My mom turns 60 tomorrow. So to celebrate we decided to throw her a party. Unlike with Richard’s party, this one was thankfully not a surprise. It certainly made planning and coordinating things easier (heh).

My older sister has been the primary organizer, mainly because I’ve been preoccupied with stuff in my house, hosting Christmas, and throwing a surprise party for Richard, and my little sister is too far away (up in Seattle) to be very effective at coordinating a party. We made it as easy as possible, and decided to have a potluck open house. My little sister – the baker – flew back down (with brother-in-law and niece in tow) with two huge sheet cakes and decorated them once she arrived. I dutifully found a local party supply store and stocked up on plates and napkins and plastic silverware. My parents cleaned the house and stocked up on soda. And my older sister sent out all the invitations and coordinated any RSVP’s and put together an awesome photo board and a ‘How Well Do You Know Mom’ board with questions and answers, and generally handled all the rest.

The whole family descended on my parents’ house Saturday morning and between the eleven of us, we managed to get the whole house decorated and ready with plenty of time to eat lunch and then collapse weakly into chairs and rest for a few brief moments before the first guests started to arrived. After that, I’m not sure any of us got a moment to even sit down for the next three or four hours. The house was completely packed. I’m not entirely sure how many people showed up because I know not everyone signed the guest book. My sisters and our husbands and I somehow managed to keep on rearranging the table enough to fit all the food that arrived, and kept the ice bucket filled, and pointed people toward the bathrooms, and made sure everyone had a name tag. My dad had hired a balloon artist, which turned out to be an awesome idea, if only because he managed to keep the pile of kids who showed up entertained, and the amount of child wrangling the rest of us had to do to a minimum. And then as suddenly as they all arrived, the house cleared out and it was over, and we were left with a whole lot of balloons and a big pile of birthday cards for my mom, and a table full of food.

We ended the evening with dinner (although after picking an overloaded table of food all day none of us were very hungry and more birthday cake, and then we all crowded into one room and played games. For the first time, all the kids were all old enough that we could try something a little more family oriented, so we did a few rounds of Scattergories (the kids were paired up with adults) before it was time for them to all head off to bed. And then we adults switched to Balderdash, which we haven’t played together in years, but which, as it always does when we play, ended with most of us crying from laughing so hard.

My little sister and her family flew back up to Seattle this morning, so we had to hug everyone goodbye last night, before we drove back home. I think both Richard and I would have loved to have followed yesterday with a quiet, lazy day, but the house was starting to look a bit scary from the accumulation of dust bunnies, and we had a gaming session planned, so we went out for bagels and then swung by Target to buy things like a duster and a new waffle iron, and then we came home and spent a a few hours cleaning and scrubbing and generally whipping the house back into shape.

So now the weekend is over, and even though I feel as if I really would like a weekend to recover from my weekend (what with the party and the cleaning and the gaming this evening), it was a lot of fun, and tomorrow my mom turns officially 60 and I hope the party was a good way to usher it all in.

It has been rather fun to come home each night this week and discover what the contractors have been up to that day. Tuesday night I came home and after dropping my stuff on the table, immediately went out to the enclosed back porch and climbed up into the attic to check out the great expanse of clear space (aka storage area) that’s now available up there. They put down a whole lot of plywood flooring, which means there’ll be less walking around on wobbly boards when one of us has to venture up there. And now that the attic has finally been completely freed of rats and all possible rat-sized entrances sealed up, we can now feel safe putting stuff up there, without fear that it will be nibbled into bits. Granted, we still haven’t actually *moved* any of the Christmas stuff up there yet (and I suspect it will remain stacked in the dining room until the weekend) but at least now we have the option.

This evening when I came home, I got to wander around downstairs and gaze in awe at the (finally) completed baseboards for the seemingly never ending floor-replacement project we started this past summer. Richard got the majority of the baseboard and transition strips attached, but the sections around the doors stumped both of us, plus there were several of the transition strips between rooms that didn’t want to stay attached and we’d pretty much thrown up our hands and hoped either inspiration would strike, or else the project would magically finish itself without our help. This week Richard, realizing that the chances of the two of us getting it done by ourselves any time in the near future were pretty much nil, asked the contractors if they could add that to the list of repairs, and so, armed with saws and caulk guns, they’ve nearly finished what we started over six months ago. The floor looks *so* much better now that there aren’t those ugly board edges visible in the doorways. Plus,since they actually have a clue what they are doing (unlike Richard and I), they used caulk, which fades to white and does not turn an ugly yellow color and require touch-up painting like the putty I used everywhere else in the room. Sigh.

********

This weekend Richard and I sat down and made out a menu for the week, so we could try to get back into the healthy eating thing. Of course, that flew out the window the first night, when neither of us felt like making – or eating – the item we’d planned just 24 hours before. The problem with being adults, you see, is that there is no one around to make you stick to things.

On the plus side, we have still been eating healthy, despite our blatant disregard for the silly things like weekly menus. It helps we did a decent enough grocery run that there’s plenty of options to choose from, and it’s been too wet and cold out for us to want to venture out to a restaurant instead. So far this week we’ve had Tuna Pie and Black Bean Soup and because I’ve been in a mood to cook, and also because we happen to have all the ingredients at hand, this evening I threw together two more tuna pies to stash in the freezer for lunches and dinners later. It may not be exactly what we’d planned when we sat down and made out the menu, but the real goal in doing this was to cook and eat at home, so even if the actual hasn’t quite matched up to the plan, at least we’re on the right track.

Saturday morning I finished the last of the lace stole, and then I curled up with an afghan and a few cats and spent a few hours of bliss just reading, with nothing at all left to do. We pretty much spent the day indoors. And when we did venture out (to go for brunch), everywhere we drove there were piles of debris alongside the road, or people outside, cheerfully raking up leaves or dragging huge branches down to the curb. In our general area, at least, the only full trees down were small ones (although some of the branches that fell from the ancient elms that line the main road were large enough to be trees on their own), and even though it was obvious from the power company vehicles and the blinking lights at major intersections that power had not yet been completely restored, things looked pretty normal for the aftermath of a storm. I did get a kick out of the group of kids we saw, as we were driving home. While the adults were out, busily clearing out all the debris and dumping it in piles as trash, here was this group of kids, happily arranging huge palm fronds and branches taller then they were around the base of one of the giant elms, building themselves a rather impressive little fort.

Sunday afternoon we headed off to Ikea – mainly because it was the meeting place designated for handing over the lace stole to the woman who commissioned it – but also to wander around and ponder ideas for bookshelves downstairs again. Apparently Sunday afternoon is prime Ikea shopping time, because the parking lot was completely full and the place was packed. Even so, we managed to find a tiny little table tucked away in a corner in the cafeteria so we could eat our lunch, and the store is huge enough that despite the crowds, there was plenty of space to wander around and browse afterwards.

We ended up picking up a few things – a little throw rug for the downstairs bathroom, and a new coffee table to replace the ugly thing in the living room that has been steadily falling apart ever since I bought it in a garage sale about ten years ago, and some magazine holders for Richard. But then it was back home, where we sat down and made out a menu for the week to come, and then followed that with a shopping list, and then Richard went off to the grocery store to get everything we’ll need while I stayed home and made a loaf of banana raisin bread for Richard, and a loaf of oat bran molasses date bread for me. They were meant to be for breakfasts this week, but we ended up eating large chunks of each loaf for dinner Sunday night because they smelled too good to ignore.

Richard is working at home this week, which has worked out well for us because the contractor is back, and by the end of today we’ll finally have a sturdy new stair rail installed in the interior staircase (both our mothers will be happy about that), the rat-sized hole fixed in the attic, ductwork repaired, and new plywood flooring laid in the attic – enough (I am hoping) to provide space for storing all the Christmas decorations that we took down this weekend, as well as all the other holiday stuff that’s been cluttering up the closet in the guest bedroom upstairs.

We did, by the way, discover we had one small casualty from the storm. When Richard went out to start clearing up the back porch this weekend, he discovered that the force of the wind had popped out one entire window panel – frame and all – from the wall. Luckily there’s still enough stuff piled up in that little enclosed porch that the window could not fall, and so it did not break. Call it a rather interesting bonus of using the back porch to store all the clutter we couldn’t find places for in our frantic race to get the house ready for Christmas.

Somehow we got pretty lucky these past few days. We survived the Great Storm of ’07 intact. In fact, we did not even lose power – although Richard says our internet access flickered briefly during the day, so maybe that counts for something.

Richard’s been working from home, so he wasn’t much affected and didn’t have to go out in the gale force winds. I, however, went in to work, at least for a short period of time. The early-arriving coworker called at about 7:30 to say the power was out and he was going to stick it out for a bit longer and then let us all know; by 8:45, though, the power was back on, and since I’m the closest to the office, I didn’t have much excuse to stay home. Driving was fun. Most of the people on the freeway were smart enough to realize that caution was the best policy – and there weren’t that many people on the freeway to begin with, so it wasn’t too bad. Driving the city streets, however, was the exciting part. Debris everywhere – huge branches, trash toters, even entire trees were everywhere.

I stayed at work just long enough to set up a conference call to discuss a database and get onto that call, before the power went back out again and this time stayed out. By this time the wind was picking up even worse (they recorded gusts of over 60 mph in our area, so it was kind of nasty out there) and one coworker was pointing out that a large tree had just blocked part of the road near our office, so the others headed out. I stuck it out just until the call was done (the phones at least were still working) and then braved the wind and rain again to drive back home. I figured if I was going to have to get stuck somewhere without power, I’d rather be stuck at home, where there are cats and warm blankets and food, than at the office, which has none of those around.

By the afternoon, it was eerily calm and quiet outside – the storm had blown itself mostly out. I headed off to First Friday Craft Night, through patches of neighborhoods with no power, debris all over the roads. Everyone else came with tales of semi trucks keeled over along the roads, and trees coming down on houses, and people without power, and yet we all knew, somehow, that when compared to what a lot of this country has been facing in the way of storms, our tiny little wind storm (fierce and swift though it was) was infinitely preferrable.

We did not end up seeing any of the New Year’s Eve fireworks, although we could certainly hear the 9pm show through the wall of the restaurant about midway through the fourth course (of six – oof – so incredibly full by the end, and that was with me passing on two of the courses because I didn’t like them). By the time we were done it was nearly 10:30 and it was freezing outside and the thought of milling about amid several hundred drunk and noisy people for the next hour and a half, all to see some fireworks (and then have to deal with the traffic jam of insanity that would surely ensue shortly thereafter as everyone tried to leave at once) was just not very appealing. So instead we went home and got so wrapped up in catching up on email (and another bout of Holidailies reading for me) that neither of us even noticed that it was midnight until I started hearing thunking outside, and was worried someone was trying to break something. And then we noticed the time and the minute we stepped out on the front porch, it was obvious all the thunking was actually fireworks (we could not see any, but we also didn’t stay out in the cold long enough to search). So we broke out the sparkling cider and toasted in the new year, and that was that.

Yesterday was more knitting (for me) and more poking about on computers (for Richard). We split a Walkin’ Pie (frozen since we last went to Apple Hill) with ice cream and cider sauce for breakfast, which seemed a fine way to usher in a new year. Lunch was the last of the salad greens from Christmas week (and I think this is the first time we’ve managed to eat an entire tub of that stuff before it started wilting and going slimy) with some toasted and buttered rosemary bread. Richard’s family arrived in late afternoon, and brought him more birthday presents, and took us out to dinner. Then they came back to the house and we all sat in the living room and nibbled homemade English toffee, and talked and laughed, although I did less of that than everyone else because I had to excuse myself to a quieter room to participate in a conference call with my sisters to hash out final details for the 60th birthday party we are throwing for my mom in less than two weeks. It seems to be the time for milestone birthday parties lately – our friend Jeff turned 40 earlier in December, and there was Richard’s 40th, and January is my mom’s, and then my older sister hits the big 4-oh in February, but after that I think it’s just the ordinary run-of-the-mill birthdays for the rest of the year and less of the frantic ‘eek we have to get this all done NOW!’ party sort of affair. I hope. Phew.

Anyway. I’m not really much of one for making resolutions, because I have a memory with the retaining power of a steel sieve, and tend to promptly forget whatever it was I’d resolved to do by about mid-February. But I do believe in goals and plans (after all, I am always all about making lists), so I have decided that I have a goal for 2008. We spent so many years in that last house of ours, with things that did not have a home, or things that were just piled, or dumped haphazardly in boxes or in closets, all because we could never be bothered to get around to dealing with them. One of the reasons I insisted on still hosting Christmas, even though we’d just moved, was because I knew it would force us to deal with a large chunk of the organizing, but there is still far too much left to do. I do not want to to spend another six years, in this new house of ours, looking at boxes and piles of stuff and thinking “someday we should do something with that.”

So I am henceforth declaring that 2008 will be the Year of Getting Things Done. To that end, I cleared off the cute little white board Richard bought for our office, and listed out 11 things that we need to accomplish in the month of January (I’d gladly have listed more, but there wasn’t room). And by the end of the month, when (hopefully) everything on the list is crossed off, I’ll make up a new list for February, and keep on going in that vein, and maybe, just maybe, by the end of the year, there will be less walking around looking at stuff saying “someday we should do something with that” and more sitting back and admiring a job well done.

Today is Richard’s 40th birthday. So, since I always get up early, I wrapped all his presents this morning and left them piled neatly where he would see them when he woke up, and then, fortified by two dark chocolate covered espresso beans, I climbed back into bed and knit for another hour or so until he finally got up.

I got him some Terry Pratchett books we didn’t yet have, and a 2008 Demotivator calendar, and a little kit to grow carnivorous plants, because I knew he’d find it amusing, and some other random books, but as I had expected, Richard has spent most of the day upstairs, playing with his new Tux Droid. Yet more nerd wife points for me. Heh.

We’ll be going out to dinner at a swanky restaurant in Old Sacramento, and if the timing works out right, we’ll hopefully catch part of the earlier fireworks display they’ll have over the river down there. But by the time it’s midnight, we’ll be back home, curled up in front of computers, or with knitting and cats, and we’ll toast in the New Year with some sparkling cider or some hot cocoa with marshmallows, depending on our mood. We might even turn on the television to watch the stupid ball drop in Times Square, because we’re just that kind of wild and crazy with the end-of-the-year celebrating. Heh. Or not.

Happy New Year and best wishes to one and all. 2007 was a pretty good year for us. Here’s hoping the new year brings more of the same.

Happy Holidailies!

We have spent the entire day in our pajamas.

At one point, Richard headed downstairs to put something warm on, and pondered aloud whether it was worth getting dressed. But we didn’t have any plans today, beyond knitting (for me) and writing (for him), and no need to even walk outside the door.

So we have spent the entire day in our pajamas. I wish I could say it has been spent in sloth, lolling about eating leftover cookies, and watching mindless television, but we got rid of all the leftover cookies after everyone left because it’s better to ease slowly back into that healthy eating thing, and leftover cookies don’t help. And we’ve both had things that really needed to get done. So, no sloth for us. Or at least for me. Just a day spent camped out either upstairs in the living room, or downstairs in bed, surrounded by sleeping cats, knitting, in my pajamas.

Happy Holidailies!

Today has been pretty much all knitting, all the time, for me. I got up early, and went upstairs and knit. Eventually I woke up Richard because I was hungry, and we went out for bagels (please tell me that the little bagel shop will carry the pumpkin spice bagels year round, because they are awesome) and coffee, and then we came back home and I knit some more. We made french bread pizzas for lunch, topped with veggie sausages, and after I ate mine, I went right back to knitting. And even after everyone showed up, and we commenced to spend about six hours gaming, I kept right on knitting. Luckily I can roleplay around the yarn and needles, and it worked pretty well, except for that brief moment when I discovered a dropped stitch that was in danger of unraveling quite a lot of (hard) work, and had to undo about four rows while swearing softly under my breath, and had to pause my character for about ten minutes until the issue was fixed. And then, once the game was done, and everyone left, I tried very hard to knit some more, except that I am very sleepy and knitting lace while sleepy can lead to far worse than just an unraveling stitch. So after I post this I am going straight to bed.

********

I am currently on a kick to try to clean out the kitchen. With all the people we’ve had in the house this past week (hosting Christmas, and then Richard’s birthday party), the fridge and the freezer have started to overflow. So I’ve been working very hard on using up all the leftovers, in whatever way we can. This explains the french bread pizzas for today’s lunch (because there was leftover pizza sauce from the English muffin pizzas earlier in the week, I made sure to stock the freezer with shredded cheese, and there was most of a loaf of bread left over from the party last night). This also explains our dinners these past few days. I sort of grossly overestimated the amount of mashed potatoes and peas I needed to feed eleven people for Christmas dinner, and there was not the usual whole-family-leftover-eating-fest the day after, so there were a lot of those left. Wednesday night I made potato and pea croquets (mixed them together, rolled them in bread crumbs, and pan fried them with a spritz of non-stick spray). Thursday night I stirred up a whole pile of potatoes and peas with a little cheese and some extra spices and then tossed that in the oven with a sprinkling of parmesan. We didn’t do much in the way of leftover-eating yesterday, due to the party, although I sliced up one entire loaf of pumpkin bread and that was pretty much all gone by the time the last guest had left, and I managed to make the remaining loaf disappear by putting it on a plate in the middle of a table of hungry gamers.

Still to use up – the rest of the meatloaf, yet more pizza fixings, a massive amount of salad greens, and a large bag of raw veggies, along with yet more mashed potatoes and peas (assuming they’re still any good, which I suspect may be debatable by this point). Those, with some of the rosemary potato bread a friend brought us in exchange for her very nicely taking our fireplace tools off our hands (no need for those, now that we have no fireplace), will hopefully provide us with lunch and dinner tomorrow, and in the meantime, I am declaring this all a success because I am starting to see an end to the clutter in the fridge, and that was my goal all along.

Happy Holidailies!

For the past few months I’ve been sending out emails, checking dates. It’s hard to plan things around this time of year because people go out of town, or have their Friday nights and weekends already booked with other holiday events. I’m not sure how many dates I proposed before eventually settling on today, if only because a majority of people said that they could probably make this one (but not all the others). I even managed to track down, through a series of convoluted steps, emails for a lot of people I don’t even know, just because I knew they’d also want to come. And then there was the cake pan, which I remembered from when my sisters and I were all little kids, and I knew I could make it work for what I intended, and my little sister shipped it down to me from Seattle, in care of my parents so Richard would never know.

I arranged to get him out of the house, and the minute he and his friend shut the door behind them, I hit the ground running, managing to throw in a trip to the grocery store, a trip to a party supply store, and the baking of two cakes, not to mention a little bit of cleaning and decorating and a quick shower, all in the space of about three hours.

Alas, his friend was unable to delay him as long as we’d hoped, and Richard showed up a bit earlier than expected. So there was no chance to organize everyone into one room to holler “Surprise”. So his 40th birthday party was only partially a surprise, as everyone else ended up drifting in just about the time he was supposed to come home anyway.

Regardless of the time slip, it was a lot of fun. We had about 25 people crowding into the house. The first few to arrive were greeted with my rather frantic “Hello – uh, can I put you to work?” and then had things like crepe paper streamers and tape tossed at them before I dashed madly back to the kitchen to finish frosting the cake. My very crafty friend was one of the first ones to arrive, thankfully, because I was then able to wheedle her into carving a set of wings out of styrofoam for the cake, while I hacked marshmallows into pieces and stirred red and green food coloring into batches of frosting, and frosted as fast as I could, so as to make the very best Cthulu cake someone who is not remotely a cake decorator could manage to build.

I think I’m allowed to be pretty proud of this cake, considering my glaring lack of artistic talent in the food decorating department. The bottom is a regular sheet cake covered in chocolate frosting, for ‘dirt’. The top was made from a teddy bear mold that has the bear actually sitting up. I sawed off the ears and used those as his legs. The eyes are chocolate chips on red frosting. The wings were carved from styrofoam, and the tentacles and arms are made of marshmallow wedges. The candle, by the way, plays “Pray for the Dead” if you press the little button on the back.

A nearly 40-year-old and his Cthulu cake (I’m including this picture to provide scale). I am pretty sure that even if he had his suspicions about the party, he never expected this as a cake.

I’m including this picture, showing only a small fraction of guests, to show that everyone got pirate hats (if they wanted) when they walked in the door, because this was also a pirate themed party (it went well with all the ‘Over the Hill’ black table settings – hee). Hooray for party surplus stores located a short driving distance away! There were also little pirate flags stuck everywhere all over the house (courtesy of the mad decorating skillz of our crafty friend’s daughter), and a string of pirate lights, and a big Happy 40th Birthday banner, and crepe paper streamers everywhere (and I cannot thank enough all the first arrivals who were nice enough to jump in and help finish decorating). And all his presents were put into a cardboard treasure chest, just to keep with the pirate theme.

There was a lot of laughing and talking and teasing, and little clusters of people here and there talking nerd-speak, or writer-speak, or some other conversation relating to how they knew Richard. There was plenty of food and soda for everyone. And now that everyone is gone, and Richard and his younger sister (who came up for the surprise as well) and I have managed to clear most of everything away, there is a tiny little plate in the kitchen with the head of a very tasty elder god, which, along with the still-hanging streamers and banner and flags, all that is left of Richard’s very nearly a surprise 40th birthday party.

Happy Holidailies!

Today has been all about relaxing. Richard’s been camped out in front of his computer and I’ve been camped out on the sofa with my knitting, and the only moving either of us has done has been to clear the floor so the Roombas could vacuum, and run a few loads of laundry. Tonight is a knitting group, so it will simply continue the day of near sloth for me.

So in lieu of anything exciting to report for today, I give you one extra story from the last few days.

Christmas day the kids were all outside, and my older sister was with them, until she came in and asked if we happened to have a very grouchy squirrel living under our porch. We only have birds nesting under our porch so it was determined that the squirrel was probably sick, and ought to be removed from the vicinity of three curious children. So my older sister found a box and caught the squirrel (the fact that it simply sat there and let her catch it spoke volumes as to the status of its health, and then we spent some time on the phone, calling vet clinics and referral lines, trying to figure out exactly what to do with it. It’s one thing to let the circle of life run its merry course when it’s just us; it was another to leave a sick and possibly snappy squirrel out to terrorize the kids.

We eventually were told to take it to the nearest shelter, and that someone would meet us at the door to take it. Naturally, there was no one at the shelter, but after even more time on the phone, the dispatch person promised if we just left the squirrel there, in its box (and by now it was twitching, so we suspected it probably was dying anyway) and someone would be by to get it shortly. It felt awkward, but we weren’t sure what else to do with the poor little thing, quite frankly. So I hope someone showed up and took the squirrel inside and put it out of its misery.

And now for some pictures.

My younger sister, reading a book of Shel Silverstein poetry to all three cousins.

The niece, wearing a truly awesome balloon hat, made by a balloon artist we found at the ice skating rink on Saturday. She loved this hat so much she would have taken it home with her, except we were pretty sure it would not survive the plane flight back.

Possibly my favorite picture of the three kids to date. One of the dads tried to get them to pose nice after I took this shot but this was too wonderful to not keep. They’re just being their goofy selves, and it captures all three of them so perfectly. I love these kids.