More blah, blah, blah

This should be a post about a cat but this is just a post about what I've been up to with a picture of our cat Specks (or should I say our cat "S"?!) ;o) yanking something from under L's door and this is a picture to use when there's no other picture to use!

With most of the furniture out of the family room for Thanksgiving, we decided to have our wood floors refinished. This required leaving the furniture out of the family room AND taking anything else off the floor. The floor was done on Thursday but we had to be out all day Thursday and until later on Friday because of the caustic smell. We stayed at my mother's--glad we had some place handy to go. Saturday we set about trying to restore order. Things are still not quite back together. Unfortunately, it is infinitely easier to undo and dismantle things than to restore things to their rightful places. But the floor does look good! Now we'll just go ahead and neglect it for another few years! :o)

I've had some good shopping days where I've really enjoyed myself but not bought anything to speak of for Christmas. I did find something for B to give me (and I bought it!). :o) I also found something for Tyler. Bryan found something he wanted and bought it. That is the extent of my Christmas preparation. My trees aren't even set up because of the refinishing of the floors and Thanksgiving (too much moving of furniture to have trees in the way).

Next on my list of things to do is to get ready for the personal progress evening at my house on Tuesday. Do you have any suggestions for snacks? We've (1) dipped chocolate, (2) had white chocolate popcorn, (3) eaten a cheese ball, crackers and veggies, (4) had ice cream sandwiches, (5) made sandwiches for lunch and had chips on the side, (6) had a breakfast, and two other evenings (7 & 8) with food (and I can't recall the food--maybe donuts or cookies?? Maybe melon and grapes??). I have more things to do regarding Young Women and somewhere in there I will do something about (1) decorating the inside of the house for Christmas and (2) finding a few more presents.

This morning my mother looked nice and had good color to her face. I attended the church meeting with her at her building. She is still declining. She is very confused and often sleeps. As of a week ago Friday, she weighed eighty pounds (and on an accurate scale finally). The hospice nurse said the next step in her decline that he is watching for is when she just stops eating.

Well, I'm off to watch the Christmas Broadcast from Salt Lake City.

Some things I've been up to lately

I like to use pictures with my blog posts. However, for a person who carries a camera in her purse everywhere she goes, I am not very good at remembering to use it. With that in mind, I took this picture about a month ago when B and I were walking the dog, intending to save the photo for just such a night as this--when I want to post a bunch of blah, blah, blah about nothing in particular and want a photo to go along with all that blah, blah, blah. Viola--I am ready.

Tonight we had our Young Men/Young Women Christmas party (yep, I didn't take pictures). I was in charge of it (or the Laurels were but none of the Laurel presidency attended). It was a fun night. We played games. I think the game that was the biggest hit was one that one of the other leaders invented for the evening. We all sat in a circle, each took turns rolling a die, anyone who got a six ran into the middle and put on welding gloves. Then that person had to try to unwrap a package that had been wrapped about twenty times. If you were the last to unwrap it, you would win whatever was inside. There were two dice going around separately. It was very fun and funny. Even the leaders got into it. We had a white elephant gift exchange. We brought cans of food and donated them to the bishop for needy people in the ward. We had donuts and milk for our refreshments. And I didn't think to take pictures. At these activities, I'm too busy managing the universe, I suppose.

I have gone activity to activity to activity--finishing one, starting on the other, trying to look ahead and keep things in motion--probably all year. So many activities. Always something to do and always something on the horizon that I need to work toward. In recent memory, in October I had the Evening in Excellence.

Here is a photo showing the decorations--this photo just does not do it justice. Even though the colored material seems small in comparison to the gym, they are taller than the average person and when walking in the room, the decorations appeared fuller and more interesting than this picture shows. Anyway, this was a lot of work. The theme was something about the Country Fair in Excellence. I delegated parts of it but I had the decorations and the games--the main things. After this was over in October, my next big thing (with 1000 little things in between) was the Recognition Evening in November.

This is the picture of the refreshment table. My counselors made the value signs (although the blue one is MIA in this photo). We had ice cream (white=faith) and candy and things in the value colors to sprinkle on the ice cream. I borrowed this idea from my very talented sister-in-law Cori. It was particularly a hit with the little kids who came. The girls said we should do the "value color" idea with fruit. That sounds good, too. We had four special speakers and all of them did a wonderful job. I felt like this activity went well.

I asked a wonderful woman to substitute for my lesson this Sunday. I had to off-load something. My next big thing is that I host a personal progress evening at my house next Tuesday. My own kids hate it when I do the personal progress at our house because they have to help clean. I need to think of some kind of refreshments that we haven't had this year and make them--and I'm running out of ideas for food I'm capable of making and capable of thinking up. Then we do baptisms that Friday and I am the only female adult driver (so I can't get sick or have something come up). Then I have a presentation the Sunday before Christmas, along with the presidency and advisors (I have my five minutes already prepared). Then some leaders, girls and I are delivering gifts to the widows in our ward on the 3rd Tuesday. Then, then, then, then, then. I'm leaving stuff out of this recitation and I haven't even gotten to the end of the month.

Fun and interesting times--never a dearth of things to do--never.

"Let us here observe, that a religion that does not require the sacrifice of all things, never has power sufficient to produce the faith necessary unto life and salvation . . . ." Lectures on Faith, 6:7a.

Thanksgiving confessions of a slacker blogger

For Thanksgiving, we invited my husband's family to come eat at our house. We worked slavishly to clean and make ready. The kids were dragged into it and required to (gasp) work. I did the shopping, decorating, dish washing, potato peeling, and I'm sure other things. :o) My husband cooked the turkey, dressing and gravy and mashed the potatoes. Yea him!! Many of the other "required" foods were assigned out. My sister-in-law G made the delicious and, at least for my family, required homemade rolls and she made the pies. My niece-in-law made the salad, salad dressing and relish tray. My mother-in-law made two favorite jellos: green pepper with lime Jello and the ribbon Jello. There were eighteen people here.

I entirely forgot to bring out my camera before the event to record the decorations and during the event to record the people! I must just be a blogger-pretender. No true blogger would have passed up that photo op. The meal was successful and it was nice to see some relatives I hadn't seen for at least a year, and one couple I hadn't seen for two years. This wasn't B's whole family--more like one third.

I'm game to do it all again next year or even at Christmas this year. I decided that if we were going to do this with any regularity, I'd trade in the plastic table cloths and try to get some good, matching cloth table cloths. I also got some drastically reduced cloth napkins to go with the green table cloths. I used "real" plates and silverware--almost all dishwasher safe. Clean up wasn't bad.

The Saturday after Thanksgiving, my family came here for Thanksgiving dinner. There were 19 people here, including one friend TD.

It seemed to me, once the food was laid out, that by some unintentional brilliance on my part, my sister had had the lion share of the cooking. ;o)

For this go-round, my husband was in charge of the mashed potatoes and the gravy--easier duty than on Thursday. I made two relish trays, green salad, peeled the potatoes, made ribbon Jello salad for the first time (the secret is putting the first layer of jello in the freezer--thanks Sis for cluing me in), and I had to clean up and set everything up. L decorated and set the tables. My sister made the bread dressing, pies, whipped cream, sweet potato something-or-other (and I cooked that) and Dixie salad. Her husband deep fried or smoked the turkey. I'd never had that before.

For Saturday's meal, I did break out the camera before the dinner because we were waiting for my sis to arrive. I took some pictures but then once my sister arrived, I was busy trying to get things ready and entirely forgot to take any other pictures for the rest of the evening. So for what it is worth, here are a few photos but in no way a good representation of the meal or the attendees.

B is in the background, probably dealing with the potatoes at that point. In the foreground we see my niece M and my daughter L.

Here are my nephews R, C and R with my son T watching something on the computer.

Here are my son J, my nephew W and my nephew A. You can see that I employ the very latest techniques for keeping children out of the middle of hectic meal preparations--electronics.

My nephew T hid under the pool table to avoid getting his picture taken, otherwise all the under-18-year-old kids are pictured here. My niece C and her husband D came with my sister and her husband--no pictures of any of the four of them. (Maybe I will later borrow pictures from my sister-in-law's blog---shh, don't tell---since C is a true and dedicated blogger and would never let such a good photo op pass her by! I admire that about her.)

Here is a picture of the "kids" table.

Here are my brother and sister-in-law sitting at the "adult" table. I'm thankful they came for Thanksgiving. It was great to have almost all of us together. We were missing my nephew and his wife who are away at school and my niece and her son. Of course, we were missing my mother who was better off staying at her assisted living place for the evening.

I'm thankful that holidays and food bring people together. It was great to see everyone and to break bread with them.

Both dinners went well and maybe if we do this about 100 more times at our house, I'll really have this system down. Furthermore, I will continue to perfect that "delegate everything to everyone else" technique that I was practicing on my sis this year! Ha ha!