Catching Up

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. 

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?