Thank you all for your kind comments about Howard. I love that people who never met him enjoyed
his pictures and personality. He really
was a very special cat.
Since I didn’t blog at all in October or November, I’ll
share some highlights to catch you up.
Our neighbors did tons of great Halloween decorations,
including a miniature cemetery in their front yard. There were “tombstones” for everyone on our
section of the street.
Here’s mine:
Caroline is definitely our most temperamental cat and takes
tortitude to a whole new level.
And here’s Nick’s:
We also did a neighborhood Halloween event on the last
Sunday in October. It was surprisingly
warm that day, so we sat outside by one of the neighbor’s fire pits. I made a huge batch of chili, and our
neighbor Lori made jalapeno popper bread and desserts.
Three of the adults (including Nick) and two of the older
kids went to a haunted farm. The other
three adults (including me), one of the older kids who wasn’t feeling well, and
the two younger kids stayed behind to watch Hocus Pocus.
Everyone had a great time, and it worked out well that some
people wanted to do the haunted farm while some of us weren’t into that kind of
thing at all. We’re talking about making
it an annual thing.
I’ve struggled some with getting into the holiday spirit
since we lost Howard, but I knew I wouldn’t be happy skipping Thanksgiving, so
we had our usual huge Thanksgiving.
Since our fridge is a little bit smaller than the old one,
I had Thanksgiving food stashed in four different mini-fridges at work the week
before. The Tuesday before Thanksgiving,
I took several things we wouldn’t need over the holiday weekend and left them
at work to make sure we had room for all of the Thanksgiving stuff.
I took the day before Thanksgiving off to do all of the
baking. I couldn’t fit all of the
desserts and sweet potato bread on the table, so there are two pictures.
As usual, Nick did a lot of cleaning. I’m a very messy cook, so helping clean up
when I do that much cooking is a massive job.
At one point, he was dashing into the kitchen with the vacuum or Swiffer
every time I left it. And one of the
neighbor kids very sweetly came over and helped out with some food prep and
cleaning on Wednesday night.
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| The day before Thanksgiving is always my highest step count for the year! |
We took Thanksgiving dinner to the hospice house for lunch. As always, they were so kind and made me cry. There’s a nurse we’ve seen for the past several years, and she hugged both of us and was just incredibly nice.
After we dropped the food off there, we went home and
finished getting ready for our Thanksgiving dinner that evening. I almost forgot to get any pictures of the
food until someone else mentioned taking pictures, so I only got two not-so-great
pictures of the food. We had food and
desserts on nearly every available surface.
We had a total of 14 people: all of the neighbors on our
end of the street and some friends from Nick’s job. Everyone ate, talked, and played games. It was everything I love about Thanksgiving. As usual, we had tons of leftovers, so no one
had to cook for the next couple of days.
After everyone left, Nick and I were talking about how you can always
tell whether or not it’s someone’s first Thanksgiving at our house by whether
or not they bring storage containers for leftovers. No one does the first time, but everyone does
the next time.
We also had an inflatable Thanksgiving decoration this
year. I bought him on sale after
Thanksgiving last year. His name is
Gregory. Good for you if you get the
reference to the Doris Day movie, “By the Light of the Silvery Moon.” I’m hoping to add more Thanksgiving
decorations every year.
Frankie absolutely loves the box that Gregory came in.
I’m not sure how he managed to stuff himself inside the
box, but he happily hung out in it for hours at a time.
So what about you?
How were your October and November?
And how were your fall holidays?
