7 quick takes!
So glad it's Friday. Brian's traveled for work the past three weeks in a row. We're all glad to have him home with no more work trips until January.
It's just been a flurry of family visitors around here. In a few hours, Brian's sister JoAnn is arriving to spend a week and a half with us. At this very moment, we're trying to stay awake long enough to pick her up from the airport. What she doesn't know is that, unlike last weekend's full sightseeing itinerary with my sister and brother-in-law, what we're all secretly wishing is that JoAnn will cook for us while we take naps on the couch. Shhhh....please don't tell her!
This will be the first Thanksgiving of my entire life that less than three rooms full of people will be gathered for the meal. It'll be JoAnn and the six of us. Plus the 52 recipes we're planning to make. I've tried to find more guests to join us, but so many of our friends here in Austin are also away from family trying to find guests to join them for the day. Another first is that we're not going to spend the whole morning home watching the Macy's parade. Since Austin is warm enough for it, we're headed to the park to meet some other families for frisbee, volleyball, kite-flying and such. Our bodies won't know what to do without our annual total food coma?
When I was a little girl, we always ate Thanksgiving dinner at my paternal grandparents' house. This past year when several of us were together again to celebrate my grandparents' 65th wedding anniversary(!), Grandma started interrogating each of us cousins about the infamous food fights at the kids' table in the basement. Being among the oldest of the grandchildren I was allowed to eat at the picnic table in the heated garage and was innocent of all the rascally goings-on the floor below. As I was telling my grandmother this, a totally new revelation occurred to my brain -- almost as if a cartoon lightbulb lit up over my head. I really can't believe it took me 40 years to figure out that my grandmother performed the most skillful of feats in putting all the children under the age of 18 (which was all twelve or more of us) out of the dining room where the grown ups ate. I guess I'd always assumed she just wanted to make everyone comfortable to sit in various locations on different floors of her house. Those grown ups managed to have calm, sophisticated dinner conversation every family gathering while the house almost rocked off its foundation beneath them. I blurted out my allegation to my grandmother and she didn't even have the decency to admit her scheme to me now after all these years! I wish you could have seen the very self-satisfied smirk on her 83-year-old face.
Have I ever mentioned that my grandmother is my hero?
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| This is my grandmother during the 65th wedding anniversary, facetiming with Brian (in TX) on my sister-in-law's hot pink iPhone. Priceless. |
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Have you seen this story about the calligrapher commissioned with handcrafting the entire Bible. Over twelve years he and a team of artisans handwrote the Bible onto 1, 150 pages. This is believed to be the first time a Bible has been commissioned in this way since before the invention of the printing press. Exquisite....