Happy Thanksgiving

Jeff and Carol came over for Thanksgiving dinner this evening and we had a wonderful time (and are quite full!). Katie made a Waldorf salad variant at my suggestion, consisting of diced Honeycrisp apples, raisins, pecans (because I thought walnuts would be a bit too bitter for the girls' tastes), vanilla yogurt, and a dusting of cinnamon on top. It was delicious.

Gretchen prepared a turkey breast, using a spice rub on it for the first time, having found a lot of inexpensive fresh rosemary at Trader Joe's on her most recent trip there and that turned out juicy and delicious as well. She also made the cornbread stuffing using the recipe that we've devised over the last few years, plus mashed potatoes and corn pudding.

Oh, and King's Hawaiian rolls. And a salad, because there needed to be something green in this meal.

A good time and good conversation were had by all. :)

Planting My Butt Firmly in the Studio

I engaged today in an act of faith, given how little time that I've managed to spend in the studio this year.

The high-backed chair that I have in the studio turns out to do nasty things to my back if I spend overmuch time in it. As a result, I've been sitting in a non-entirely-comfortable-but-not-back-wrecking Steelcase chair that I salvaged from one of our closing offices over a decade ago. (The chair is about 20 years older than that.) It's not entirely satisfactory, but it will do.

I was flipping through the Black Friday sale papers and discovered that Office Depot had a Serta Big and Tall Men's chair for sale at a substantial discount. And I thought about my determination to spend more time in the studio and how this chair would likely be a great improvement.

So I ordered it. It should be here next week.

And I should start spending more time in the studio...