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I ran into my neighbor as she brought her dog out to do its business today. As we were chatting, she mentioned that she was waiting to see our Christmas tree at the curb, officially signaling the end of the holiday season.

Tonight, we took down the Christmas tree and it is now at the curb waiting to be picked up.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! :)
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We had a very relaxed Christmas here. The kids get up later in the morning now, which makes things much less tired in the morning. :) And everyone liked their presents. The kids got new technology gifts which has mostly resulted in them being head down in games for most of the day. Mom and Dad got some new technology too, all of which still needs to be tried out, but maybe we'll manage that tomorrow.

We ended up with a ribeye roast from Sam's Club, which was more expensive than the bone-in rib roast that I'd intended to buy, but substantially easier to slice. About half of the roast is left and I suspect that I will be doing some damage to it tomorrow.

Tomorrow, there will be more cleaning before Eighth Note Fest starts on Friday. There are a lot of things that need to find places to go, but we will figure it out. :)

I hope you had a Merry Christmas or other suitable holiday of your choice!
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It was a crazy day at work today. Sam, Bonnie, and Jerry were coming over for cider and cookies around five. I had hoped to be done with work by then, but it took a few minutes longer. Eventually, I made it downstairs and the conversation was fine. :)

In the meantime, the "Liftoff to Landing" CDs arrived from the duplicator, four days earlier than forecast. I was happy to see those too. One of them has been opened and is being tested in my car, where everything is fine so far.

Tomorrow, I hope to catch up on the shopping that I didn't finish today. Happily, that does not involve a trip to the mall -- just to the supermarket!
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Today's holiday prepping included trips to Home Depot and Sam's Club. I was supposed to go to Michaels' with Julie to pick up something she needed, but she was busy until it was too late to go, so we'll try that tomorrow.

In the meantime, the kids spent some substantial time mopping the floor in part of the back of the house and cleaning up the kitchen. I prepped the stove so that Gretchen could finish cleaning it. The net result was that the kitchen looks a lot better than it has in a while.

I finally got upstairs this afternoon after doing some laundry and managed to launch the first of seven sessions for the computer division for the second half of the APBA season. My team cratered badly in the first half, finishing seventh out of eight teams. This appears to be largely a result of bad luck, as my Pythagorean record would have given me 46.5 wins in 84 games, while my actual record was an anemic 39-45. I am off to a better start in the second half, going 8-5 in the first 13 games there, but am still in second place, because one team ran off to a 10-3 start. But there are 65 games to go.

UPS says the new CDs should arrive on Friday. I am looking forward to seeing them.
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I now have a Christmas gift for everyone in the household, not counting dogs and cats. I am, as usual, being difficult to shop for, but I have pointed out that I have this big expensive new computer sitting on my desk, which should count for something.

This weekend, I plan to go out and get the Christmas tree, which means that some serious cleaning is in order first...
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K woke up this morning as if it were a school day. It wasn't, and she was good enough to wait until 9:30 or thereabouts before starting to agitate for parents to get out of bed. Julie was up and around before I came downstairs, so we were all assembled and able to exchange gifts, which was a lot of fun. I had, in a burst of confusion, failed to order K's gifts for Julie until Christmas Eve, so they won't be arriving until Thursday, but Julie was enthusiastic when told what was coming. (Enthusiastic is a mild word for how she screamed and hugged K when she found out that she was getting two Rick Riordan books that are illuminations on the various novels in the series.)

It was a relaxed day around the house. I don't know when the last time was that neither car left the house during an entire day, but that's what happened today.

Dinner was a lovely rib roast (one bone has now been tithed to Ruby the Dog), baked potatoes, baked mac and cheese, and green beans. Brownies are now in the oven and almost done.

It was a very Merry Christmas here. I hope it was for you too!
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The gift wrapping is finally begun and done and we are ready for Christmas morning. I think.

If Christmas is your holiday, have a very Merry Christmas! And, if not, have a wonderful holiday.

Tree's Up!

Dec. 10th, 2023 10:12 pm
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The Christmas tree is up and decorated. This is good.

On the other hand, the government paperwork that I was going to work on this weekend still appears to be sitting on my desk, which I was reminded of when I came to my desk to make this post. Maybe I should have posted earlier...

Treed!

Dec. 8th, 2023 10:34 pm
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We went out today and picked up a Christmas tree. The selection would have been better last week, I think, but this one is tall, if not broad, so it should be fine once the ornaments and lights are on it.

Next year, we'll do this a bit earlier.
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We had a lovely Christmas here, getting up (relatively) early, opening presents, and eating *way* too much food, topped off by a lovely rib roast tonight.

We are now going to crawl off to bed as we prepare for a round of cleaning tomorrow as we get ready for company. :)

Merry Christmas!
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It's Christmas Eve and almost time to go to bed. For those of you who celebrate the holiday, a Merry Christmas to all of you. For those who don't, have a wonderfully happy holiday.
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Gretchen has pointed out the weather forecast for late Thursday and Friday and has suggested that I should pick up the Christmas groceries ahead of that. This seems like an entirely reasonable suggestion.

Now we just need to decide what I need to buy...
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Gretchen and I are giving a Zoom concert tomorrow as part of the Festival of the Living Rooms at 7 PM CT (6 PM MT), so it was important for us to actually have a place to set up for this. We selected the living room, which is where the Christmas tree is, which meant that getting the lights and ornaments onto the tree was a good idea. This was mostly accomplished this evening.

I have allocated several hours to get the performing space ready. This *should* be plenty of time to correct anything that tries to go wrong. :)

We'll see some of you there!

Treed

Dec. 4th, 2022 09:58 pm
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Gretchen and I went to Home Depot today and I picked out a Christmas tree, which is now standing in the living room waiting to be decorated. It is not as tall as I would like, but there were no taller trees available. It *is* quite nicely shaped, so that worked out. Normally, I get a Fraser fir, but I liked the look of this Noble fir better, so it followed us home.

In terms of things that might follow us home, it was *much* cheaper than a Taylor AD27.

Timber!

Jan. 6th, 2022 09:10 pm
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It's January 6th, officially the end of the Christmas season, and the trash collectors are coming tomorrow, so it was time for our Christmas tree to come down. It is now out at the curb, along with the garbage and recycling. With any luck, it will leave tomorrow.

There's some cleanup left to do in the living room, but it's progress.

And it is good that the tree left today, because tomorrow four out of the five boxes of Julie's new bed will arrive. Sadly, we still haven't gotten a taker on the very nice bunk bed, but I will try posting it in some more places soon.
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Christmas Day was a rousing, overfed success at our home.

Everyone got moving late, which was fine by us. Gretchen went out to get drinks while I showered. This took longer than anticipated, because apparently various McDonald's that were supposed to be open had a staffing shortage, which meant that coffee and hot chocolate were available at Dunkin' Donuts, but all attempts to locate diet cola were a failure. I would fix the last later on a circuitous trip where I also bought a Powerball ticket, because, well, $400 million.

But anyway, Gretchen came back, we opened a variety of delightful presents, finishing up with new iPads for each child, which meant that K no longer needs to use my ancient hand-me-down, while J has her first iPad of her own. They were suitably surprised. :)

Gretchen's knees were bothering her this morning, so I was delegated to make breakfast (which we finally finished around 1:30 PM), setting up bacon, sausage, pancakes, and eggs in sequence so that things came out right in the end. This took us right to the time when we needed to be getting the rib roast into the oven, which meant first tracking down a likely recipe. We settled on a simple one, rubbing the roast with salt and pepper, searing at 500 degrees for 15 minutes, and then reducing the temperature to 350 degrees and cooking until the meat thermometer read 118 degrees. The roast was then removed from the oven and allowed to stand for a bit more than 20 minutes while Gretchen and K finished up the rest of the meal. The "standing" part of this worked really well; this was one of the better rib roasts we've had in a while.

We staggered off in a food coma that lasted a few hours until it was time to try the mutant Key Lime pie from yesterday. It came out pretty well, all things considered. The only thing odd about it was that the crust was a bit more chewy than usual. Given the amount of butter in it, this doesn't surprise me.

Tomorrow, we will clean things up and start dispatching various items to where they belong.

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas!
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We decided to make a Key Lime pie for Christmas dinner, because it is a dessert that everyone in the family will eat. And the good news is that making Key Lime pie is really easy, especially because we have been planning to make one for a long time, so we had all of the ingredients in the house. Of course, it has to be prepared the day before and properly chilled, so we made plans for Gretchen and K to put it together on Christmas Eve.

The wrapping of the Christmas presents at the kitchen table, however, went on *far* longer than we anticipated, so it was nearly four o'clock when I started snagging the supplies out of the pantry for a double-check. We make a gingersnap crust instead of a graham cracker crust, but we had the sealed bag of gingersnaps, which are among the most durable of cookies. We had cans of sweetened condensed milk. (Checks expiration date. All good.) We had a fresh lemon to zest. We had eggs. Lots of eggs.

And here was the bottle of Key Lime juice. Which had expired in January of 2021. Oh. Well, maybe it's still good. I unscrewed the cap and before I could think about removing the seal, liquid started sputtering out under pressure. This was not in any way a good sign.

So maybe I could get to the grocery store before it closed. Sadly, I arrived at Mariano's about ten minutes after they closed at four. Maybe Jewel was still open. I called Gretchen to advise her and she suggested Walmart as an alternative, checking the website and determining that they didn't close until six. But that was ok, because neither did Jewel.

In what was not a surprise, the spot on the shelf where the Key Lime juice would go was barren. There was plenty of lime and lemon juice available, but since all of *those* were loaded with sulfites, I can't have them due to allergies. Having anticipated this, I had been told that the juice of four lemons would probably do, so I bought five, and also three limes for good measure. (Roper family marked safe from scurvy.)

Did I mention that K has never made a Key Lime pie?

So the first step was to make the crust. Gretchen's knees were bothering her, so she was dealing with things at the kitchen table and letting K do the work at the countertop, which was a reasonable division of labor. Dad, meanwhile, had retired to his chair with a headache.

Did I mention that the food processor that we would normally use to make the crumbs for the crust had been missing since the kitchen renovation?

But, you know, if you put the cookies into a freezer bag and attack them with a rolling pin, you will eventually get crumbs. And that is what Gretchen set out to do. Meanwhile, I went into the library to look at the remaining packed up debris from the kitchen renovation in the hope of getting the food processor to materialize out of thin air.

"Check the bag on the amplifier," Gretchen said. "There are two bags. One is full of drone parts."

I looked at the bags. "There are two bags full of drone parts," I announced. On the other hand, I passed my math test by observing that there were *three* bags on top of the amplifier. And underneath a Halloween-themed apron, I found several items, including popsicle molds, a set of ice cream dishes that were supposed to go to Goodwill, an antique curling iron designed to be heated with the stove, an iron, the missing juicer, which was another thing that we really wanted to have right now, and the food processor.

I brought the bag into the kitchen just in time for Gretchen to finish crushing the cookies with the rolling pin. There was much rejoicing, because we were really starting to wonder where the food processor had vanished to and although it had turned up too late for this project, it would come in extremely handy in the future.

We had doubled the crust recipe, which meant that instead of five tablespoons of butter, we would need ten. Gretchen decided to round up and told K to use one-and-a-half sticks of butter. Something was lost in translation, because K melted *three* sticks of butter and added the cookie crumbs to them, making a gemisch that obviously contained *way* too much butter. Some of the excess butter was drained off into a separate dish and the remaining mix was pressed into the pie dish and baked to set it. More or less.

K then set out to separate the six egg yolks and add them to the condensed milk. Unfortunately, this is another thing that K hasn't done before, so she didn't realize that the best course was to separate the egg yolks far, far away from the dish with the rest of your ingredients and then add them. So after the first egg white hit the milk, Gretchen came over to help separate it as much as possible from the milk and then to proceed to separate the remaining eggs. We paused before adding the lemon and lime juice (K having zested lime and lemon while Gretchen juiced lemons and limes), because it was seriously getting to be time for dinner.

So Gretchen popped the frozen Trader Joe's mac and cheese into the oven to bake. The ham steaks were fried, and the frozen green beans microwaved. And the mac and cheese came out of the oven and looked really sad, even after mixing. It was decanted into another bowl, covered with leftover quesadilla cheese, and microwaved to melt everything together. After this, it looked a lot better. Tasted good too. :)

After dinner, Gretchen finished mixing the pie custard while I took paper towels and blotted more excess butter out of the pie crust. The pie was assembled and put into the oven to bake. Eventually, it emerged, was allowed to cool, and is now in the refrigerator waiting for tomorrow.

In the meantime, we adjourned to watch (for the second time) "Zoey's Extraordinary Christmas".

We'll see how the pie came out tomorrow night.

As for all of you, if Christmas is your holiday, have a merry one! And, if not, have a wonderful day.
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This afternoon, we started wrapping Christmas presents. We might have gotten further, but tonight was when the garbage needed to go out and that was a priority interrupt.

We will resume our regularly scheduled Christmas wrapping tomorrow and anticipate task completion on schedule.

(I hope.)
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I have reset the passwords at work that were scheduled to expire over Christmas break and have abandoned ship for the duration. :)

Time to go Christmas shopping!

Ho, Ho, Ho

Dec. 12th, 2021 09:48 pm
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The Christmas tree is finally decorated. Now, I just need to finish buying the presents. :)

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