not sure I can actually stomach the peppy lectures about inane things I already know and the required cheering for the people who only ever had ten pounds to lose and dropped it in five weeks by just switching to diet soda, and somehow still think that they have fought as hard a battle as those of us who have a heck of a lot more than ten pounds to take off and who have been losing that battle for most of our adults lives).

There was talk of the adults all playing a game together after the kids had gone to bed, by the cold medication only goes so far, and I didn’t sleep very well last night, so I bowed out shortly after the kids were all put to bed, and Richard and I came home to collapse on the sofa downstairs – me surrounded by four cats who instantly converged on me with tales of being left alone *all day long* – and we watched Grey’s Anatomy, and now I am trying to talk some sense into my very uncooperative sinuses to please let me get just a little sleep tonight, and please, once this cold goes away, do not take it as a sign that they need to clog up and force me to spend the next week wired on decongestants, which can only now be purchased after signing a special form and showing a valid picture ID.

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Apparently the last two days were a complete and utter fluke. I woke up this morning with my throat hurting again, and my nose all stuffed up, and a little bit of the chills, which always suggests that there might be a fever coming along for the ride. So I guess I get to be sick for another major holiday. Ugh.

I took some cold medication just to tune all the symptoms back to a minor annoyance for a few hours and tried my best to get more things on my list-for-the-week done, but the cleaning of the office took a wee bit longer than I’d anticipated (which really does suggest maybe next time I ought not to leave it this long, hmm?). So instead of reorganizing and creating an inventory database of my yarn stash, I instead made two loaves of banana bread because the remaining bananas on the counter were looking pretty nasty, and I swung by my parents’ house to get a little plastic baggy full of their sodium-free baking powder and baking soda substitutes (and then felt vaguely illicit, dirivng around with an unmarked bag of strange white powder in the cup holder of my car). I zipped off to Vacaville to pick up the books we’d put on hold for my brother-in-law’s birthday and then came right back home to get the pumpkin bread (made as sodium-free as possible for my dad) mixed up and in the oven in time for it to cook before we had to head off to Napa. I really wanted a nap, but I do not trust myself to wake up to oven timers when there is the potential of overcooking or burning as a result of oversleeping, so instead I knit furiously on my next sock-in-progress (mystery yarn in stripes of every color brown and cream that remind me so much of a cake or a Snickers candy bar that I have decided to call them my chocolate layer socks). Richard left work early, this being the last day before a holiday, so he came home in time for us to get the bread out of the oven and wrap the books and then hop right back in the car and head off to Napa for my brother-in-law’s birthday dinner celebration, with only a very slight detour along the way to pick up a new box of cold medication for me, because by then I was getting pretty desperate.

Dinner was a little delayed, but that just gave everyone more of a chance to chat, and more time for the little kids to tear around upstairs (although they were not running, they assured us, each time one of us adults would go up to check on how it is that ‘walking’ feet can thunder quite so fast). My cold medication kicked in enough that I managed to spend most of the evening feeling slightly more human than I did all day, but by the time it was time to go, it had started to wear off. And driving down Highway 12 in the dark and the rain is just enough fun (not) that I decided throwing cold medication into the mix was probably not a wise decision.

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The defnite problem to putting off a big project is that it will invariably take far longer than you planned. I am beginning to think that the chances of me managing to do everything on my list for the week are dropping rapidly from slim to none. Heh. Ah well.

The good news is that I finished all the shredding today. Not only that, but I think I am just about done with organizing the desk. I set up a new rotating filing system for bill paperwork, and also a tracking spreadsheet so we can see at a glance what has and has not been paid for the month. We will not discuss the fact that there are little bits of shredded paper all over the floor on my side of the computer room or the bags of stuff that still need sorting in the bedroom, or the fact that there is a stack of old checks from long-defunct checking accounts that need to still be shredded; the important thing to note here is that for the first time in possibly years, my desks are clear.

I took a short break from all the sorting and shredding and dust and hastily finished up the pineapple hat that I was making for a store sample. Naturally, this meant I had to then go drop it off at the store immediately, if only to get myself out of the house and away from the still slightly messy computer room. While I was there, it would have been rude to just fling a hat at them and run, so naturally I also had to sit and knit and chat with them for a while, especially about how we all wished that somehow, by the time we returned home, elves would have come in and magically finished all our cleaning/organizing/home caring tasks.

I worked on my next sock-in-progress (the last of the zebra socks) and rewarded myself for a job well done by buying some cute little needle holders for my sock needles and also a measuring tape that looks like a Queen Bee. And naturally I also had to poke around and see all the new yarns which had arrived since I was last there, which led to me bringing home two skeins of bright red cotton and wool blend laceweight, and a pattern for some pretty lace scarves to do another store sample. Have I mentioned lately how very cool it is to have friends who sell yarn (and let me make stuff for them)?

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A few weeks ago, I opened the envelope that contained our quarterly vacation hours balance at work, and realized that despite having taken three entire weeks of vacation back in May to go to Ireland, and also a few additional days here and there since then, I had way too much unused vacation – enough that it was going to start hitting the ‘use it or lose it’ level in a few months if I didn’t try to do something about right away. So I eyed the calendar and then decided that I would make good use of the next two work holidays, namely Thanksgiving and Christmas, and turn what would otherwise be a long weekend into an entire week off. At the very least, by the end of the year I’ll have managed to trim 6 more days worth of vacation off the accumulated total.

Being sick this weekend was not a good start to my week, but I woke up this morning and felt a lot better than yesterday, so I am crossing my fingers that this means I am done with the winter cold for now. I sat down and scribbled up a rather ambitious list of things i really want to accomplish during the next three days, and made sure to include in the list plenty of time to knit (by listing out the number of socks I intend to have finished before the end of the month).

There has been a lot of temptation today to just ignore the list and curl up in bed with a big mug of coffee and my yarn and the cats and just spend all day either knitting or napping, but the problem is that I keep doing that, and the things on my list keep being left undone. So instead I made myself tackle the very worst job, which was to clear out my side of the computer room. It doesn’t sound so awful until you realize that my side includes all the files of old bill paperwork that have been accumulating in boxes over the past year or two, waiting to be shredded because we cannot just throw them out into the trash, and as the piles got larger and larger I have been dreading this chore more and more.

I spent several hours this morning and this afternoon, doing nothing but sorting and shredding. I threw away piles of paperwork related to credit cards or accounts that have long since been closed. I threw out great piles of junk and filled a huge box with stuff that needs to go to the recycling center. By the time I finally decided to call it quits in the desk organization project for the day, I had filled several large bags completely full of shredded paperwork, and the worst part is that I am not yet done.

I took time here and there to do some knitting on the current pair of socks that I fully intend to have finished before Thanksgiving, and also did a run to the grocery store to stock up on everything we might need for the coming week. When Richard came home I cooked up some vegetarian sausage and spaghetti and sauce and we had that for dinner, and then we purged the fridge, throwing out a whole pile of things that had been lurking in the back, plotting to become their own life forms.

There is still a huge pile of stuff on the floor in front of the shredder to be dealt with, and I have only made a small dent in clearing off my secondary desk, but there is also a huge sense of relief that I have finally worked up the willpower to tackle this project, and I am trying very hard to give myself little lectures about how, once it is done, I cannot ever let it get this bad again.

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I had grand plans this morning of attempting to sleep in late and simply skipping church, since even though the sore throat was (mostly) gone by the time I woke up, I knew I was still going to be exhausted and a little stuffy throughout the day. But then I woke up early because I just couldn’t sleep any longer and I checked my email and one of the other recorder players wanted to know if I’d bring my recorder with me to church because he wanted to give something a try and, well, so much for grand plans.

I’m glad that I did go, though, at least to run through the piece he wanted to try, because now I have some really fun ideas for something to do with the recorder group, and even though this isn’t going to be just the usual transcribing piano parts to recorder but doing some actual *arranging*, I am still excited about the idea. Plus it was nice to poke my head into the Fellowship Hall where all the unsold items from yesterday’s bazaar were arrayed, and see that of all the things I”d brought over, only five jars of the pomegranate glaze were left.

This afternoon was the monthly knitting gathering at the bakery in Vacaville, so Richard and I went early for lunch, and then he left me there amid the other knitters and ran away to Borders to escape all the yarn-related chatter for the few hours we were there, and returning only after all the other knitters were gone. Then it was off to CostCo to stock up on healthy stuff for the kitchen, followed by a massive purging of the refrigerator (because it is amazing, sometimes, what you can find lurking in the back of the shelves when you go digging). Richard did laundry while I loaded the dishwasher, and then we cooked ourselves a rather virtuous dinner and we ate in front of the television while watching Ghostbusters.

There is still that feeling of something in the back of my throat, which I know just means it’s still a little swollen, and I’m still tiring too fast from doing things like going up and down the stairs, but today was a lot better than yesterday so I am hopeful that this means that this little bout of winter ick isn’t going to finally go away.

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When I woke up this morning, my throat was sore and there was that nasty feeling that there is something lurking in my throat, something that just would not go away no matter how hard I swallowed. Plus I felt a little achy and I was a bit stuffy, which means that I guess now it’s my turn to get the latest bout of winter ick that everyone else seems to be passing around with abandon.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have the luxury of just climbing back into bed; I had to be over at the church because the recorder group was scheduled to play at the Open House / Bazaar event. So we went over and we ate breakfast and talked to friends and when all the other players arrived, I rounded them all up and we did a quick run-through of the songs we were going to play, and then, eventually, we played them. There were only four of us, but that was enough to cover all the necessary parts, so I was happy with how we sounded.

That whole thing pretty much wore me out, so after we got home I crashed for a few hours until I realized that I really shouldn’t sleep any more, and I have spent the rest of this afternoon curled up either on the bed or on the sofa downstairs, surrounded by cats who are feeling just as lazy as I am, working on a very cute, and highly involved pattern for a knit pineapple hat.

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None of the jelly set. Not a single jar of it.

Making it, initially, takes an awful lot of time, what with having to shuck the pomegranates and then boil them down for juice and then make the jelly. Add to that the extra four or five hours I have spent trying various methods to reset the unset jars, and it all adds up to a hell of a lot of time spent for nothing.

I dropped all the pumpkin bread and the four jars of set jelly off at the church this morning, and left the rest til the evening, hoping maybe it might change. No luck. I labeled the fourteen unset jars as pomegranate glaze, in the hopes that this will inspire at least a few uses (using it to glaze ham comes to mind right away, and it’d probably be pretty good), and dropped all that off this evening.

I am seriously starting to rethink our tradition of making this stuff every year. We usually manage to get one batch to set, but that never seems quite worth all the effort of having all the rest just sit in its jars and never gel.

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When we made pomegranate jelly last month, only the first batch set. I tried resetting some of the syrup a few weeks ago but didn’t have much luck. However, time is rapidly running out for any further chances, and this morning I had the unpleasant realization that the bazaar is this weekend and if I was going to try to salvage this stuff, tonight was really my only remaining chance.

So after work and coming home to deal with cats and then after choir practice, I came home and tackled the jelly. There were fifteen jars of jelly that did not set, and it took me three batches to treat them all – a laborious process of boiling and adding more pectin and sugar and lemon juice, and then boiling again, for a very exact amount of time (no more and no less) and then doing my best to pour it into freshly washed and sterilized jars without making too much of a mess all over the kitchen counters. I am realizing more and more that I really do need to invest in some additional equipment for canning. It’s one thing when we do it as a group and between all of us we can cobble together all the necessary equipment from either our own kitchens, or by borrowing the stuff from our respective moms, but I am a grown adult now and I really ought to own my own canning funnel. One of these days I will remember that I need to do this *before* I am suddenly facing a pan of boiling jelly and a row of glass jars and trying to figure out how to best pour it in without spilling it all over the place.

The jelly is cooling on the counter now and I am crossing my fingers that this resetting process will work, because while pomegranate jelly is a good seller, it is harder to convince people to invest in a dozen or so jars of pomegranate syrup.

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