One thing that’s been on mind for more than a year is that I need a new sewing cabinet. One where my machine will sit flush with the table top so that I can bone up on my machine quilting skills. Right now, my machine sits on a folding cafeteria table and has one of those acrylic “beds” which gives me more room for piecing and general sewing, but it makes quilting a large quilt painful and frustrating.

In my town there are two Horn dealers and I made up my mind that I was going to buy the quilter’s model from one of them and buy something else from the other. I’ve been saving my money for a long time and I’m finally ready to place my order. My birthday is coming up in a few weeks and I’m going to celebrate with the new purchase.

But last weekend something happened that made me doubt my purchase decision. I had run in to the “other” dealer just to ask a Horn question because they’re closer to me than the other one. Oh my goodness, they also carry Koala cabinets now. I had never seen any Koalas in person, only in magazine ads. I know that they’re more expensive than the Horns so I never gave them another thought, the Horns are expensive enough. But to see one up close and touch it? The workmanship and quality is exquisite. Koala has many more layout possibilities than Horn, and if you have the money and the room, you could set yourself up one heck of a studio. So I got to thinking that maybe I ought to save for a few more months and go with a Koala. Hmmm, what to do, what to do?

Then Erin and Kevin told us about the baby. I had just the day before told my friend Kay that if I ever had grandchildren I was going to get a serger and make baby clothes. What timing! I think this made my decision for me. I’ll get the Horn and put the extra money I would have paid for a Koala toward a serger. I don’t need the serger for several more months and that will give me time to save for it.

If you have either Horn or Koala, please post a comment and let me know what you think of the model you bought. The one I’m buying is the Quilter’s Dream #3180.

Happy Thanksgiving! Today is only the second time in 32 years that John and I have spent Thanksgiving by ourselves. The first was in 1995. He had moved to Richmond earlier that month and I came to spend the holiday weekend with him (it was supposed to be a house-hunting trip but no one was showing houses naturally) and get my first glimpse of my new home-to-be. I took the red eye from Los Angeles, arrived at RIC early Thursday morning and fell asleep in the car as John was showing me the sights. He took me back to the apartment and put me to bed for a nap. We later went to a restaurant for what was, as I remember it, a perfectly awful turkey dinner. We also drove all over town looking for a place to buy a pumpkin pie. Back home, we could always count on Marie Callender’s or Baker’s Square, but John hadn’t lived here long enough to know if there was anything comparable. I think we ended up getting one at a Shoney’s. There weren’t very many restaurants open that day.

So today we had a scaled-down dinner for two. We managed to find a turkey under 8 pounds, got some potatoes for mashing, gravy from Tom Leonard’s, a vegetable from Whole Foods’s readymade meals section, sweet potatoes and marshmallows, yeast rolls from Golden Corral, Stove Top stuffing, canned pumpkin for pie and a bottle of Pinot Grigio. Yum-oh!

I decided to try my hand at homemade pie crust. I’ve always made my own pumpkin pies (well except for 1995) but have used the Pillsbury pie crusts because they’re so easy. My friend Laurel makes the flakiest crusts and I got her recipe. Here I am just before things got difficult:

I had so many problems rolling out the dough. I had flour everywhere, on the board, on the rolling pin. But still the dough just wanted to stick. I think I’d read somewhere a long time ago that you don’t want to overwork the dough as it will become tough, or something like that. But I had to start over a couple of times. I had trouble making a circle and I also had trouble making it larger than the pie plate. I was working on a chilled marble board which is rectangular and not wide enough on the one side. Next time I’m gonna ditch the board and use the countertop. Here are my pitiful, pathetic patchwork offerings. I was trimming dough from one side and patching it in on the other side.

But when they came out of the oven, they didn’t look half bad:

Another tradition of ours is to cook our turkey outside on the grill. It is so easy and it frees up your indoor oven for the side dishes. Our weather was very mild today and it was not unpleasant to be grilling outdoors. But if you think the turkey looks a little underdone, you would be right.

We use one of those digital thermometers which said it was at the right temp, but after letting it rest the temp wasn’t going up as it should and it just wasn’t completely done when John cut into it. So back on the grill it went. All the side dishes were hot and on the table, but they had to wait. Even though the thermometer was beeping the correct temp, the bird *still* wasn’t done but we didn’t want to wait any longer. John carved up half of the breast, a leg and a thigh and put them in the microwave. He put what was left of it in the oven after dinner and it took an hour for the thermometer to beep. I just knew it was dead at this point and when he took it out he said it looked dead. But when I looked at it, the skin was the shade of brown I expected to see when we took it off the grill. Should be good for leftovers.

I’ve spent my day on the pies and other cooking and writing blog posts and John has spent his day like this:

He bought a new receiver and he’s getting it set up. Electronics sure are complicated these days.

Speaking of mild weather, here it is Thanksgiving and my New Guinea impatiens are still blooming. We should have had at least one killing frost by now. We have very few acorns on the ground, as compared to the virtual carpet we had last year and I imagine the Farmer’s Almanac would say that means we’ll have a mild winter. (I haven’t exactly looked that up to confirm so please correct me if I’m wrong.)

I hope your day has been filled with family and friends, tradition and new ways. Give thanks.

I know that I haven’t been posting much of late, the reason being that I’ve been sick for 5 weeks. It started innocently enough with a tickle in my throat, then progressed to a pretty nasty cough that didn’t want to go away. I don’t get sick very often; all of the over-the-counter medicines I buy expire before they get much use. For example, I found a box of Robitussin cold gel tabs in my medicine box with an expiration date of 2006. Being somewhat desperate, I took one but threw the rest away. It didn’t do anything for me, anyway. At the urging of friends, I went to the local urgent care facility so that I didn’t have to take time away from work trying to get in to see my regular doctor.  That may or may not have been the best decision; the doctor gave me a prescription for 10-day antibiotics but didn’t really give me a diagnosis. I was expecting to hear that it was bronchitis. After the 10 days were over I didn’t feel any better so at the urging of friends, I bought some Mucinex. I took that for a week and felt worse before I started to feel better. As I write this, I do feel much better now although there is a little bit of cough remaining. Maybe by the time the weekend is over, I’ll be back to normal.

Another thing that has kept me from posting regularly is an audiobook I started listening to. 47 CDs, 53 hours. Not a typo. I just finished it about 10 minutes ago.

Let me tell you a bit about this series. Written by Diana Gabaldon, the Outlander series begins in post-WWII England, where Claire Randall, an army nurse, and husband Frank decide to take a holiday in Scotland. To make a really long story short, Claire finds herself at the site of an ancient stone circle, the stones “sing” to her, she touches one of them, and the next thing she knows, she is thrust 200 years in the past, right in the middle of a battle. She is discovered by Frank’s ancestor, Black Jack Randall, and he is not a nice man at all. (Frank is into genealogy, which is how Claire knew who he was.) She is rescued from him by red-haired Jamie Fraser, a Scottish hottie if I may say so, they fall in love and marry.

This is not science fiction, it’s historical fiction. Diana is an excellent writer and can make you believe such time travel is possible. Her books are thoroughly researched and contain a lot of detail. This last point is easy to see, each book in the series is quite large. But they are easy to read, the chapters are oftentimes fairly short which helps move things along in my opinion.

The Fiery Cross is the 5th book. I had read the first 4 many many years ago, when I lived in California (I’ve lived in Richmond some 13+ years now, so that gives you an idea how long it’s been). I bought this book and started reading it, but found it a little slow going and hard to remember who was who, the whole series has a cast of thousands, I swear. So I thought about listening to it rather than reading it and checked audible.com but they only have an abridged version. I once listened to an abridged version of a James Michener book and felt very unsatisfied, like there wasn’t any meat to it. I then checked my local library and found that they have the unabridged version, so much the better because it’s free! John spent quite a bit of time copying the disks to our iTunes library so that I could put it on my iPhone. I listened to it in the car during my commute, listened to it at work when doing mundane tasks, and finally, it’s done. Thoroughly enjoyable. It is read by a woman who is good with the English and Scottish accents, the occasional French and Gaelic dialogue and it made me want to speak in a Scottish accent. I do have a little Scottish blood and really enjoyed the history of the Battle of Culloden as well as the descriptions of North Carolina. My Scottish ancestors settled in the area around Durham or Chapel Hill which made it all the more personal.

So anyway, I highly recommend this series.

I have plans for more posts in the coming days.

Stay tuned!

One of my vendors, Mediaspace Solutions, sent me a box last week:

While we get a lot of goodies around here at the holidays, this food was not meant for me. Mediaspace asked that I give it to my local food bank, which I did. I dropped it off at Central Virginia Food Bank on my way to work this morning.

I think this is a wonderful marketing idea, don’t you? They could just as easily have sent me cookies or candy, which I certainly don’t need. When that stuff starts coming in, and it will in the next couple of weeks, I do try and share, if not with my co-workers (who are also inundated), or bring it home for John.

I just downloaded the WordPress 2 iPhone app and I’m testing it as I wait for my food to arrive.

Somehow I’m supposed to be able to add photos. I’ve got one selected, but I don’t see how to get it into this post.

Oh well, I don’t think I’ll use this method much. It’s better suited for short Facebook or Twitter posts.

Edited to add:
I found out that the way it works with photos is that when you click Publish, any photos you’ve selected from your camera roll appear at the end of the post.

Have you seen these pretzels? I don’t know if they’re available nationwide, but they are only sold at the holidays. So when we saw them, we bought two bags, and I’m about done with the 2nd one. I can’t stop eating them. Go look for them, you won’t be sorry (if you can find them).

We’re going to be first-time grandparents!

And we couldn’t be more thrilled (until the baby comes, that is)!

Kevin and Erin set up a video chat on our computers with us and his parents. As soon as I saw Pat and Tommy, I knew something was up. This will be #3 for them and as they have two granddaughters, they’re probably hoping for a boy. We’ll be happy with whatever she has.

This brought back a flood of memories of our first pregnancy, the first grandchild for my parents. We had been through the wringer with years of fertility treatment and it was the Saturday after Thanksgiving when I went for a pregnancy test (no home pee-on sticks back then) and got the call that evening that it was positive. I had dinner in the oven but we pulled it out, put it on the counter and ran to tell our parents. My dad was home but Mom was at a “hen party” with her friends. Dad called over there and asked to speak to “Grandma Hoff.” She was so surprised and I was very happy that she got the news while surrounded by her friends. I am so happy for Erin that she didn’t have the fertility problems I had.

So our niece Sabrina is due with baby #2 in May, niece Amy with baby #3 in June and now Erin in July. That’s 3 quilts I’ll have to knock out in record time (because it takes me so long to make one).

My mother thinks, because her father was a twin and what they say about twins running in families and skipping a generation, blah blah blah, that since she didn’t have twins (nor her siblings) and I didn’t (and my cousins didn’t), it’s gotta be Erin’s turn. Maybe so, but I don’t know that I’d wish that on her (or me for that matter, what do I know about twins?)

And while I’m at it, here’s another Walmart spot we did this season. The song was written by the same guy (Dave Muhlenfeld, one of our copywriters) who does the freecreditreport.com jingles.

You may be aware that I work for an ad agency, one that produces national work, I know you’ve seen our stuff.

Here is just one example of why I am so proud of who we are, what we do (well, not me directly) and why I brag on us so much.

You can see more about this spot here.

Forward this to your friends. I would love for it to go viral.