Dazzling holiday lights

When My Awesome Parents told us they were coming for New Year's, I bought us tickets to Dazzling Nights Pittsburgh at the Pittsburgh Botanical Garden. Dear Husband and I have regularly attended the holiday flower and light show at the Phipps Botanical Garden, but I wanted to do something different. A company comes in to set up forests of lights along the pathways. It was an impressive variety of strings, rings, flowers, rods, arches, Christmas trees, and other shapes. There were natural trees illuminated in neon lights, a fairy forest of dancing pinpoints of lights, and a cathedral of candles and stained-glass windows. Everything was even more magical because of a full moon overhead and snow on the ground, softening the landscape and crunching under foot. I just didn't anticipate that it was going to be 20 freaking degrees Fahrenheit. We made it 2/3 through the park before deciding our fingers were icicles, and we had seen enough. Inside was an exhibit of quilts by Black artists, but nothing in the gift shop enticed us enough to be purchased.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

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.

Miracle on 34th Street, Hon!

One day we all gathered at my brother’s house for brunch, games, and presents. It was really nice to have the kids’ (almost) undivided attention for a Nerf battle, Chinese checkers, and Don't Bee Last (which I wasn't very good at). We also saw the beginning of Red One, the new Santa action movie (yes, you read that right).

In the evening, we went out to Everyman Theater, which shrewdly seemed to be the only company in town putting on entertainment between the holidays. We saw an excellent production of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, a sort of “locked-room” whodunit based loosely on a fairly racist children’s rhyme. While movies today come with lots of slick special effects, it's always exciting to see stage magic happen in person.

On the way home, Dad, Dear Husband, and I stopped by the 700 block of 34^th Street in Hamden to take in the 77th year of spectacular holiday lights! The lights are on from 6pm-10pm Sunday through Thursday and until midnight on Friday and Saturday from November 30-January 1. To manage the crowds, they block off vehicular traffic and invite vendors, Santa, and caroling groups. We might have stayed longer, but it was starting to rain.

Happy Holidays Hon!

Flock Party

Merry Grinchmas

Happy New Year

It's hard to see, but this is a train garden under the front porch.

Hannukah lights!

Christmas 2024

Dear Husband and I were lucky enough to spend from Christmas Day to New Year’s Day visiting my family and our old friends in Baltimore. After opening gifts from his parents at our house, we packed up the car and headed east. The drive was cloudy but dry.

When we arrived it was time for dinner and more presents, including a large number of jigsaw puzzles. Here are the ones that we did together over the next week:

We started with this “Deck the Shelves” puzzle from my Aunt Beth, with its bright primary colors and many discrete elements to assemble.

This 1000-piece Melissa & Doug puzzle of striking front doors of unknown provenance has bold colors and different textures in the image, but the pieces are cut with a limited number of shapes, so many fit where they didn’t belong. Usually you just had to turn in upside-down.

The most unique puzzle was undoubtedly this 500-piece wooden jigsaw puzzle of an elephant. Some of the pieces are identifiable shapes, like a cat, a dragonfly, or a leaping dolphin. Black shading and extremely unique piece shapes that broke up the patterns upped the difficulty level, but it helped that if a piece didn’t fit, you knew it was wrong.

Lastly we started a 1,000-piece masterpiece of the "Alchemist's Library" by Vasilisa Romanenko, who paints vibrant scenes that could double as eye-spy games.

When not puzzling or eating, I alternated between completing a book review and working on my cross-stitch. I am pleased that I was able to read the book, write the review (my 7^th article or book review of the year), and submit it on time to get it off my to-do list. I have since finished the animals and words in the “Peaceable Kingdom”; all that remains is a LOT of outlining. I think I’m going to add some grass at the bottom, since there is so much extra green floss left over from the olive twig.

Other “fun” while on vacation included taking DH’s car to the shop to replace the left rear tire, which was as flat as flat could be, and having to hide all the carbohydrates from the mouse that has taken up residence in my parents’ house, chewing through packaging to get at the sweets and avoiding my father’s traps: