Help in the kitchen

Here's Janine helping to make her favorite Thanksgiving dish, mashed potatoes. She prepared the table with a little help from me. I suggested the glass dish to catch the peelings. She did the rest.

I wonder if she will help herself to more at dinnertime.

In the meantime Bobbie is working on the rest of the meal.


Menu:
Turkey, fresh, brined overnight
Granny's cornbread dressing
Green beans
Mashed potatoes
Pumpkin pie

Tomorrow we will turn around and do it all again when we host two families from our church. I guarantee that we will not have turkey.

New Gadget

Click for the ringtone I want on my phone.

Then sit back and enjoy an old favorite. Flaco Jimenez. I first saw the guy at the live broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion in 1981. My cousin John and his wife Marti got tickets and were kind enough to invite me along. I enjoyed the show from its early days in 1974 when it originated from the Macalester College student union.

In the late '70s the show had moved to the World Theatre, a very tired place in downtown St. Paul. I had to sit on my coat on more than one night to cover the springs peaking through my seat. After PHC was done at 7 PM Saturday night, the theater showed a Vietnamese double feature. So it was a very different crowd waiting outside in the cold when you left.

For the rest of my time in the Twin Cities, PHC was a favorite date idea. The show ran from 5:00 to 7:00 PM allowing for leisurely dinner afterwards.

Live broadcasting is always lots of fun, especially radio because you are watching what the "folks at home" can't see. Flaco lived up to his name. He was skinny.

Click on the comments button and tell me what you think.

Brownie Food Drive

This past week Janine and her Brownie troop had a food drive at a local grocery store. They passed out flyers to shoppers coming in and then collected their contributions as they left.

They picked grocery prime time, Sunday afternoon a few hours before a 4 PM Steelers game. The store was packed with the black and gold faithful. (I saw one cart filled with hoagie loaves on one side and deli meats and cheeses on the other.)

If the girls look a little stiff, they were cold. They stood in an entrance with doors on either side and a cold wind blowing across. They did very well for two hours work. The food bank got three large boxes of canned and dry food including our box of Cheerios.

Milestones Passed

I found this card along with stroller instructions when I was checking our product information file the other day. The car seat and stroller are long gone, but we still had the literature in the file.

It made me stop to think about how we put Sarah in it glad that she was no longer in the "bucket" carrier.

This weekend Sarah and John both go to a church youth group retreat. Legally, Janine has not been in a car seat or booster for over a year and had been big enough not to need one for even longer.

How things change! While I am somewhat wistful, nonetheless I am happy to see them grow and encouraged by their progress.

Peak Color

Last week was the perfect time for late season leaf peeping in our neck of the woods. The weather was sunny and warm. Here are three brilliant trees at their peak. Note the tree in the background is getting close to bare. This magnificent view is from our backyard across one neighbor's to another.

This week is another story. It's cloudy and cold. Saturday was the end of the outdoor season as indicated by the fact that I put away the deck furniture until next spring. Now on to raking the leaves!

Trick or Treat

Would you give candy to these three?

Well, a bunch of other people did this past Friday. For the first time the kids did not trick or treat in our neighborhood. But boy did they have nice weather for it. Clear and about 65 at sundown, it dipped to a comfortable 55 by the time it all was over at 8:00 PM.

Sarah (the flapper) went over to her friend Caroline's house. (It's nearby, but far enough to be interesting.) They hit just about the entire sub-division, up and down the hills and back into all of the cul-de-sacs. Because Halloween was on a Friday this year, many houses were empty, their families at the game.

Janine (Luna Lovegood from the Harry Potter series) went to a Halloween party at a friend's house. They made crafts, ate dessert and exhausted the parents.

John (Edward Cullen of the soon-to-be-famous Twilight series) and I went to other direction and trekked to his friend Andrew's house. There, we met up with a bunch of other guys. We started in a very high-end neighborhood full of doctors. At the orthodontist's house, they all got toothbrushes. Then we cut through a yard to another neighborhood that really had the Halloween spirit. Entire families were sitting out in the driveway with tables full of candy! Other houses had some unusual decorations including the jack-o-latern featuring the number of Evegeny Malkin from the Penguins. I wonder if they trick or treat in Russia?