Our concert dress (for the women’s ensemble) is black pants, black shoes, and a black suit jacket. A few days before the first concert in which I sang, I realized I had yet to purchase the black suit jacket, so I ran off to the nearest department store and consider myself extremely lucky that I was able to find one quickly, that fits (the fact that it is also machine washable is a huge bonus because me and dry-clean-only do not mix).

That was little over two years ago. Every concert I pull out the jacket, and put on my pair of good black pants, and I find myself wishing that at least one of the two items of clothing had a pocket (because I have sinuses of doom and am often in need of a tissue). The jacket *looked* like it had pockets, but they were just little flaps, with no pocket underneath (and the jacket is lined inside, so there was no indication that pockets might actually be lurking there in the first place). It was not until last night, sitting in the rehearsal room and waiting for the concert to start, when I bemoaned my lack of pockets, that one of my fellow singers said ‘Oh, actually, you probably do. See? These were just stitched close so the jacket wouldn’t hang funny in the store.’ And then she proceeded to carefully remove the thread underneath the previously useless little flaps revealing, ta da, pockets! Wow.

(In my defense, computer nerds / research writers do not normally make a habit of wearing suits. But still. Two years I have had this jacket, people. Two years. Sigh.)

Tis the season for Holidailies!

This morning I slept in, gloriously, until 9am. Or rather, I lay in bed until then, before finally giving up because cats view the slightest cracking of the eyelids as a sign of weakness and then begin, in approximately ten to fifteen minute intervals, to walk across my pillow (Rosie and Zucchini), demand to burrow under the covers (Azzie and Checkers), or simply sit on the end table beside me and whine (all of the above). The only reason Sebastian wasn’t part of the whole ‘pester Jennifer until she gets out of bed’ event was that, as I discovered once I *did* finally haul myself out of bed, he was still firmly ensconced in my computer chair, where I had left him the night before. As for Tangerine, well, she is the sole cat in the house who does not feel duty-bound to be near me / on me at every opportunity (because the minute she laid eyes on Richard eight years ago, I was reduced to nothing more than chopped liver) so she was curled cutely into one of the sofa pillows upstairs and taking no part at all in the festivities.

For breakfast we had gingerbread bagels, picked up at Panera on the way down to visit the in-laws yesterday, and they were surprisingly tasty. I’d pondered going to the farmer’s market, but most of the groceries we needed weren’t going to be available there, so instead we headed off to Safeway. This required a slight detour in the route, as there was a run going on downtown, and some of the roads were blocked off by police cars and a whole lot of people waving flags and playing very loud and energetic music.

One of the reasons we needed to go to the store was to pick up eggs, because the Meyer lemons in our backyard have been ripe for a few weeks now and this meant it was time to make more lemon curd. And lemon curd, being such an oh-so-healthy recipe (uh – *not*) requires eggs. It also requires a whole bunch of butter and sugar. But the key ingredient, and the reason I was looking forward to making it, is that it uses up a whole pile of those cute little Meyer lemons our tree produces. Even with a double-batch of the stuff, though, once again I have barely made a dent in our lemon supply. Not to worry – I’ve been bookmarking some likely recipes for other ways to use up large quantities of lemons, and still leave enough left to foist, whole, on unsuspecting friends and relations.

Richard hosted the End-of-Nanowrimo party at our house this afternoon, so in preparation we did a little bit of cleaning, and then dragged all the Christmas decorations down from the attic. There’s still the tree and the lights inside and out to put up, but the house already looks a bit more festive, with all the nutcrackers placed carefully on the ledges over the doors, and all of our little nativity sets lined up on top of the piano (note to family – piano is full, do not need *any* more nativity sets; well, okay, if you find one that has either Cthulu, gargoyles, or daleks, we can discuss it).

People started to show up for the party, so I retired to the computer room with a cat and a book until it was time for me to head back to the church for the second concert. We made a few changes, mainly to our entrance and exit for the first half, which worked out extremely well, and overall, I think we did a fantastic job. But I have to admit that the very best part about the concert being over is knowing that I do not have to worry about music or singing for the rest of the calendar year.

We ate a pretty light lunch, since we knew people would bring food for the party, so by the time I got home this evening I was very, very hungry (not having had access to pot luck party food like Richard). So I took advantage of the fact that we actually have eggs in the house, and made myself an omelet for dinner, just because for some reason it sounded good. In case you were wondering, a teensy bit of homemade Meyer lemon curd on top of a plain cheese omelet is a very good thing. Dipping tiny little chocolate cookies into the remains of the lemon curd, followed by a dollop of whipped cream, is even better.

Tis the season for Holidailies!

It has been a very busy two days. Yesterday at work, every time I turned around there was another email from someone needing something fiddly done as quickly as possible, so I never did manage to get out early enough to go get my allergy shots for the week (oh well). And then right after dinner I was back out the door for the dress rehearsal, where we spent four hours going over all the music for the concert, until we were all making stupid mistakes because we were so tired, and it was finally time to go home and go to bed.

Today we went down to the in-laws, near San Jose, for the annual decorating of the tree. This year they bought a fake tree (which led Richard and I to proclaim that apparently we started a family trend, since we went fake last year), which was a little bit taller and significantly less prickly than in years past. Both of Richard’s sisters were there, and the youngest climbed behind the tree to decorate the side near the window this time, instead of me. Apparently this is also the first year they’ve had a tree skirt, which the cat finds quite fascinating, because it has big splashes of color and she likes to try to attack them.

After the tree was decorated and lunch was consumed, it was time to hop back in the car and drive home. I’d taken a decongestant in the morning (my sinuses hate me again) but it was only mildly effective, so by the time we headed out, my head was really starting to hurt. Richard drove while I closed my eyes and tried very hard to will my sinuses into submission, because singing with seriously congested sinuses is all kinds of not remotely fun.

Luckily all the ibuprofin I popped in the car, and later, finally kicked in shortly before we started to go through the music. And tonight’s concert went pretty well. It was a nearly full house – always a nice thing to see – and everyone seemed to really enjoy the music. Several of us went around after the concert with baskets of mistletoe on our arms and passed out the little packets to anyone who wanted some. My parents came, along with my knitting mom (aka the woman who taught me to knit, and who refers to me as her knitting daughter because her own daughters aren’t very interested in knitting), and as has become tradition, we all went out for ice cream after.

So now the first concert is over and I am, annoyingly, quite wide awake, now that the decongestants have kicked in completely (stupid sinuses). But I am not too worried because I know that tomorrow I can actually sleep in late (or as late as the cats will let me) and after tomorrow night my sinuses can do their worse (although I really hope they don’t take that as a challenge) because I will be done singing for the year, hooray.

Tis the season for Holidailies!

Today is the official start of Holidailies, so to anyone who’s coming here for the first time from over there, welcome. Check my About page for a little more about me.

It is getting quite cold around here, these last few days. I always like to hold out as long as possible on turning on the heat in the winter, and it goes in stages. First I turn on the heater, but only in the evenings when we’re home, and before we go to bed, and then only to a low temperature. Then, as the mercury drops outside, the heater use time period starts to expand. It wasn’t until this week that we finally gave up and left it on during the night. There are only so many extra blankets (and cats) you can pile onto the bed before it just gets ridiculous.

And the cold has come along with its good buddy fog, hanging damply over the entire city and making driving anywhere just that much more exciting, since visibility is about half what it normally is. And things aren’t helped by the fact that when driving through town, it’s that much harder to see pedestrians, or worse, bicyclists, most of whom don’t believe in using lights and so have this tendency to appear out of the fog and take even the most alert driver by surprise. I have to admit that it makes me almost a little glad that Richard came home from Seattle with a bit of a chest cold so has been driving to work instead of biking.

Tis the season for Holidailies!

This morning I got up at 6am, like I usually do. Normally my mornings are full of things like leisurely showering and dressing, taking care of all the cat-related chores (litter boxes, filling food and water bowls), checking my email, sipping my coffee, and pondering whether or not to make pancakes or bake some scones, or just have cereal for breakfast. Instead, in the space of half an hour,I took a *very* quick shower, threw on some clothes, commandeered Richard’s computer to print out directions, grabbed a little container of dried apples from the pantry, and then ran out of the house, with my music and concert dress jacket in tow. I picked up one of the other singers in the group, and drove to the KOVR studio in West Sacramento. Eventually, two other singers joined us. We ran through music softly while sitting in the lobby, and once they took us to the green room (which, by the way, is painted in many shades of green and came complete with a tiny little coffee maker, but no cups) we ran through the music again. At shortly before 8am, they ushered the four of us into the studio and had us do mike checks during commercial breaks, and then, shortly thereafter, we sang.

We did a total of 3 songs during the course of the show; pretty much the only 3 in our concert program that could be done with only 4 voices, including one we added completely at the spur of the moment during a short break in the green room, during which two of us rather hastily learned the cello part so we could sing it in two-part harmony instead of unison, like we’ll sing it at the actual concert this weekend. And overall, it went really, really well. No one screwed up (a concern, considering the aforementioned ‘learn a new part in five minutes’ thing we pulled), our voices blended extremely well for being only one third of the usual group, and aside from the fact that, due to standing next to the tallest member of our group, I come across looking as if I am actually a munchkin, it was a lot of fun.

Tis the season for Holidailies!

One of the other singers in the women’s ensemble got it into her head that it would be fun to give away a little something to all the attendees at our Christmas concert this coming weekend. At first we were thinking about giving away cookies, but after considering the issues of various food allergies, and also the monumental task of someone having to find time to bake and decorate several hundred cookies by Saturday, we decided to go with something else – something that is very appropriate to the season; something that can be had for free, if one is willing to go out in the middle of the night with a ladder and some gardening shears and harvest it yourself.

So this evening she showed up at my house with the largest pile of mistletoe I have ever seen, lugging in huge sacks full, and we set up a little assembly line on the dining room table. She clipped off appropriately sized sprigs of mistletoe and slipped them into little plastic bags, and I formatted and printed labels and then sealed the bags closed. Occasionally one of us would have to take a sprig outside and remove a bug, and mistletoe berries have this annoying tendency to either roll madly across the table, or squish into an extremely gooey mess, but otherwise it went pretty smoothly. It was actually a lot of fun, sitting there at the table, rummaging through branches looking for the prettiest bits, chatting back and forth. By the time she left this evening, we were only about halfway done (even though we’d filled over 150 bags), and my color ink cartridge was running dry, but there was still plenty of mistletoe left and luckily I managed to squeak out enough remaining labels that we should be okay.

(A few of the cats were interested in the process, so I kept a pretty sharp eye on them, since mistletoe is extremely poisonous. But few of my cats are plant eaters, and they were far more interested in the fact that there was a new person in the house from whom to beg pets and attention. And after she left, lugging a still-sizable sack of mistletoe behind her, I immediately pulled out a broom and very carefully swept up every single bit of mistletoe I could find, and then Richard set the Scooba going to scrub up anything I left behind.)

Tis the season for Holidailies!

It has been a very long several days. As I mentioned before, we would get up bright and early and drive over to my little sister’s house, arriving there by 7:30, and then usually not leaving to return to the hotel until almost 10pm.

My sister went a wee bit overboard in the food preparation this week. She is a baker, so we alternated between coffeecakes and maple twist bars to an assortment of cinnamon rolls and fresh croissants for breakfast, all of them delicious. Desserts were several kinds of pie, including a marvelous chocolate pecan pie, and a sour cherry pie that I think Richard and my brother-in-law could have cheerfully finished off in one sitting. She baked eight loves of pumpkin bread (far too many for 11 people, no matter how much we all might love pumpkin bread) so there was a lot of encouragement to eat more bread all week. I think it is a wonder we all did not just roll out of the house every night from all the yummy food.

My sister and her family are vegetarian so we had no turky for Thanksgiving; instead they made ravioli from scratch. My sister stirred up the dough and then we all got a chance to play with the pasta attachment on her Kitchen-Aid mixer, creating thin sheets of pasta, which we would then take out to my brother-in-law, who was set up with the ravioli mold and the fillings. They made two different types of filling – one cheese, the other filled with a mixture of spices and vegetarian sausage, and they were served with homemade sauce and were absolutely delicious.

The kids did pretty good for being crammed together into one house with all their relatives for five days. We went to Seattle Center on Friday and listened to bagpipers play, and watched some highland dancers. The kids rode the carousel and tried out the ice skating rink. Saturday we met up with my mom’s sister and one of our cousins (who recently had a baby girl), and afterwards, we pulled out the box of PVC pieces and assembled enough marshmallow shooters for everyone. Last year the women didn’t get a chance to try them out because the kids and the guys all played with the shooters while we were doing the after-Christmas shopping, so this year we all got our chance. It is a lot of fun. Most of us quickly figured out how to shoot multiple marshmallows at once, and why one has to be careful not to inhale while one’s mouth is on the pipe, because sucking a mini marshmallow into your windpipe is something I would strongly discourage. When my aunt came over the house after lunch we all promptly pelted her with marshmallows, and then, because we ended up with exactly enough pieces for one extra gun, we let her join in the fun. And Saturday night we all gathered downstairs around the TV and watched videos of the nephews and niece in their respective school plays.

Just about the time Richard and I finally memorized our way to and from the hotel, it was time to fly home. We got home to a house full of cats who are *very* glad to see us. We’ve done a run to CostCo and the grocery store, and started the first load of post-trip laundry, and now it is time to settle back into the house and the regular routine and try to recover from the week of too much eating.

In case you are curious, when preparing to leave for a trip involving an airplane flight, just because said flight takes place shortly before Thanksgiving is no guarentee that the airport will be crowded. In fact, karma dictates that the earlier you arrive at the airport (especially when holidays are involved), the more nonexistant the line will be at the security check-in. Granted, the distinct lack of crowds in the airport has absolutely no relation to how packed the *plane* is going to be, but all this is a longwinded way of saying that we cleverly got to the airport over an hour early and got to sit around and twiddle our thumbs until it was time to board. It is a good thing I packed four different knitting projects, plus stopped at the store on the way to pick up a magazine of logic puzzles. And how I ever survived flying before Richard got me the itty bitty mp3 player last year, I’ll never know.

But we arrived without incident, and despite having to trek all over the place to find the car rental desks, we got our car and found our hotel (through the miracle that is a handheld GPS unit – all hail modern technology) and checked in, and the very next morning we headed off to my little sister’s house bright and early, because small people do not believe in this concept called ‘sleeping in’.

After breakfast was consumed and large quantities of coffee were drunk, it was time for the women to all head off for some girl time. My sisters and decided that it was high time my mom experienced her first pedicure, so we made the arrangements and then bundled her into the car and did not tell her where we were going until we arrived.

It was a lot of fun. My little sister and her daughter get pedicures as a last-day-of-school tradition, so my niece is used to them by now, although at the age of 8, she still has a very hard time no squirming and squealing with laughter when they were touching her feet. The salon set us all up in a row, with massaging chairs, and all the adults got paraffin wax treatments, although it was a bit too hot for the niece (she did dip in one toe, but it *was* pretty warm). We decided that if we were going to do pedicures we might as well do them fancy, so we all picked out little designs for the big toe, even my mom. And then when we were done we all crowded around the drying station and tucked our feet under the drying lamp and laughed ourselves silly at each other and our pretty, girly toes.

We came home and my sister made an assortment of sandwiches for lunch, and then the kids all went off to play while the adults congregated in the living room with books and crossword puzzles. I sat with my little sister and walked her through some new-to-her knitting techniques. The kids all went outside and played with the chickens. We ate dinner and then followed that with ice cream cake, and then once the kids were in bed we all trooped downstairs and drank more coffee (decaf this time) and watched Bones (because that is one my little sister’s favorite shows) and talked until eyes were starting to droop, and then Richard and I finally made our way back to the hotel, where I am taking advantage of the free wireless to catch up on email and check in to make sure no one has crashed the intranet while I am out of the office, and shortly, to try to get some sleep because, well, see earlier comment about small people and the non-belief in sleeping in.

We are heading off to Seattle this evening, since it’s my little sister’s turn to host the family gathering this year. I had a long list of stuff I hoped to accomplish before we left, and the only things left to cross off involve packing for the trip, so I am feeling pretty good about that.

Saturday was my brother-in-law’s 40th birthday, so my older sister threw him a surprise party. His mom came to take him out to lunch, so while he was out, friends and family gathered in the house, and all got to holler ‘Surprise’ as he walked back in the door. One of his birthday presents was Rock Band for the Wii, so throughout the party, people would gravitate toward the living room to try that out, or alternatively either trying not to snicker when little kids sang along with songs from our youth, likely having absolutely no idea what they were singing about, or feeling old because the songs of our youth are now incorporated into a video game.

I brought along a jar of the red pepper jelly I made a few weeks back, and we swung by a grocery store on the way in order to pick up a block of cream cheese and a box of crackers. It’s a really easy dip to make – just put the cream cheese on the plate, dump the jelly on top, and then scoop it all up with crackers – but it well worth the effort involved in making the jelly in the first place.

I finished shucking all the remaining pomegranates, which was a good thing because some of them were about a day away from going off, and stirred up two more perfect batches of jelly, including a little bit extra, which we slathered on top of the pumpkin scones I made yesterday morning, and which we have been nibbling on ever since. We did a bunch of much needed cleaning around the house, since with six cats, hairballs have a tendency to gather at an alarming rate, and I always prefer to clean the house before I go on a trip so that it won’t be a complete disaster by the time we return.  I managed to plow through a large pile of laundry, and got the last of the dishes into the dishwasher, and I have selected four knitting projects to bring along on the trip with a surprisingly minimal amount of my usual new-project-related dithering.  We’ve printed out boarding passes, and reservation info for the hotel and the car, and instructions for the pet sitter, and I ran an extra key over to the neighbors, just in case, and over the past week or so we’ve procurred and cut up enough PVC pipe that there are marshmallow shooter parts for everyone, so all that’s left now is to figure out a way to cram all our combined stuff (including all the pieces of PVC pipe) into one large suitcase. We are both usually very resistant to checking luggage, but in the case of the marshmallow shooter parts, we realized that it was probably best to not try to bring those onboard in carry-on, plus we are nerds who will be bringing laptops because Richard is stll doing Nanowrimo, and the hotel has free wireless, so our carry-on bag allotment is already set.

Because today was my usual Friday off, and this week was going to be a short week anyway (especially since we’re flying up to Seattle tomorrow night), and also because my accumulated vacation balance is getting dangerously close to the upper limit (I know, I should be taking it on a more regular basis but I just never get around to it), I decided to use this all as an excuse to take 3 days off (next week) and give myself a nice long break.

I started my little mini vacation by getting up bright and early on this morning to start baking massive quantities of pumpkin bread, as tomorrow is the annual church bazaar and I agreed to provide some loaves for the bake sale. Luckily the bread takes an hour and a half to bake, because as I was mixing up the first batch I realized that I was completely out of a number of key ingredients (like, say, flour and sugar) necessary to make any more. So I popped the first two loaves into the oven, then tromped back downstairs, got dressed, and zipped off to the grocery store to stock up on baking supplies.

I made 8 loaves of bread, total, but two of them got stuck to the pan and there wasn’t really any saving them (I swear I did not do that on purpose), so gee, darn, they had to stay with us. I did slice up half of one loaf and take it into my office, along with the half dozen loaves that turned out non-shredded, because my coworker said she’d be willing to drop them off at the church for me, but we’ve been slowly nibbling away at the rest ever since.

I also finally started tackling the pomegranates that have been sitting on counter since we picked them up last Sunday. I would like to note, for the record, that one of the many reasons why granite is an awesome choice for countertop is that it does not stain. Because pomegranates are very messy little critters, and I had two huge grocery sacks full of them, and by the time I had shucked enough to make two batches of jelly, there was juice *everywhere*. I am continually amazed by how far pomegranates can spit. Luckily the tiles we picked for the backsplash also do not stain. Neither do the cabinets. Or, for that matter, the floor.

Pomegranate jelly is one of those fussy recipes that I have fought with for years. The first time I made it, most of the jelly set, but ever since then, we’ve had mixed results, and there were years when we were lucky to get even 50% of the jars to set. My friends and I could never figure out what it is we were doing wrong. Turns out, it wasn’t us. It was the pectin. A friend at my knitting group mentioned that her mom had the same problem, and they finally narrowed it down to the brand of pectin. It is wacky, because, well, pectin is pectin and this should really not make the slightest bit of difference, but guess what? It does.

The first batch I screwed up, adding the sugar too early, so when it didn’t set I wasn’t surprised, and at some point in the near future I’ll try some triage on the entire batch to see if I can some fix it.  But the second batch set beautifully. Hooray!

So now the entire house smells wonderfully of pumpkin bread and pomegranate jelly, and there are 7 jars of jelly cooling on my counter (we are going to ignore the 7 jars of…uh…pomegranate ‘syrup’ sitting beside them). And as soon as I go out and buy yet more sugar (jelly making takes a *lot* of sugar) and more of the *right* kind of pectin), I can tackle the rest of the pomegranates and see how much more surface area I can splatter with them in the process.