Our Thanksgiving this year came together very nicely even though our Thanksgiving was wildly disorganized and we did not even expect to be here before it all started. We are very grateful to our guests (Jack N., Dan T. Warren B., Aaron L., and Charlotte D., not to mention Kelly and Christian) because they all fit in nicely to a fairly chaotic but enjoyable Thanksgiving weekend. Most of us were able to attend a special, Spanish language church service on Friday which very much put the right kind of emphasis on the whole affair.
On top of that, Kiwi the surviving cat sister was the true miracle of the weekend. We emptied the oranges from a cardboard box and before we could move the box Kiwi climbed in. She spent most of the weekend there, minimizing the number of times we had to lock her in her room because she was getting into things to a record low.
We cooked two small turkeys over the weekend and were going to make soup, but Lorena accidentally threw out the broth from the simmer down of the turkey remains after we meticulously removed the fat and other detritus. Oh well. We will try again over Christmas.
When we lived in Raleigh and the kids were going to Wake Technical Community College and North Carolina State University, Christian did most of his studying at the bar in the kitchen while Lorena worked there. They loved that. It is really nice for both of them to get the chance to do that again. Lorena absolutely loves to cook and even more so when she can do it for the kids. Now, though, she has to study herself. The Astronomy class she is taking at Centralia College is a lot tougher than we imagined. One thing she has been trying to figure out is how to get the 10 extra credit points given for visiting a big telescope. 
There is one that qualifies not too far from our house in Olympia, but there is an amazing one–one of the best in the world in Arizona, the 
Kelly is coming home this afternoon for a few hours to wash some clothes and get some work done. Lorena made up some quiche out of leftovers from the party. We are planning to do nothing but get stuff done today–we will see if that plan actually works. Hopefully the plan will include a practice run on a new way to cook tri-tip. Well, it is new to us. I think everybody and their grandmother has done what we are going to try, but Lorena thinks she is really bad at stuff that she has not tried before. With respect to cooking, that is almost certainly 100% wrong these days. If it was ever true before, it is certainly not true now.
We had quite a nice party of mostly twenty-somethings over the weekend. The shoes and purses were piled up much higher than this at the peak of the party. We cooked hamburgers and hot dogs with very spicy guacamole on Sunday evening and and then quiche with Lorena’s special, extra spicy salsa on Monday morning. I do not think people got a whole lot of sleep, but the “kids” all seemed to have a nice time. We inaugurated or new fire pit and made gallons and gallons of coffee. We were thankful to have an extremely nice Canadian contingent (maybe that statement is a little bit redundant) and a strong showing from the very polished California young urban professional crowd. We are looking forward to doing it again next year.
Lorena checked the apples in our trees in the back yard and found that we probably could have (should have) been harvesting them for a couple of weeks now. She bought herself the business end of an apple picker pole and attached it to the end of the very long pole, Carolyn C. give to her as a gift about a decade ago. I have to tell you that has been about the most useful gift she has ever gotten. She has used it for a gazillion things and now it is receiving double duty both for apples and 
dusting of very high places. Now she is a state of high applesauce production mode. We need to get Bob over here soon because we have entirely too many of them. I think the pruning we had our yard crew perform in February really did the trick. So far we have gotten peaches (crazy sweet), pears–really small, but tasty, and now the apples. We really need to get set up to put a garden in which mostly just means we need to level out a spot, put up a really high fence to keep out the deer, and maybe put in a raised bed.
The sole purpose of this post is to find some common ground with Cousin Merle and his apostate daughter, Trisha, who think it is OK to eat hot dogs with ketchup. It is not. That being said, I walked into the kitchen just now an found my dear wife Lorena eating hot dogs with extremely spicy Mexican salsa. I think ALL of us can agree that that is just wrong. In no known or unknown universe is that OK. I hate to air the family’s dirty laundry in a blog post, but wanted to show Merle and Trisha who offensive it is when they eat their hot dogs with ketchup in a public setting. At least keep it to yourself.
Christian flew in from Tempe on Monday night, then took Amtrak down from Seattle to Centralia with Kelly after she got off work on Tuesday. It will be a whirlwind trip because they have a friend flying into Seattle on Friday to hang out with them. Our time together has been very relaxed time with them and, as usually, has centered on cooking, food, conversation, reading, and music, not necessarily in that order. Exercise has been on hold for a couple of days which affects all of them, but (shame) me because they all work out at least five days a week while I give lip service to working out five days a week. Is there such a thing as a Fourth of July resolution?
Yesterday, Lorena and Kelly picked 15 pounds of blueberries while I worked on some stuff for my new job and Christian worked on his dissertation research and comprehensives preparation. We spent a lot of time doing similar things growing up so it was very nice and relaxed. As for the blueberries, my understanding is that there will be pie sometime before they get back on the train to head back to Seattle later tonight.
We were very grateful to have Kelly come visit us for Father’s Day this weekend. She rode Amtrak down on Saturday morning. She even packed the new pink pantsuit she bought on Friday so she could model it for us. Lorena is getting better at taking pictures. You will notice in this shot, she cut off the feet instead of the head–that is a marked improvement.
We liked our 
We were very sad that our 
We really liked our old coffee maker, but did not like the fact that there was no jar that could be carried over to the table or people in the living room to serve coffee. Rather, the coffee stayed in a reservoir in the coffeemaker and was served with a lever directly into cups there. That would have been fine if we could have easily transferred the coffee in the reservoir into a large coffee pitcher, but the device made room only for a cup. So Lorena went down to her favorite department store (Goodwill) and found a coffeemaker we really love. It can make coffee from grounds into a jar AND from single serving K-Cups. It also has a small receptacle that fits in the place of a K-Cup where you can do single servings from grounds. We really like it a lot. It is not one of those fancy espresso/coffee/mocha/latte automatic machines like our friends, the Douglas’s have in North Carolina, but it will have to do until (and if) we can ever afford one of those.
Christian has taken great care of us. Tonight he drove us all over Tempe and Chandler so we could replace Lorena’s Note 3 and my Note for with two Pixel 2 XL phones. We have had these phones for four years–a record for us. They are very nice. The weather has been insanely good since we have been here and Christian found the one true taco shop in all of Phoenix (Los Taquitos on Elliot Rd) and even though I can hardly believe I am saying it, they are on par or maybe even better than the one true taco shop (
We are enjoying Tempe a lot. Lorena went with Christian to buy new tires for his car and to do some other shopping. The thing we notice is how “alive” this place is–maybe it is the time of year and the amazing weather (not too hot), but we are glad to be here right now. Christian is taking us to a new taco place he just found that is authentic in the way we measure Mexican authenticity. He said he had the “street tacos.” What else would you order in a truly authentic Mexican restaurant–especially for the first visit–so you can have a common metric against which to compare other “authentic” Mexican restaurants. Can hardly wait.
We had the fruit trees in the back yard pruned in February with the hope they might produce a better crop than we got last year. The reality is that it was not so bad last year–Bob brought his apple picker over and harvested a good amount of apples. Lorena made applesauce with her own apples for the very first time. The trees had not been pruned for a long, long time, so with this pruning we are hoping to see some improvement over last year. Now, all we have to do is get Bob to come back over with his apple picker…
I have been about 40 lbs. down from my high for over a month now since Jon W. and I first started our weight loss plan a little after Thanksgiving last year. It is good I am down and not going back up, but it is not so good I have been stuck for so long. I would like to say that I am on this plateau just because my metabolism has adjusted, but that would not be entirely true.
We inaugurated the new grill last night. I must say I think it was a wild success. Lorena and I split the steak in the picture (3 oz. each) so I even stayed on track with the diet. Jon and I have both been in stasis on our diet for the last month due to (speaking for myself, not for Jon) a total lack of discipline in the face of ham dinners with scalloped potatoes and angel food cake with whipped cream and strawberries for dessert. Nevertheless, we are both back in the saddle and ready to engage the battle one more time.
After all the hullabaloo