ORGANIZED THANKSGIVING?

Thanksgiving, as I sit here and write is tomorrow.  Thanksgiving was very important to me growing up.  Since my family (and I) are Jewish most of the mainstream family holidays (Christmas, Easter) were not our holidays and we did not observe or celebrate them.  But Thanksgiving was different - it was for all Americans (and any one visiting the country also).

When I met my husband (who is Roman Catholic) and as we progressed through dating to marriage we started celebrating each other’s holidays with the each other’s families.  That left Thanksgiving as the only holiday both families wanted us for.  We tended to go to his family, but sometimes went to mine.  We got married and this continued.  Then came the year his sister got married - a week or so before Thanksgiving.  We did not want to go to dinner with just his parents and grandmother, but did not want to leave them alone and go to dinner with my family.  What to do? 

I then made a suggestion that shocked and surprised my husband - “Let’s have both families here for Thanksgiving dinner”.  I then found the real difference between the two families.  It was not being from different “old countries”.  It was not the difference in religion.  It was - his family ate out for almost all holidays and mine ate home for almost all holidays.  The concept of making dinner for and having 10 people shocked and scared him.  My mom used to have that and more for family holiday dinners and to do so was what I expected out of life.  He was further concerned as we lived in our apartment then - “Where would we put everyone?’  We had a long living room and I figured we would get (we ended up borrowing from his parents) folding tables and set them up end to end to make one long table. 

Both families agreed to come.  We were a little rocky that first year.  We overreached.  Luckily we started the night before.  We planned on making our own stuffing which used chestnuts - I never knew that under the shell chestnuts had a skin, which also had to be removed - it took forever.  We put together some food dish or other and had it on the counter.  I dropped a glass - the food was covered in glass and had to be thrown out.  But we did it.  Lack of serving space?  Cover the portable clothes dryer with a table cloth, push it in the corner of the living room - bar.  People had a problem walking past each other at the table, but it all worked out.  I even saw a different side of my, always seemingly austere, grandfather - someone made an inadvertent double meaning comment (meaning off color in the unintended meaning) and my grandfather laughed like crazy with everyone else and so did husband’s grandmother. 

It was so successful that we continued for 25 years to make Thanksgiving dinner for the combined families.  We got much better at it.  The year we moved to this house we moved in October.  I promised that we would make Thanksgiving dinner - even if we ate off of paper plates.  (The china was on the table for the dinner.)  The problem we found we had was that the dinning room was square, not long and we had to deal with fitting in tables.  Until we bought a dining room table some years later we came up with plywood pieces which clamped to our old kitchen table and made a huge square table and had to be assembled and disassembled each year. 

The only thing that stopped us, finally, from continuing to make Thanksgiving dinner was bed bugs.  Since we no longer feel comfortable having anyone in the house we no longer have people in.  Since then my family eats dinner at my sister’s house and his family goes out for dinner.  We eat alone. In the 8 years since then we have eaten Thanksgiving dinner in a chain buffet or made dinner for the two of us.  (One has a lot of leftover turkey when one makes dinner for two.)  The chain buffet closed this year.  That left us looking for an alternative.  There was one possible place that we could sort of afford, but we had never been there and reviews online were not the best.  So this past weekend it was “officially” decided that we make dinner at home. 

Now to keep organized over the years I made lists.  Starting the second year we made Thanksgiving I wrote them in a spiral notebook.  At first it not only included a list of what we would have, but also lists of what each item would be cooked and served in.  Over the years since the menu mostly repeated I knew which items would be used for cooking and serving.  I knew that, as odd as it sounds, the first thing to start cooking when we got up Thanksgiving (late) morning was the potatoes for mashed potatoes.  The first year we had found out that there was a large local deli which was open on Thanksgiving and we could order the turkey cooked and ready for a hot pickup in the afternoon - my sister and her husband (and children) would pick it up for us on their way here (we paid) as they went past the place anyway.  Over the years the place shut down and we started getting the turkey from their other location - closer to my sister than us.  Not having a turkey in the oven left room for everything else.

At the height of our hosting Thanksgiving I would start cooking on Tuesday having already cleared the dining room as much as possible - including moving small pieces of furniture to our studio on the other side of the kitchen.  I baked Venetians (aka rainbow cookies).  They had to be baked and put together with the jellied centers on one day, left overnight with a heavy book on them and then chocolate melted and frosted it on another day.  I would make beef vegetable soup (PA Dutch recipe) on Wednesday and bake an apple pie and brownies (brownies were from a mix).  Wednesday night we would put together the sweet potatoes (no marshmallows, Colonial Williamsburg recipe) and bake the pumpkin pie.  Thanksgiving day we would make the rest of the items and bake the sweet potatoes.  A couple of times I made and baked rolls from scratch and once a baked a tea bread (CW recipe again) from scratch.  Sometimes I made biscuits instead.  Nieces and nephews however like the can popping open however, and we mostly made rolls from refrigerated dough.  (These rolls are no longer made by the popping can company or any other.) 

Each year I would look at my list of dishes from the year before.  We would discuss it and possibly make changes - Would something new work?  Do we need more of less of something. More of something? Did his sister want salad?  Was my sister vegetarian that year?   Did my niece decide she was kosher that year and would bring her own food? (Did not last beyond 2 years.)  We would adjust the menu.  But year to year it remained organized.  My sisters, mom and I were used to working together on getting out the food and clearing up and husband’s sister made her best efforts to help.  As nieces came along they helped - young children like to help - but nephew preferred the living room and playing.  I would do the dishes, etc. after everyone left.  In the apartment by hand and here in the dishwasher.  Here in the house I would also wash and dry the tablecloth and napkins overnight.  Since we stopped having the family in, the dish washer has broken so I am back to washing by hand.  When we went to/go to sleep at night on Thanksgiving everything has been washed (or was being washed in the dishwasher).  It does take a few days or a week to put it all back, but all is always cleaned that night.

Our guest list would change - it got smaller when my dad died, larger with each niece or nephew, a boyhood friend of husband’s who lived out of town, was down for the holidays a couple of times and joined us for dinner.  Husband’s sister’s mother-in-law was added to the guest list for several years before we stopped.  We first heard that his sister and her husband were going to adopt a child at dinner one year.  My niece had her first “food” - applesauce - at Thanksgiving dinner one year.

I have the recipes in the computer.  I used to use a cookbook program, but it needs a parallel printer directly hooked up to the computer on a specific port, so it is no longer usable.  It used to be great, it would resize recipes and calculate the revised ingredient list and had a shopping list feature.  I had put in the location of foods in our supermarket and I would have a shopping list printed out in the order I needed to find the foods.  When I saw its life coming to an end I printed all the recipes and scanned them back into the computer as pdf files so I would not lose the recipes.  I have to calculate ingredient quantities for changes in servings and make my own shopping lists, but I still can print the recipes out.  One advantage to this when making an assortment of items, is that when an item is done being prepared, the recipe is tossed out.  Helps keep track of what is done and what needs to be done.

So if we have been so organized and good at it, why has this year been such a mess?  We did not decide until the last minute that we were making dinner for ourselves.  (We had kept waiting for the magic restaurant to appear for us to go to for dinner.)  On Sunday while in Costco we saw turkeys for 99 cents a pound.  We were not going straight home and did not want the turkey sitting in the car for hours so we did not buy one. 

Tuesday we had a list of what we would make and needed ingredients. - some our traditional ones, some husband picked to make it easier for me.  We set out to food shop.  In my mind we would buy items which did not need refrigeration (since they were more Thanksgiving related they might sell out) and then get a turkey at the Costco near us.  Husband had planned to buy the turkey first in case we had a problem finding one - but did not tell me why he was buying it first, so I pushed to get it later.  We bought stuff at Walmart and the supermarket next to it.  (I may or may not have mentioned that our Walmarts do not have the supermarket Walmarts commonly have and there is a separate, unrelated supermarket next to the Walmart we normally go to.)  We then set off, not to the Costco near us, but to the one we normally go to (which we like it better than the one near us) to get the turkey.

Horrors! There were no more 99 cent a pound turkeys!  The only turkeys they had were $3.29 a pound as they were organic.  Panic!  My mind went to what we could have instead of turkey.  I remembered we bought 2 ham portions - one for Christmas and one for whenever - when last in Lancaster, PA and I figured if stuck we would have “French Turkey” which is ham.  Husband drove to a specialty food store located near Costco which had opened here this year - a chain from Connecticut.  We had been very disappointed when we went to see this store after decades of hearing about it - very expensive, but I followed him into the store.  He moved so quickly that I lost sight of him before I got to the store.  I kept thinking I was seeing his red winter jacket - but when I got to where I thought I saw him it would be an employee in a red apron.  I finally caught up with him at the turkey case.  They had LOTS of turkey - even better and - important at this point - was that the turkeys were not frozen.  We picked out one that is probably too big for us, and brought it home. $1.69 a pound, not the 99 cents we planned, but not $3.29 either. 

Today Wednesday we went to the supermarket to buy the items which we did not buy yesterday as they need to be refrigerated and we did not want to drive around with them yesterday while getting the turkey.  We ended up changing the menu while there.  I had planned on baking him a pumpkin pie.  He decided we should buy one instead.  I make it for him with less sugar and no pie shell (believe it or not the latter part - no pie shell - is from Libbys and uses its basic pie recipe).  He decided it was too much trouble, so we bought a pie and I ran around putting back things such as eggs which we were buying to bake the pie.  What had settled the matter was a free apple pie for me with the purchase of his pumpkin pie (or vice versa).    Both treats for us which will be eaten over many days as we are limited in eating sweets.   

I had planned on clearing out the dining room yesterday and today - in particular the items for the RV which sit under the dining room table in RV season and get stored in the RV for the winter, but did not have a chance due to the running around shopping.  We keep our dining room table,  without the boards to the table, against the wall when not in use.  (This was done in the 1700s and is very convenient allowing use of the empty space in the middle of the room for other projects.)  I will pull it into place in the middle of the room and stack the RV stuff (and any weaving stuff, etc. stored in the dining room) against the wall out of the way.

I did polish the silverware we will use.  It has been some years since it was polished and the heating of the house to kill the bed bugs did not help.  I have been picking out for us the less tarnished looking pieces. Surprisingly it did not take as long as I remembered to polish what we needed - and I put the pieces in a zip bag to keep them relatively free of tarnish.  Perhaps I will finally get around to polishing the rest of the silverware and lining the drawers they are kept in with the special fabric to prevent tarnishing to protect it.  In the meantime, the pieces I have polished will be returned to the sealed bag when we are done with them.

Somehow the dining room will be ready.  I will get up tomorrow and put the turkey in the oven and go back to sleep.  Everything will come out okay - worse comes to worse, it is just us.

My best wishes to all of you who are in the U.S. for a wonderful Thanksgiving.

GETTING EXTRA TASKS DONE - SOMEHOW

This week I wanted to talk about fitting in things that have to be done now and then.  One can set up a routine for the week to help one get the house cleaning and other tasks done, but every now and then (more now than then it seems) other things have to be done.  Some are planned, some just pop up.  Some are fun, but some are just things to be done - some even are things one dreads doing.
           
I have on numerous times mentioned our RV.  The weather is getting cold.  Before the weather gets freezing we have to winterize it.  If you live in an area which gets cold in winter you probably know that if water freezes in your pipes they will split and you will have a problem.  This is more likely to happen if the house or the area of the house where the pipe is located is not heated.  (With the huge snow storms here the past few years this has happened to people who lost their electric power and had no heat.  Husband worried about in our basement as some of the pipes are attached to the inside of the exterior walls as it was much colder than normal here and ran an electric heater in the basement to keep the pipes warm.)  Winterizing the RV is, basically, getting all of the water out of the pipes, valves, etc. and replacing it with non-toxic anti-freeze.  Sounds simple.  It is not as that simple and there is an entire process that needs to be followed to do it - we have it written down, but still manage to always forget something.  Today we winterized the RV. 

My husband has started weaving on a loom this year.  So, every week or so I help him do what is called “warping the loom”.  This is putting the threads on the loom to weave through.  It is a relatively tedious process.  He needs my help to bring the warp threads out to a dowel to measure them out and then when all the threads are on the dowel, I bring the dowel to the loom - v e r y  s l o w l y - and I keep tension on the threads, as he winds them onto the loom.  When he finishes weaving a piece I know that he will soon be looking to warp the loom again.  So, when he finished a piece, I knew that he would be looking to warp the loom.  After we finished winterizing the RV - which took most of the afternoon, I saw him walk into the living room (where the loom is) and look around and sort of sigh.  I knew what was going on.  He wanted to warp the loom, but did not want to ask me to do so after spending the afternoon with the RV.  I made the offer and we spent most of the rest of the time before dinner warping the loom. 

So this afternoon was mostly used up with these two chores.  I managed to check my email and that was about it.  (I am writing this at night after dinner.)

I have worked as an accountant most of my life. (I started helping my dad add up columns of numbers when I was 12, so I do mean most of my life.)  I have reached a point now where I have a couple of regular clients for whom I do their books on a regular basis and a handful of income tax clients.  Unfortunately there is no exemption by IRS for a practice this small and I have to take annual classes and exams as the same as if I worked full time and actually made money doing this.  While I can take the classes and exams as home study, it still is something else which must be fit into my time and takes about 20 hours in total.  I get nervous every year about fitting time to take the exams into my schedule.  I managed to do some of the smaller classes last night, which helped me get a bit less nervous.  I still have some more of the smaller classes to do.  I also have a large class and a 3 hour exam I have to take which I have not taken before.  This scares the heck out of me.  Not only do I have to do well on the exam to keep working - I also have to find a 3 hour block of time to take the exam.  Somehow, I know I will do so - special things always manage to somehow be fit into one’s schedule.

Then I know that later this month the other big special things to do will start - Christmas decorating.  Somehow no matter how busy we all are, we somehow manage to fit in decorating the house and the tree and buying and wrapping gifts.  And then somehow, when it is all over, we find the time to take it all down and store it away.  Okay - our decorations tend to stay up longer than they should - but the year they stayed up until April, it really was only because it was a freezing winter and our garage door froze to the ground and we could not get out the storage boxes to store the ornaments.  So rather than take off the ornaments and leave them about, the tree stayed up. But for now, let us just think of the fun of decorating and how nice everything will look - if we can just find the time to decorate.

So, in between the normal daily, weekly, monthly tasks we all somehow manage to fit in these other tasks. How we do it varies from person to person and time to time.  I just “found some time” I hope to keep available to get things done.  On Monday nights I read comics online.  Mostly I was reading the entire week of each comic’s strips.  Some (most) weeks this reading ran over to Tuesday.  Two weeks ago I  decided it takes too much time.  I looked through the strips as I read them.  I dropped one strip.  Five others I decided I will only read the Sunday strips.  I like the characters, but can do with just a quick visit to them.  (Sunday strips generally have nothing to do with weekday strips so I won’t be missing any “plot”.)  Over time I may drop some of these strips, but I will see what I decide.  The remaining strips are ones which I like the most and want to keep reading.  This has cut out over an hour of time that I spent reading my comics and I now seem to be able to able to finish them on Monday night, leaving Tuesday night free for whatever else I need to do.  (Hence, why I was able to take part of the classes I need to take last night.) 

How do you fit in things which need to be done to your busy schedule? Do you need to fit in making Thanksgiving dinner next week?       

HOW CAN SOME WEEKS BE SHORTER THAN OTHERS?

Wow, another week gone by already?  It seems too soon.  Again I did not write tonight’s post in advance - the election yesterday took up my attention last night.  No opinion being published on same.  This will be, again, a short post as a result. 

I managed to finish unloading the RV.  We let the remaining water in it out (there is a valve on the bottom with a cap - remove the cap and the water runs out and down the driveway - it is clean water so this is not a problem).  I went in and stripped the bed and disassembled it back into 2 seating benches as I need to clean the bedding, as well as we will be going in and winterizing and will need access under one side of the bed to the water pump.

I dealt with the mail from our short trip - it being the end and beginning of the month there was not much from the 3 days.

We dealt with a telephone problem.  We still have copper wire phone service at our house.  We have a cordless phone with an answering machine in the kitchen.  The last 2 times I talked to my mom on it (and we can go for hours) the battery ran out within an hour.  Husband looked to buy new batteries - discontinued and therefore very expensive.  So a new phone was needed.  Telephones have changed dramatically since we last bought one.  We have an additional problem that the phone hangs on the wall - so we need a wall phone - and the basement door is located across from the phone so it has to be able to open past the phone, and most of the few wall phones with answering machines we found would not allow this.  Luckily we found one, but the cordless phone sits in a separate charger elsewhere in the kitchen.  So far it seems to work well.  I will have to have mom call me - when I call her I use my cell phone.  So a lot of time this week was spent shopping for the new phone and then installing and testing it.

The reason we need one with an answering machine is that we screen our calls.  We tell everyone we know who might call us about this - “When you call me back about this problem, you will get our answering machine.  Leave a message for us; if we are home we will pick up when we hear you or we will call back if we are not home.”  This is a bit of organizing.  Our telephone number is rather similar to a Domino’s pizza (actually several of them, but one more than others), an optician, and a doctor’s office.  In all these cases the last 4 digits are the same and the 3 digits before them are similar when one looks at them and reads the numbers wrong. Add to the wrong numbers for all of these (This is Mrs. Jones, I want a cheese pie - I am timing you.  This is Mrs. Smith don’t tint my eyeglasses.  - would be nice if they left a call back number or an address to deliver the pie) the robocalls and other spam calls we all get and it is a major time saver not to be dealing with the phone calls.  We have 3 answering machines on the same line.  The one in the bedroom answers on the 3rd ring and is always on.  The ones in the office and kitchen are individually turned on and off depending on where we are and answer on the 2nd ring.  This way we can screen the calls in any of the 3 places in the house we generally are.

Managed to finally reach the person at our doctor’s office, so hopefully the problem we are having with the billing on our lab work - last June - will not need more attention.       

Ah, yes, managed to finally convince my husband that the shoes he actually wears should be on his closet shoe rack (on back of door) and the ones on the rack which he does not wear and keeps only because he wears such a hard size to find, in case he ever needs them, should be stored away.  I actually only needed to store away one pair of the shoes on the rack to fit all but the shoes he is wearing and his slippers on it.  This is a discussion which has gone on for years.  Now I can actually clean the floor in the bedroom as I no longer would have to move all the shoes.  Did I clean it?  No - it was a short week.  But I will and will do so more regularly.

Had to spend some time on my embroidery group this week.  I missed the meeting due to our trip last week and had to do some followup on business I missed as a result.

So, the week seems much shorter than it was.  I am now catching up the laundry, which of course, I decided not to do for the part of the week last Wednesday (I do the laundry Wednesday and Thursday nights) so I am doing lots of loads this week.

Hopefully this will be a more organized week and I will get more done.  Don’t you hate short weeks?

RV WATER AND FRIDGE PROBLEMS

This will be a shorter post than normal.  I am writing it on my old Palm Centro phone, which I carry as a PDA on trips.  We are driving home from a trip.  We planned on staying 2 more days so I planned to write today’s post on my laptop tonight & then post it, both in our RV, which technically I am doing, but I am writing while riding at 65 mph on the Pennsylvania Turnpike!  (Obviously husband is driving,)  From this we learn in terms of organizing, not to put things off to the last minute.

Everything on our trips takes organizing, even more than at home.  Going home 2 days early (on a 4 night trip) changes lots of plans.  We carry at the start of a trip 25 gallons of water with us in 2 tanks,  We know from experience that we can easily get by on same if we conserve water for 4 nights.  We learned on a recent trip that if we are very careful, we can make it through 5 nights.   Now on the other hand, we need to fill the outgoing tanks at least 75% or they will not dump properly.  See the organization needed to manage the water.  Uh oh!!!

Back again,  drive needed my attention.  Road construction & the cones were in our lane making it rather narrow.  About 10% of them were knocked down by vehicles ahead of us.  Glad we are not in an 18 wheeler.  Needed to help husband avoid them.

So since we used so little water as we expected to need it to be used over 4 nights, we had to add enough water - gallons and gallons - to the outgoing tanks so each had enough to dump them before we did so.

This was our last trip of the year with running water.  We will be winterizing the RV soon so that there will be as close to no water in its systems as possible so there will be no damage from water freezing in pipes, valves, tanks, etc.  If we travel again this year we will get a space near the bath house.  But that is a story for another time.                   
                   
We had a problem this trip with our refrigerator.  It is a small one about the size of a dorm fridge.  It is different than same, however, as it can run on regular household current or 12 volt car battery current - it switches on its own.  It is harder to keep it at the correct temperature than the refrigerator in the house.  It is affected more by the temperature outside, as well as also by the temperature in the RV.  I can usually get it to the range I want - about 38 or 39 degrees Fahrenheit and then I work at keeping it at same.  Sometimes it behaves and stays in range, other times it can take days of playing with it until it is correct - and even then it can need an adjustment.  I have been known to jump into the back to play with it when stop for gas if it is going too far off.

This time it was going too low.  I raised the temperature and it was too high and would not get lower no matter how low I turned the thermostat in the fridge.  We have an electronic thermometer which reads the temperature in the fridge and sends it to a device outside the fridge so we don’t have to open it to read it.  I also have a mechanical thermometer in it.  When I looked at same it was about the correct temperature.  The problem was the electronic thermometer, not the fridge - good thing as it is much cheaper and easier to buy a new thermometer.   We took out the batteries and played with it and eventually it was working, seemingly, correct again.  We will have to keep an eye on it.  Thank goodness I had kept the original mechanical thermometer in the fridge just in case. 

Please remember if you are in the US where there is daylight savings time to "fall back" an  hour this Sunday (Nov. 6)  and VOTE    TUES - whether you vote for the same candidate as me or not - Vote!