Journal: ♫ ♪ Now Thank We All Our God ♫ ♪

Here's Teensy, begging for some of my 'loaded potato soup'.  Yesirree, I saved him the last spoonful, much as I love that stuff!

Last Tuesday, Hester sent pictures of Keira in one of the little dresses we gave her right after she was born.  It finally fits! 

I wrote back to Hester, “Her little face is quite expressive, isn’t it?  😍 “

“That’s her ‘I heard there was going to be food’ face 😄,” returned Hester. 

Baby Keira has a good appetite, and is getting close to 14 pounds now.  We were debating whether or not she’d stay a little fixin’, and Hester said, “If babies are like puppies and you can go by foot size, she might be little 😅.  Her feet are itty bitty.”

“Well...  nuttin’ wrong with being itty-bitty!  😃” I remarked.

By nighttime, I had two partial blocks put together for the New York Beauty Variation quilt.  I wanted to wait ’til the Venice lace arrived to finish putting the blocks together, in case I decided to sew the lace into the seam.  I did some calculations to see how many of each patch I needed to cut from each piece of fabric, so I could do all the cutting at once.  I have 28 one-yard pieces of cream-on-cream, 25 one-yard pieces of white-on-white, and four other one-yard pieces that don’t quite fit with the rest, which I might use in the borders.

Here are the partial blocks.  There’s a little more contrast between the cream and the white than it appears here, and there will be more when I quilt it, as I will use a dark cream thread in the cream areas, and a bright white in the white areas.  I will use two layers of batting, Hobbs 80/20 against the batting, and Quilters’ Dream Wool on top, so the quilting will show up well.

We had Schwan’s Canadian bacon pizza for supper Wednesday night.

Victoria sent pictures of Carolyn in the pajamas I made for her.  All three pairs of pajamas fit the little girl for whom I made them!  Carolyn was carrying a dolly that looked about half as big as she is.  That dolly used to be Victoria’s, and it doesn't seem so very long ago, either.  😊

Larry’s been working on his shop every chance he gets, trying to get at least one side of the roof done before bad weather sets in, in earnest.  He worked on it every evening last week after he got home from work, and Thursday morning before our Thanksgiving dinner at church.

There were over 400 people there.  We had a service at 11:00 a.m., with our orchestra and band playing Thanksgiving songs, the congregation singing, and my nephew Robert, our pastor, reading some verses.  Dinner was at noon.

On the menu was turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, corn, green beans, sweet potatoes, homemade rolls with butter and jelly, pickles and olives, milk (white or chocolate), coffee or tea, chef salad, orange jello fluff, frozen cranberry salad, pecan, cherry, or peach pie, or pumpkin cheesecake, with whipped cream, and ice cream.

If I take vewy, vewy small portions of everything, I can sometimes manage to have a bite or two of most things.  But I’m almost always too full to have any dessert, and then by evening I’m dying for a piece of pie!  Such a revoltin’ development.  When that happens, I usually wind up baking a pie. 

This time, though, I foiled my flagging appetite:  I asked for a piece of pecan pie even though I knew I was too full to eat it, and I took it home with me!  By late afternoon, as always, I was hungry – and pleased as punch with myself for absconding with a slice of pie.

I was discussing real potatoes versus potato flakes with a couple of friends.  I agreed with them, that yes, real mashed potatoes are best.  I like mine with a few lumps left in them, and the peelings, too, if they are red potatoes.  We like Hungry Jack potato flakes quite well, though. 

One time when Larry and I were married no more than a year, I fixed a big supper for his parents, brother, grandmother, a couple of aunts, and an uncle.

Not one to do things halfway, and not knowing exactly what all their likes and dislikes were, I fixed a banquet that would have made the Windsor Palace kitchen proud.  I mean to say, there were a good dozen courses, plus several desserts.  We had to employ the coffee table and the hope chest into service as buffet tables, to help contain the spread.

On the menu was mashed potatoes – made from Hungry Jack potato flakes.  As usual, I left a few small lumps in them ----- and added enough milk and butter to make them a creamy yellow color.  Mmmm, mmm; they were good enough to eat all by themselves, no gravy needed.  Mmmmmm!

The meal had just begun, when Lyle, Larry’s father, nodded in a satisfied mien and said, “Daughter-in-law,” (he generally called me ‘daughter-in-law’ rather than my real name, and I considered it a warm term of endearment, coming from him), “I really have to commend you!  I’m glad to see that you make real potatoes, instead of that stuff made from cement and chalk.”

I grinned at him.  Then I got up, went to the pantry, pulled out the Hungry Jack potato-flake box, ker-plunked it down in front of him, and announced, “Yesirree!  ‘Real potatoes’!”  And I pointed at the little square on the front of the box that proclaimed, “Made with Real Potatoes!!!”

He looked at it, nonplused.  And then the whole family burst out laughing.  And Uncle Earl proclaimed that he liked a girl who would tell the truth, even if it meant admitting to potato flakes.  haha 

That evening, Larry went on working on his shop roof, and I went on working on the New York Beauty variation quilt.  By bedtime, the cutting for the center part (not including the borders) was done, and I’d put together three tapered-block arches before quitting for the night.

Every time I stepped outside to take pictures of Larry with his scissor lifts and those big pieces of metal roofing, Tiger came patiently plodding along after me to see what I was doing.

Friday, Victoria invited us for supper, along with Jeremy and Lydia and family and Caleb and Maria.  She told me what she was fixing:  roast beef, chicken, green beans, mashed potatoes and gravy, a cold pasta salad, a tray of fresh vegetables, and fresh pineapple.

“Did you think we all needed two Thanksgiving dinners???!” I asked.

“No,” she laughed, “I didn’t get turkey!”

I contributed a big pot of honey-buttered corn.  I made several bowls full of various kinds of jello, planning to cut it into squares after it set up and mix it together into a big bowl, but two of the bowls didn’t set up.

I’d poured frozen fruit into each of those bowls.  Which of that fruit had caused the problem?  I knew kiwi would keep jello from setting... but there was no kiwi in the mix.

I looked it up online and found a list of fresh fruits that will keep jello’s protein molecules from gelling:  pineapple, kiwi, mango, ginger root, papaya, figs, and guava. 

Now, I’ve used pineapple in jello lots of times, with no trouble.  But it was canned, never frozen pineapple.  Frozen evidently works just like fresh pineapple in putting enzymes into the liquid.  And, as if that wasn’t enough, there was mango in that fruit mixture, too.

I mixed up more jello with just enough boiling water to dissolve it in, leaving it very concentrated, and poured that into the bowl.  It didn’t help one little iota.

Soooo... I put the stuff into the freezer.  We now have numerous bowls of tasty fruit slushies.  In fact, I’m nibbling away at some as I type.  But mercy me, we’re each going to have to eat a large bowl for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day for a month before that stuff is gone.  At least it’s sugar-free!  😉

Victoria sent us home with some of her scrumptious, fluffy pumpkin crunch cake, and whipped topping to put on it.  Mmmmm... she’s a good cook.  😋

I worked a little longer on the quilt that night, getting the tapered-square arches done for all 36 blocks.  Saturday I added the quarter rounds to them all, and started putting the rays together.  There are 363 rays in all, so I won’t be done for a couple more days, probably.

The heat moldable batting for the nesting bowls is on back-order until the first part of December, so the fabric nesting bowl project is having a sabbatical.  But today I discovered that it’s back in stock at Red Rock Threads, so I ordered some.  The first order wouldn’t have been enough anyway.  It’s already been shipped, and should be here in two days.

Nathanael and Levi have had colds, and weren’t getting better.  Hannah took them to the doctor on Friday.  She couldn’t see the regular doctor, so saw a new one instead.  He gave them a cursory and not-too-thorough look-over, and prescribed a couple of medications.  When Hannah went to pick it up, there was only one prescription rather than two, and not the same one the doctor had said he’d order.

The medicine didn’t help, and Saturday Nathanael was worse, and Levi was no better.  Hannah took them to Urgent Care.

Sure enough, Nathanael has pneumonia, just as we’d feared, and he was dehydrated, too.  They gave him medicine to stop the nausea, and a strong antibiotic.

Levi, meanwhile, has croup.

You know, it’s understandable when doctors have difficulty diagnosing rare diseases; but to miss pneumonia or croup is really without excuse!  No wonder we live in a sue-happy world.

That night, Larry got all the roofing except the slanted pieces for the ends fastened onto his shop roof.

I edited about half of the pictures taken at our niece’s wedding.  One of these days, I'll get caught up!  Uh, that is, if I don't keep taking pictures faster than I can edit them.

It started snowing late that night, and kept it up until early morning.  We didn’t get as much as the weatherman predicted.  I suppose it was an inch and a half, or thereabouts, with some drifting on account of the high winds.

Last night our men’s choir sang Turn Your Eyes upon Jesus.  It was a beautiful arrangement of that lovely old hymn, written in 1922.  If you’d like to hear it, you can find it here, in the P.M. service, at the 16:00 mark:  

http://www.bbccolumbus.com/one.htm.  

Our grandson Aaron is in the middle row, second from the left; Teddy is in the middle row, first one on the right.  Bobby is in the front row, fourth from the left, and Kurt is fifth from the left, beside Bobby.

The little birds are glad for all the feeders I keep filled.  I saw a new one today – a Harris’ sparrow, one of our largest sparrows.  He joins the English sparrows, house finches (left), American goldfinches, red-breasted nuthatches, downy woodpeckers, blue jays, Northern cardinals, Eurasian collared doves, mourning doves (though most of them have moved farther south), and dark-eyed juncos.

Our furnace fan has bitten the dust.  We have the wood-burning stove going... but it’s in the basement, connected to the heat ducts, and we used the furnace fan to distribute the warm area.  So we have a couple of large radiant heaters going.  The house is comfortable, though it’s only 24° outside.

Larry brought home a pet gate to put in the doorway to the basement, so we can leave the door open and thus allow more heat to come upstairs from the wood-burning stove.  This, because we don’t exactly trust Tiger by himself in the basement.  But Teensy is a well-mannered gentleman, so it doesn’t matter that he can easily clear the gate and trot downstairs.  Tiger could never get his pudgy bulk over that gate if his life depended on it.

Teensy, as expected, soon sailed over the gate and headed to the nether regions.  Later, I went down there to add more wood to the stove, and found him snoozing happily on the thick carpet just outside my gift-wrapping room.  Teensy looks like he’s back to his normal weight again, and acts hale and hearty again, thankfully.  We like that kitty!

The Venice lace for the New York Beauty Variation quilt just arrived!  I got about $400 worth of lace for just $70 at cheeptrims.com.  I wondered if the quality would be up to snuff.  It is!  It’s beautiful lace.  

The man from the heating company never returned the call Larry made earlier today.  But... we are comfortable, with our wood-burning stove and radiant heaters.

There’s 12-grain bread baking in the oven... pulled pork cooking on the stove... and I’m warming the last of the honey-buttered corn in the microwave.  We’ll have fruit slushies for dessert.  A fine supper!

,,,>^..^<,,,          Sarah Lynn          ,,,>^..^<,,,