Only one more sleep until 2025

One of the reasons we could be gone for a whole week is that I was able to take my turn covering the clinic remotely. With the exception of split pea soup for lunch and a walk to the creek while the weather was nice, it meant a full day on my laptop and phone, handling patient matters. After I finished video visits, Dear Husband and I kept each other company at the kitchen table while he put together the Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol Lego set I bought, along with the pieces necessary to transform it into A Muppet Christmas Carol.

In the evening we worked on another puzzle and finished watching Oppenheimer. We marked New Year’s Eve with the hilarious British short, a German/Continental tradition since the 1970s, “Dinner for One.” Then we played Trivial Pursuit with dessert and champagne. It was the Genus IV edition (c) 1998s, so the questions were newer than the original edition I grew up playing but older than the Millennial edition. No one won by getting all the colors and answering a question in the center or answering an entire card. Hockey, Wagner, and Presidential quotations were overrepresented in the questions, which had an awkward syntax that made them hard to parse. The categories also had the "wrong" colors.

Recipe: Here’s the eggnog pie that has featured on these pages before. Mix 1.5 cups eggnog + a 3.4-oz instant vanilla pudding packet + either 1 cup of heavy whipping cream, whipped OR ~2 cups or 2/3 of a container of whipped cream. Pour into a 9” graham cracker pie crust, sprinkle with nutmeg, and chill until serving. East peasy, lemon squeezy!

2024 went out with a bang: Dear Husband and I stayed up late enough to hear the fireworks at midnight, and then we rolled over and went to sleep. Happy New Year! After a quiet morning and an early lunch, we packed everything up and drove back to Pittsburgh, taking the scenic route along the Lincoln Highway (Route 30) and stopping for ice cream at the Lincoln Highway Creamery, which was open on the holiday and happy to let me taste the teaberry (tastes like Pepto Bismol!). DH opted for the black cherry, and I finished off the tub of queen of hearts (their version of death by chocolate, with raspberry to boot). The drive over the Laurel Highlands was a little dicey, with the beginnings of a winter storm, but we made it home to Rosamunda, who was happy to see us. She's such a snugglepuss that we don't get the cold shoulder; instead, she wants ALL the attention, pets, and affection she missed while we were gone, with interest. She's purring on his lap right now, but if he tries to go to bed without tonight, there will be meows. So he will sleep with her in the guest room tonight!

Open Hearts, Open House

On the “low” Sunday after Christmas, we decided to attend worship at Lovely Lane, the “mother church” of Methodism in this country. I had visited 30 years ago on a field trip with my confirmation class, when the building was in disrepair. They have since restored the beautiful starry ceiling, wooden auditorium seats, and stained-glass windows in the round sanctuary. The scripture passage was about Jesus’ parents finding him at the Temple in Jerusalem, and the sermon was about how we’re preparing ourselves to find God in the new year.

Then it was home to finish getting ready for an open house with many old friends from church and growing-up.

Recipe:  The hands-down star of the show was my SIL’s cranberry salsa, which you spread over cream cheese and eat with Wheat Thins or other crackers.

Ingredients:

If you're serving a crowd, use 16 ounces cream cheese = 2 standard blocks at room temperature.

Otherwise it's a more even ratio to use only 8 ounces = 1 block.
12 ounce bag fresh cranberries, washed
2 jalapenos minced (adjust according to taste)
½ cup sliced green onions, roughly chopped
¼ cup chopped cilantro, roughly chopped
½ tablespoon lime juice
¼ teaspoon kosher salt
½ cup sugar, plus more to taste
Wheat Thins or some other sturdy cracker

Instructions:

• Set out the cream cheese to soften.
• Finely chop cranberries, jalapeños, green onions, cilantro, lime juice, salt, and sugar, in a food processor.
• Add salt and sugar to taste.
• Chill in fridge for about 2 hours or more. 
• To serve, spread room temperature cream cheese evenly in a pie plate or other shallow serving dish, like an 8×8 pan. Spread salsa on top and serve with crackers.

N. stayed for dinner so we could keep talking, and afterward we played Baltimore in a Box, the Monopoly knock-off. There’s a one-hour version that involves handing out properties at the start and limiting the time of play. At one point, three of us were in a traffic jam together! Daddy Money-Bags won.

Visiting the American Visionary Arts Museum

When I still lived in Baltimore as a teenager with conservative tastes in everything but politics, I didn't think that I would vibe with the American Visionary Arts Museum, but when my family visited over the holidays, it was a pretty conventional museum-going experience. Only the gift shop, Sideshow, with its yard-sale bazaar atmosphere of plastic goo-gahs next to irreligious icons next to crystals next to a bucket of buttons (marijuana leaves, Harry Potter, zodiac symbols, etc.), seems to retain the off-beat character I expected.

Foreground: Andrew Logan, "Black Icarus"

Background: Ingo Swann, "Millenium [sic] Triptych"

A whole gallery is currently given over to the multi-media sculptures of Judith Scott (1943-2005). She lived with her family in Cincinnati, until she was institutionalized at the age of 7 because she was deemed "ineducable" due to Down Syndrome and the fact that no one realized she had lost her hearing from scarlet fever as a baby. In 1986, her twin sister Joyce removed her from the institution and brought her to California. She was put in supportive housing and began attending art classes. Judith developed a unique and thought-provoking style of fiber arts collages with found objects. Imagine the life she could have led without that 36-year exile.

Gallery title: "The Secret Within: The Art of Judith Scott"

Videography stills of Scott at work at the Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, CA

You may say I'm a dreamer,
But I'm not the only one.
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one.
~John Lennon

"Esther and the Dream of One Loving Human Family" is a long-term exhibit of art by and about people who have suffered violence, such as apartheid in South Africa and the genocide in Rwanda. It was inspired by the 36 large crewel-work pieces of Esther Nisenthal Krinitz (1927-2001) who survived the Holocaust in Poland with one sister, hiding in the countryside while the rest of their village perished in the Majdenek concentration camp. Both married other survivors, and Esther moved to New York and later Maryland, while the sister went to Israel.

Childhood dream that the sky was falling on their barn; she is running away with her mother.

Krinitz included the gas chambers, crematoria, piles of discarded shoes, and fields of cabbages grown in soil mixed with the ashes of murdered Jews.

This is a happier image from life in Brooklyn, when Krinitz climbed a tree to pick cherries for her two daughters waiting in the yard.

Life-sized doll in traditional Polish costume

Apache elder Judy Tallwing (1945-) depicts the desert and the mountains.

Mr. Imagination aka Gregory Warmack (1948-2012),

"Always Remember You Are A Child of the King"

Finally, we scoped out "Good Sports: The Wisdom & Fun of Fair Play," a gallery on sports-inspired art, including Morgan Monceaux's (1945-2017) large portraits of Black pioneers, such as Toni Stone, the first woman to play in the Negro Leagues. In the 1940s and1950s she was on the rosters of the San Francisco Sea Lions, the New Orleans Creoles, the Indianapolis Clowns (a baseball-version of the Harlem Globetrotters), and the Kansas City Monarchs.

Minor-league umpire George Sosnak (1924-1992) was extremely talented with ink. Unfortunately, the photo I took of one of his decorated baseballs was blurry. Here's a letter he wrote and illustrated for Miss Lois Sullivan, who lived on Virginia Avenue on Mt. Washington in Pittsburgh. We looked at a house on Virginia Avenue before buying in Munhall.

David R. Klein, Pez dispensers

We were hungry, so we didn't even visit the museum's second building. Instead, we hopped on over to the Cross Street Market, loud and lively and looking good. Founded as open-air stalls in 1845, a two-story brick Italian Revival hall with shops on the bottom and a meeting space above replaced it in 1871. It burned to the ground in a 12-alarm fire in 1951. The next year, the current one-story brick building opened; it was renovated in 2018 and houses more than 20 vendors. The five of us had poke bowls, Korean fried chicken, a cheeseburger with fries, and/or ice cream from Taharka Brothers.

Recipe: That night for dinner I made a vegetarian feast of stuffed acorn squash, green salad, and rosemary bread. We fed 7 people with a variation of a recipe I found on Facebook.

Ingredients:

1/2 acorn squash per person

2 large sweet potatoes, cubed

2 cups Brussels sprouts, halved

as much dried cranberries and crumbled goat cheese as you want

olive oil, garlic powder, maple syrup, salt and pepper to taste

Instructions:

• Preheat oven to 400°F (200°C). Wash and chop the vegetables.

• Paint the edges of the acorn squash with olive oil and sprinkle with salt. Roast (skin up) for 40-45 minutes.

• Toss the Brussels sprouts and sweet potato with olive oil, garlic powder, salt, and pepper. Roast on a baking sheet for 20-25 minutes, stirring halfway through until golden and crispy.

• Fill each acorn squash half with the roasted veggies. Sprinkle dried cranberries and crumbled goat cheese on top. Drizzle with maple syrup if you like a touch of sweetness.

Days 5 & 6: The Olympic Flame and the Athens National Garden

Due to high winds, our caldera boat tour was in fact cancelled, so Thursday we stuck around our apartment. After a late morning, we finally left shortly before noon to eat lunch at a nearby restaurant that had an enclosed second-floor dining room. We got "the best seat in the house" at Mama Thira, watching the clouds make shadows over the blue waves rolling inexorably toward the shore and the ferries coming and going. It was incredibly meditative. Dear Husband had an excellent beef stew, and I ordered dolmades and a seafood salad. Our waiter even brought some raki (or tsikoudia) at the end of the meal as an aperitif. It's the kind of stuff that will put hair on your chest!

Then DH worked on a choir project and I sat in on the patio in the sun but with my hair covered because of the strong wind, reading a history of food in World War II. Eventually we broke for gelato and then made the 15-minute walk up to Imerovigli, where we took photos from the high point at St. Nikolaus Holy Convent. 

At home there was a cold dinner, and then we hiked the other direction into Fira to get the souvenirs we wanted before coming home to pack. I am rather proud of the fact that just under 100 Euros of groceries yielded us 4 breakfast, 3 dinners, 1 lunch, and a LOT of extra cherry tomatoes--oops. Part of me wanted to be frugal, part wanted to eat what and when we wanted instead of whatever the restaurant kitchen sent out, and partly cooking for ourselves let us enjoy the gorgeous view from our Air BnB patio. I'll share the recipe I came up with to use the famous Santorini tomato paste (since the tomato jam looked watery and unappetizing). If we had rented a car, for sure we would have visited the Tomato Industrial Museum on the other side of the island.

Santorini Sandwiches: Cut a crusty roll in half, butter generously, and toast the tops in a pan. Spread a layer of tomato paste, then thinly sliced cucumber, next 2 pieces of white cheese, and finally 2-3 slices of prosciutto or salami. Enjoy with veggies, leftover dolmades, a glass of wine, etc.

The photobomber apologized for "ruining" the shot; I told him he made it perfect, very genius loci.

Friday morning was the big day: the running of the Olympic torch on Santorini starting in the main square of Firostefani, right where we were staying! We stood on a wall to see over the tourists and Greeks who had turned out to take photos and cheer. There was even a class of schoolchildren with construction paper torches. The flame was transferred from one of six carrying containers to the sleek silver torch. I haven't been able to find out the name of the athlete who carried it. She had an honor detail of buff bodyguards in white track suits with sunglasses and earpieces--their job was presumably to hold back the crowds on the sides of the narrow walkway, and to run interference with the hikers who insisted on using the path anyway.

After that, Dear Husband and I went back to our room and passed the time until our airport pickup by starting the Nanoblocks figure I got him of a grand piano. These are like Legos except smaller and were recommended by the New York Times columnist who also recommended my neck pillow and reminded me we needed new European plug converters.

Once in Athens, we took a very crowded Metro for an hour into Syntagma Square. I wanted to walk to our hotel through the National Garden. (The Wikipedia article encapsulates a strange episode in post-WWI Greek history involving a pet monkey biting the king and a war with Turkey.)

What you can't see is the extremely popular χελώνα (turtle) everyone is taking pictures of. 

There's even a small zoo with water fowl and billy goats (?!). After walking in an entire circle due to the non-linear pathways, we gave up and just took the noisy sidewalk alongside. Here's Hadrian's Arch we passed on the way to our hotel.

When we had finished the tiny piano and were ready to leave the hotel for dinner, we discovered that DH's sports coat had gone missing, so we retraced our steps through the drizzling rain, thankfully finding it draped over a bush on our way back.

Dinner was at an Indian restaurant that apparently just (re)opened for the season. It was a little off the beaten path, and perhaps we should have heeded multiple clues that things were "off"...

Christmas 2023

Editor's Note: If you're following along in real time, this post is dropping one month after the big event due to general busyness of mixing family/friend time with a half-week of work over the holidays, followed by jumping into the new semester with both feet. Also, I was waiting for my new storage items to arrive in the mail, and I wanted to show them to you, because this post is dedicated to the suburban wife I have become. Cheers!

Dear Husband and I had a lovely Christmas 2023, in part because for the first(!?) time in two decades, we did not travel. Instead, his immediate family came to us. Unsurprisingly, I made very ambitious plans for cooking and activities, beginning with a great new taco place. Christmas Eve breakfast was waffles with a warm, homemade cinnamon pear compote topped with walnuts and powdered sugar that looked like something from a Williams Sonoma catalogue, but I was too busy serving and eating to photograph it.

(Moravian star visible in front window.)

(Yes, that is a flock of flamingoes; alas, their days may be numbered--

they really should have flown south for the winter, as snow and ice do not agree with them.)

Since buying our house almost 2 years ago, we have been purchasing more Christmas decorations. Last year was a reusable wreath with matching garland for the light pole in the front, and a sparkly light-up deer for the back. This year I discovered "urn fillers" for the concrete containers on either side of the driveway and scoured the internet to find a set that DH liked with battery-operated timers that didn't require a second mortgage. (Our first picks cost $170! EACH!) I also leaned into some kind of country kitsch with two oversized black metal lanterns with battery-operated candles to hang in the back yard--for ambience? DH seems to like them.

For Christmas Eve lunch (DH would already be at church by dinnertime), I decided to re-create that phyllo pie recipe. This time I made chickpea-with-spinach and chicken-(leftover from chicken soup)-with-peas, served with homemade cranberry sauce and my in-laws' German cucumber salad. Demerits for forgetting to defrost the frozen dough sheets overnight, although it turns out you can nuke them in their plastic wrappers in the microwave for 60 seconds (thanks, Alan Brown!).

Christmas Day breakfast was cinnamon rolls with grapefruit. More demerits to me for hustling us out of the house at 9am to be early for the 10am service at St. Paul's Cathedral, when actually we wanted to attend the noon service with the special music that started at 11:30am (whoops). So we gave up our spot in the parking lot and drove across town to Homewood Cemetery, where we hunted for the grave of a distant relative, then dawdled over hot drinks from the Starbucks that was open in the Jewish neighborhood. It felt so nice to give ourselves the gift of "no stress." (Kudos AND TIPS to the baristas who were working hard!) We were in good time for the brass, choir, and organ music and came home to a late lunch of phyllo pie with my MIL's raspberry pie for dessert.

There was jigsaw-puzzling, various rounds of card games, and we visited the large train set that is up in the living room of the older couple next door. The husband grew up in our house, and that train set used to be in what is now our living room.

Christmas Day dinner was London broil with this excellent marinade (not shown), mashed potatoes with my in-law's mushroom gravy, and Brussels sprouts that I thought would continue to cook while they rested on the stovetop but didn't (whoops).

On Boxing Day I took two meals off and only cooked for dinner, since DH's brother had come to town. I made this Martha Stewart "Cajun shrimp" recipe (above), except I swapped out the Andouille sausage for water chestnuts to lower the salt and fat content for my FIL, and I skipped the celery altogether, since only my MIL and I like it. I also tossed in the green pepper chunks last so they would stay crunchy. Served with roasted carrots and cumin. This filled our stomachs before we headed out to the Holiday Lights at the Phipps Botanical Garden.

Finally, this year I tired of storing our ornaments in torn, decades-old tissue paper and a mish-mash of cardboard boxes, so I invested in a set of plastic tubs and red-and-green canvas storage containers with cardboard inserts. Here you can see Rosamunda "helping" me sort everything into their new containers. There's a little space to grow, but we have more than enough ornaments to fit on a standard-issue live fir tree, so it's mostly about being able to see what you're looking for when you're decorating and feeling neat and tidy when everything is put away.