This evening, since it’s Thursday, was my usual knitting group night at a local coffee shop. But tonight, since it’s the last one before Christmas, we all decided to do a gift swap. We set a price limit and agreed in advance that it would be nice gifts (because sometimes the White Elephant gift swap tends to be weird or wacky things, sort of like the hand-shaped jello mold I ended up with at Monday’s choral party), and since we’re a knitting group, it was easy to assume that there would be some knitting-related items amid the mix.

There were nine of us who gathered with gifts to swap this evening. It went pretty smoothly in the beginning, with everyone opening their present and everyone oohing and aahing. There were bags full of gorgeous yarn, boxes with pattern books and knitting fiction, packages stuffed with chocolate and other goodies. So there was a minimum of stealing as we completed the first round…until the very first person to open a gift was allowed to steal a present. And that’s when the fun began. With a lot of laughter, and people pretending to hide their presents so no one would steal them, and people talking up other people’s presents to get them to take *those*, we spent the next half hour or so doing a massive gift swapping. Luckily we had set a limit to three owners per gift, or this would have gone on all night. At any rate, eventually one of the knitters finally took the last gift, and we were done, with the gift swap declared a rousing success. Although next year we have all decided that since the gifts that were in highest demand were the ones that all had a common theme, next year’s gift swap will involve yarn and chocolate. Because few things make knitters happier than yarn or chocolate.

Tis the season for Holidailies!

I am the sort of person who the instantaneous data access of the internet was made for. This is especially true when it comes to shipping. If I have ordered something, I will be obsessively checking the tracking site daily (if not more often) to see how far my package has come, and if I mail something, I’m right there online, following its progress as it wings its way to its intended recipient.

Christmastime is always a perfect opportunity to fulfill my obsessive tracking needs. I’ve watched every package I’ve ordered make its way to our doorstep, and these past few days I have carefully tracked our first package out, as it made its way up to my little sister. We shipped it this past weekend because I knew it was going to be quite heavy and I was nervous that if we waited it wouldn’t make it there in time. So naturally this meant it arrived over a week early. Ah well.

On the plus side, however, this worked out well, because part of the gift I’m giving my family this year is something that I didn’t ever have the opportunity to test before I sent. So my little sister was more than happy to oblige. I’m not going to go into more specifics, because the remaining family who will be getting this exact same thing in *their* package reads this, but suffice it to say that everything worked out better than I had hope. So yay for me.

On an entirely unrelated note, around this time of year, in some cultures, little children leave their shoes out at night, in the hopes that Saint Nick will fill them with gifts.

Richard took his shoes off last night while we were camped out on the couch watching TV, and forgot to take them downstairs with him when we went to bed. So when we came upstairs this morning, imagine our surprise to find out that Saint Nick had stopped by, to fill them full of gifts!

(Of course, in this case, Saint Nick comes in the form of a rather portly tortoiseshell cat, whose favorite thing to do is to cart around her extensive collection of small stuffed critters, and who also has quite a fascination for Richard’s shoes, but still, it seemed very holiday-appropriate today.)

Tis the season for Holidailies!

We put up the tree this evening.

The answer to your question, by the way, is yes. Cthulu is once again atop the tree, flanked by his servitor caribou.

Tis the season for Holidailies

This week it is all about the holiday gatherings and white elephant gift exchanges for me. One of the things we did when we went to CostCo on Saturday was to look for suitable items for the various gift swaps. Two of them are the sort where the gift is supposed to be nice, and there was a price limit, so I managed to find something suitably perfect for both. The third was more the typical type of white elephant gift swap, where everyone brings something small and/or goofy, so I didn’t need to get anything extra because I was already all set.

The gathering tonight was for the women’s choral ensemble in which I sing. It was a bit of a pot-luck so, since they’d been such a hit the first time I made them, I decided to make another batch of the lemon curd and shortbread bars. They were just as big a hit this evening, if the numbers of threats to harm me for bringing them (said either with mouth full of lemon bar, or with fingers already reaching for another one) are any indication.

It was a small group there this evening, since some of the singers have already left on vacation, or had other holiday plans. But we all crowded into the kitchen and nibbled food and chattered and laughed and did not one single bit of singing. Someone had given the director a caroling kit, which consisted of a variety of goofy winter holiday hats and jingle bell wristlets, so it was perhaps inevitable that eventually every single one of us ended up festively attired by the end of the party. We did the gift swap of goofy little presents, including a rather wacky board with a spinner and a list of options of What Would Bacon Do, and a hand-shaped jello mold (which I eventually ended up with). I brought a bag with a duo of some of my homemade jam and jelly, which was stolen at least once during the game.

It was a fun little party. By the time it gets to concert time, we’re usually all stressed and starting to snap at each other, and once the concert is finally over, we’re all too tired to really want to think about spending the slightest bit more time in each other’s company, so it was nice to have a chance to hang out with the other singers just for the fun of it.

Tis the season for Holidailies!

I have been eying the weather warily all day today. We were supposed to get some kind of big soggy storm in our area this weekend, and I figured with our luck, it would hit right before the party was to start.

Luckily, however, it has been nothing more than a little misty and damp so far today. In fact, this morning it was clear – clear enough that Richard could get outside and sweep off the front porch and steps while I whisked around inside the house, wiping down surfaces and cleaning windows. I set up the crockpot with cider and mulling spices, unearthed the tea kettle and filled it with water to boil for hot cocoa, found a cute container to set out the mini marshmallows, and thawed the remainder of the massive batch of chocolate toffee chip cookies I made, that have been lurking in the freezer for just such an occasion. We put wet food on plates and then I took them downstairs, followed closely thereafter by a quartet of loud and suddenly starving cats, because bribery by canned food is much, much easier for herding cats than trying to actually *catch* them when they most definitely do not want to be caught. And in a move that stunned us both, when I put down the second plate, Checkers descended from her lofty post atop the largest cat tree in the bedroom, and ate off the plate *beside Tangerine.*. Considering that this is the same cat who gets a wee bit pissy if someone else is on the bed when she is on the bed, or someone else is even *looking* at her, I am going to count this as a tiny little Christmas miracle.

Everything on my detailed list had been crossed off with time to spare once we finished, which turned out to be a good thing because a few folks (who had to come from very long distances) actually showed up a little bit early. Eventually the house started to fill up completely, and it turned out to be a very good thing that we did all the rearranging of furniture, because that meant there were lots of places for people to gather. At one point I started laughing because the living room was full of lots of Richard’s friends from his writers’ group, while the green room was full of friends from my Sacramento knitters group, and everyone else was congregated in the kitchen, as if there had been some unspoken rule that said they all couldn’t mix. It was fun having knitters from my old group and my new group getting to meet, and bonding over recognized lace scarf patterns and handknit socks. Several of our neighbors were able to come, which was fun, since none of them had seen the kitchen since we did the big remodel, and jaws were actually dropping each time one of them would wander in.

Eventually, the party ended, and everyone headed out, leaving behind an impressive collection of cookies and other goodies. Luckily, Richard’s best friend remained behind, which meant we could foist most of the leftovers on him to take home. Most of our guests remembered to bring some canned food for the local food bank, so there’s a nice collection piled in the front hall to be taken down later this week. I have released the cats, who are now creeping slowly around the upstairs again, nervously checking to make sure that all those strange noisy people are truly gone. And we are left with a house that is suddenly quiet after all the people, filled with the smells of holiday cookies and mulled cider and hot chocolate, and oh yes, very, very clean.

Tis the season for Holidailies!

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!

When you have an abundance of lemon juice in the refrigerator, what else can you do but bake something?

Brown sugar shortbread – I found the recipe online (and then promptly closed my browser window so I don’t recall where, but it’s just shortbread, and my best buddy Google says there’s about a gazillion recipes out there). Bizarrely, I have never made shortbread before. It is disgustingly easy to make, as long as you have a stick of butter and some sugar and flour, and an appropriately sized pan.

Lemon curd. Because one can never have too much of it.

Once both had cooled, I topped the shortbread with the fresh lemon curd, and stashed that in the fridge for a few hours to set.

We fed about half of them to Richard’s writer’s group last night, and I sent the rest of them in to his office with him this morning. He reported that it did not take long for them to all disappear.

This is one of those silly little recipes that was incredibly easy and quick (well, except for the waiting-for-things-to-cool part). Considering that the Meyer lemon tree is only going to just keep on getting bigger each year, requiring me to come up with more and more ways to use lemons, I think we’ll definitely be making these again.

All this week we are slowly putting out all the holiday decorations. This afternoon I pulled out this pair of adorable reindeer and set them on the window in the living room.

My younger sister and I agreed to try to do Christmas as handmade as we could this year. So she and my niece gave us all a selection of extremely delicious fudge (not pictured here because, well, we ate it already – heh), and she knit dishcloths for everyone – something that fills me with glee because finally I have another knitter in the family (yay!) – and my brother-in-law made everyone a set of these.

There is something very satisfying about opening presents that someone made for you by hand. I hope my family likes all the stuff I’ve been making for them just as much!

Tis the season for Holidailies

What do you do when, after making pomegranate jelly, you have just a little bit of juice left?

You make pomegranate gummy candy.

Tis the season for Holidailies!

I had such high hopes when we moved into the new office. Supposedly there would be temperature ‘zones’ in the new place – including one in my area – where we could adjust the temperature to our own comfort level, instead of having to endure whatever the main office was set to. We were all really looking forward to this, because in the old office, we were never able to settle on a comfortable temperature. Half the office was always sweltering; the other half was always huddled over space heaters tucked underneath their desks. To be fair, that was more the result of in adequate venting for the HVAC system, but still, it was really annoying. After all, one should not require a space heater in Sacramento in the middle of summer.

This whole temperature zone thing, however, just isn’t working out the way I’d hoped. No amount of fiddling with the thermostat in my area seems to make a bit of difference. Granted, it was mostly fine during the summer – my area stayed comfortably cool during the warmer months, while the front of the office had to resort to closing all the blinds and covering over all those lovely windows and views of the river because otherwise it just got too warm. But now that it is winter, and the temperature is in the mid 30’s and low 40’s, it’s starting to get a little ridiculous. I have given up entirely on wearing my cute flats to work, and have returned to wearing the ugly lace-ups with my handknit wool socks, because otherwise my feet freeze. I have been learning to type with only one hand while I sit on the other one in an attempt to warm up my fingers. I drink far too much coffee because at least it’s something hot I can wrap my poor frozen hands around.

So…I am back to the space heater tucked carefully underneath the desk, and keeping a jacket permanently in the office, for something to wrap around my shoulders, and rummaging through my yarn stash for the perfect candidate for a pair or two of fingerless gloves. So much for the much-acclaimed temperature ‘zone’. Sigh.

Tis the season for Holidailies!