Christmas

So I did indeed make it safely to Goshen on Christmas Eve, or by the time we drove 3 and 1/2 hours in the rain, early Christmas morning.  Despite getting really tired of driving in the rain, the ride was much brightened by the company of Becca and Roselyn, I am not sure I really would have been up for it if I hadn’t had folks with me.  And of course getting welcomed by both Jonathan, my dad (briefly) and Google (the best dog ever!) made it all worth while.

Since then it has been a long blur of games, eating, reading, sitting around, taking walks and entertaining ourselves by torturing Google with games of ping pong.  I guess I should probably explain that Google is the puppy dog that Jonathan and his friend Colin adopted this summer out in Colorado and my family got to dogsit for 3 days or so while Colin was at Camp Friedenswald.  A black lab mutt of around a year, Google is highly affectionate, smart and totally nutso about his frisbee, his pear and ping pong balls.

Christmas itself was a bit anti-climatic in that Tim and Charletta were only scheduled to arrive the next day so we saved gifts and the turkey dinner (My second in less than a week!) till Saturday.  So Jonathan, Mom, Dad and I entertained ourselves by (re)learning Puerto Rico and baking cookies.  I persuaded Mom that we should make a batch of thumbprint cookies, so this time we tried out homemade grape jelly and pear butter in addition to the more traditional apricot and blackberry.  I think grape was my favorite of this batch.

Saturday morning included a trip to E&S sales in Shipshewana (the store that Becca loves so much because it sells corn nuts) with my Mom and Becca.  After a frustratingly long attempt to pick up an order for the Harvest (a local co-op in Evanston), we purchased a random assortment of interesting items including dark chocolate Reese’s cups, discount Arizona tea, pistachios, and black licorice (for my Dad, who loves the stuff for some unknown reason).  Then we stopped by Yoders’s department store and I finally purchased a cookie dough scoop, which I had been wanting for several months.

That afternoon Tim and Charletta finally arrived after their snowy 6 hour drive from Iowa and so we opened gifts. This year we had switched to drawing names instead of just getting gifts for everyone. Dad had my name and so I received the book When Wanderers Cease to Roam: A Traveler’s Journal of Staying Put, which oddly enough I had just added to my hold’s list at the library. Apparently Dad and I had heard the same report on NPR, so I was happy to actually receive my own copy, especially because the book is full of beautiful watercolors and interesting projects/recipes/etc that I will probably want to look at multiple times.  Also Dad got me a gift certificate to Amazon, so it will be fun deciding which book/dvd/random kitchen appliance I will be purchasing.

Saturday evening we had our turkey feast for which I made the corn bread stuffing I had made for my feast with the Girls and my Dad baked a turkey in a paper bag.  An interesting technique that payed off with very succulent turkey meat, if a rather odd roasting experience.  Also my mom made this incredible cranberry chutney, so obviously we ate very well.  After dinner we attempted to learn Agricola (Jonathan’s gift for Tim), but all the turkey and the late hour meant that we only got to the end of the first stage.  But I didn’t actually hate it like I tend to do towards any new game I play for the first time.  We finished up the evening with an episode of Planet Earth and some more reading by the fire place.

Sunday was finger food breakfast at Assembly, so I got to see my old church and marvel at how some of the kids I babysit for are now graduating from high school!  It was wonderful to have a chance to reconnect with a wide variety of folks, which is always one of my favorite parts of Assembly, there are always lots of adults who remain invested in your life, even after you leave.  So when you return they are always eager for updates, even if they are the 1 minute version.  Plus I got to see their beautiful advent decorations, hear an incredible frank and beautiful sermon by Julia Keim and sing some great Assembly songs.

After church we had turkey related leftovers and then Jonathan persuaded us to do a group painting.  This is also something that he started doing this past summer with his friends Colin and Matt.  Basically everyone starts painting on one part of the canvas (or in this case piece of wood) and then after a while you rotate the canvas so that everyone gets a chance to paint on different parts of the canvas.  Sometimes things get painted over and other times different parts join up.  It was lots of fun and here are our results:

Thumbprint cookies, sometimes called Pits of Love

I had been meaning to make some kind of thumbprint or shortbread cookie with a little dollop of jam for a several weeks now, and finally got around to doing so on Tuesday.  While there are probably a hundred variations on this recipe, the one I used was my housemate’s favorite that she had in her binder of recipe clippings.  So I don’t know where exactly this one was originally printed, but here it is in all its amazing glory.

Ingredients:
2 cups flour
3/4 cup powdered sugar
1 cup finally chopped nuts (I used a blend of almond and walnut and really liked that combination)
1 cup softened butter
1 teas. vanilla
Various jellies

Instructions:
Combine the flour, sugar and 1/2 cups of the nuts in a mixing bowl.  Cut in the two sticks of butter with either a fork or pastry cutter.  Add the vanilla.
The dough will be quite dry, but work it until you can form 1 inch balls.  Roll the dough balls in the remaining 1/2 cup of nuts and place on greased cookie sheets at least 2 inches apart.  Now the recipe claims that this should make 60 cookies, but I am either really bad at measuring 1 inch (which is most likely true) or it makes closer to 30.
Either way lightly indent the tops of each ball to make a small crater.  I found it helpful to use both hands for this, one holding the sides of the ball together and the other pressing down.  Then fill each small crater with 1/4 teaspoon jelly.  The recipe calls for red current jelly, but since I didn’t have any of that,  I used 4 different kinds, strawberry, blackberry, apricot and orange marmalade.  The apricot and strawberry ones were my favorite, but feel free to experiment.
Then bake in a 325 degree oven for 15-18 minutes.  I found that mine (maybe because of their larger size?) needed closer to 18-20.  Make sure you let them cool before eating, because believe me that jelly stays hot longer than the cookie itself.

Christmas Break, so far

Other than my cold knees, I am currently enjoying one of my favorite parts of time off or vacation in general.  I am sitting at the beloved Brothers K coffeeshop, with my lap top and and an almost finished latte beside me.  Jess is a seat away working on her laptop and outside snow is drifting down.  Other than the draft from the door, I couldn’t be much happier.  No deadlines to worry about, and I am not even sleepy because (thanks to the dose of Benedryl I took) I slept in till noon.  Of course thanks to our northernly latitude, it is already headed towards dusk, but we are already on the upswing of daylight hours and headed slowly and surely towards that summer equinox only 6 short months away.

I can hardly believe that tomorrow is Christmas Eve and my last full day of break in Evanston.  My plan for this year is to stay and see my church’s Christmas Eve pageant and then carpool a group of folks home to Indiana (including my cousin who I see all too rarely!).  Then it will be 3 days of home and the family, before heading up for a day and half of college friend reunion at Brunk’s cabin.  Then another day’s respite, before a trip into Pennsylvania in which we will spend all of New Year’s Eve driving.  Two days of extended holiday time: possible highlights include my cousin’s still very new baby Miles and a chance to see my cousins who are on furlough from their mission work in Malawi.  That brings us to another 10 hour drive back go Goshen, another 3 hour drive to Chicago and the start of the second half of the work year.

So enough of this talking stuff, here are some pictures of a few things I have been up too this week:

On Sunday evening, Becca, Jess and I prepared an incredible feast for ourselves, exchanged presents and watched the Christmas classic, Elf.

In addition to our amazing spread of side dishes, we also tackled the free turkey that Becca had received from her employers. We were pretty proud of ourselves for getting it properly cooked and everything considering our combined lack of turkey-roasting experience. However while preping the bird I was surprised to find that it was missing the giblet bag. Despite some very thorough turkey cavity searching, I couldn't seem to find more than the turkey neck. Of course it was only when we were carving the cooked bird that we discovered that turkey's have TWO body cavities. Who know?!

On Monday night, I went with the Iverson family down to the Lincoln Park Zoo to see their lights. They didn't disappoint with their rather Dr. Suessian colors and generally incredible tackiness factor. Despite the cold, we had a great time wandering around looking at sleeping animals and crowds of happy people.

Erin was home from her first semester at college and so it was fun to see Jess and her doing the sisterly thing. Of course, in typical Iverson fashion they were very good at looking cute.

And of course I couldn't resist taking lots of pictures of Christmas lights, which if you are interested in seeing more of click over on the right sidebar to go to my flickr page.

the week before Christmas Break

While not a full out teacher (like some people I know read) there is something that makes the week before Christmas break feel like an eternity.  Knowing that there, at the end of the week, is a golden 2 weeks of no work and no classes is making my motivation to do most anything beyond nothing, really hard to combat.  However the highlight of this weeks has probably been working with Jess and Becca to perfect our super secret gonna be awesome Christmas cards.  There is something about having a project to work on that definitely helps the days go by faster.  Plus we are going to celebrate our completion of the cards by cooking ourselves a pseudo holiday dinner on Sunday night.*  But until then I think I will go back to my holiday countdown and just keep turning up my Christmas music.

*Thanks in large part to the fact that Becca’s employers gave her a turkey for Thanksgiving this year

so winters in chicago get pretty dry

In fact they get so dry that when you leave an orange peel out overnight, it turns into this:

Another weekend almost over

Unfortunately most of this weekend was spent laying in bed or other forms of sitting around, all because I managed to come down with the weirdest form of fever/cold/flu thing I have ever had.  It started around Thursday or so with some random aches and foggy head, but it wasn’t till Friday night till I finally started with the fever.  At which point, my other two (pretty lame) symptoms stopped and I felt pretty okay, but the fever kept going up until Sunday morning.  The most disappointing part of all this was that instead of going to any of the 4 parties (the holiday season is crazy!) going on Saturday night, I spent my evening laying on my bed watching television shows online and wishing my fever would go away.  The most disappointing part was that I missed my housemates 75th birthday party which had been in the works for over a month and included storytelling, dancing and desserts.

But the silver lining to this (and confession of total dorkiness level) is that I managed to watch the entire first season of Chuck* and I can’t recommend it highly enough.  So as frustrating as it was to be sick and have to quarantine myself in my room, at least I enjoyed the excuse to be a complete television bum.

Oh and I should also add that the other huge and much more important 2 part silver lining is that I am officially done (I just sent in my final paper this afternoon) with my fall semester.  Thus allowing me the chance to enjoy my first longer than a week break from classes in over a year!  Now if only I can get through the next week of work, my Christmas break will start for real.  Oh and I passed that really annoying but important test I took last month, hurray!

*a comedy about a nerdy computer geek (who has a very Jim Halpert from The Office appeal) who gets all the info from a super secret government computer installed in his brain and must (with the help of his two awesome handlers (one of whom is the incredible Jayne from Firefly) take on various CIA/NSA tasks as his new “night job”.

Best of 2009*: Swell Season Concert

While I have never been a huge concert attender, so saying something was one of the best concerts of my life is not a huge statement.  I could probably count on one hand (or possibly even two fingers) the number of live music shows I have seen this year, however last Thursday night’s performance by the Swell Season was flat out incredible.  The Swell Season (the name for the performers from the movie Once and the band the Frames) came through Chicago last year, but due to my tardiness in snapping of tickets I missed out on the show.  So when I heard they were performing in Chicago last Thursday night I snapped up tickets right away (despite the evil hidden fees of Ticketmaster and its malicious little corporate takeover of the ticket buying world) and rounded up a group to come with me including Jess, Tim and Charletta.

Anyways after dinner we headed over to the Auditorium Theatre and climbed up 5 flights of stairs to our nose-bleed top-most 4th level (or 3rd, it was kind of hard to count from that high up) balcony seats.  Before the music even started a great part of the concert is the theatre itself.

Isn't it a stunner, I saw it for the first time when I went with the girls to the Joffrey Ballet in October. It is an incredible space.

If you aren’t familiar with the movie Once or the earlier Swell Season cd, Glen Hansard describes the goal of his music like this:

“There’s a difference between melancholy music and despairing music,” Hansard says. “If you’re completely lost, there is no hope, and when there’s no hope, your music will appeal to a very small number of people. But if there’s sadness with redemption, the alchemy of sadness meeting joy — I would hope that’s where our music takes people.” (from an interview in the Chicago Tribune

And the concert was just that, beautiful, aching, full of touches of rock and roll with a underlying folk sensibility.  Also Glen Hansard makes a very genial host, full of stories, song-introducing tangents all of course conveyed in his endlessly charming Irish lilt.  It was also really neat to see both the band the Frames and Marketa Irglova all join together to create such a complex sound.  Although my favorite moment of the evening was when Hansard played two songs solo, and the second one unaccompnied by any amplification.  It demonstrated both the amazing design of the theatre (which was designed before amps and such and therefore carries sound incredibly well) and Hansard’s roots as a street busker in Ireland.

Overall it was a completely lovely evening, if slightly long (I was gobsmaked to realize it was 11:30pm by the time we left the theatre, and the concert opener started at 8), but I wouldn’t have shortened it by a second.  So overall if you have a chance to see a Swell Season show, I can’t recomend it highly enough and if that proves impossible at least buy their most recent album Strict Joy, you won’t regret it!

*this post isn’t a direct prompt from Gwen Bell’s idea, but still inspired by it.

it’s the most wonderful time of the year

You can tell a certain holiday is coming up, when your flickr contact page begins to look themed.

I don’ t know if that is completely true, but I do have to say the season of Advent is one of my favorites.  I have always loved Christmas lights whether they are the all out tacky displays you can find on the country roads around Goshen or the elegant tree lights along Lakeshore drive.  Plus there is Christmas music, which once again I have a taste for both the tacky and the beautiful, for example one of my favorite albums is Amy Grant’s Home for Christmas.  As a child I am pretty sure I almost wore out my family’s tape by listening to over and over again.  Also Advent was also the season I got baptized in, back in 2001, when the season was much darker due to the recent terrorist attacks and subsequent war.  I still remember those church services as some of the most meaningful events for me.

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It is amazing how easy it is to not bother blogging when you no longer have the daily compunction to do so.  This past weekend was both exhausting and incredibly non-productive.  I don’t feel comfortable going into details but I ended up doing some mediation between two friends, which left me really sad.  But as I keep telling myself, I volunteered for the task and so it is only fair to take the good with the bad. This exhaustion also led to me not getting a stitch of either paper I need to write this week done, and also being much further along in my watching of Alias season 1.

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However in the category of good things this weekend, I am now the proud owner of a Wii Fit Plus Board, which is slightly amusing in that I don’t own a Wii, so what I really own is a fancy scale with no display   This pretty awesome gift is a result of attending the Nintendo Enthusiast Party hosted by Erini and Rachel at a swanky loft in West Chicago.  I knew going into it was an advertising party aimed at hip young social media users (a category I am pretty sure I don’t fit in), but considering I was in no way required to do anything on this here blog, or even give them the address, I felt pretty comfortable going and accepting the pretty awesome swag.*  And I have to say I had a pretty darn good time, Becca went too and of course Erini was there.  It ended up being a super casual, low pressure lots of fun evening and so I have to say I think Nintendo Enthusiast are doing something right with their marketing, because thanks to their gift of a free Wii Fit (valued at around $100) I am actually considering getting a Wii**.

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Another amazing thing from the past few days was getting to attend a Swell Season concert last Thursday, however the awesomeness of that event needs its own post.  Also I should note that these little paragraphs are not intended to actually relate to each other in any way, I am just trying to wean myself off of constant bulleted lists.

*I should also say I see nothing wrong with people who choose to go down the advertising path, it just isn’t for me or this odd little blog.

**A possible current plan is to go with Becca and purchase one together after selling off one of our Fit Boards, but we will have to wait and see.

The after photos: without those bothersome before ones

It was last July some time that my Mom did me the huge favor of coming up and helping me paint my room.  I know, I am 26 (25 then) and should be capable of doing something like that by myself, but I am so grateful to have a mother who is willing to help me out with things like this.*  So somewhere buried on my external hard drive are the pictures I took of the room before we painted and re-arranged it.  But for now all you have are these pictures which I finally took last Saturday after a strange cleaning fit overcame me and I both washed my sheets and vacuumed, crazy I know.

So to see the whole tour, go over to flickr and look through this set.  But just in case you can’t be bothered, here is a preview which shows you the dividing line between the Boston Fern and the Tawny Birch.

I included a lot of random explantory notes on this picture over on Flickr

*The previous summer she came up and helped me move, which helped me have the most efficient and orderly move of my entire life

Best of 2009: Trip

I never really end up doing a lot of year end reflection, at least on this blog, however this really neat idea by Gwen Bell has been popping up all over my GoogleReader, and still at least a little bit in the habit of writing every day I figured I would give it a go.  Plus Gwen has conveniently written a question for every day, so while I probably won’t do every one, I will probably do at least a few.

Best trip of 2009: This is probably quite easily my Spring Break trip to Seattle.  Ever since two (and then three) of my good friends from college moved to this west coast city, I have been finding excuses to visit almost every year.  There are parts of this trip that have become tradition, such as pillgramages to Theo Chocolate to buy more of the BEST CHOCOLATE on earth.  Other parts of the trip are different every time, like my first trip to the top of the Space Needle this past year or my first west coast hair cut (which is quincidentally the only hair cut I have had this year so far).

That trip was also pretty much my only one of the year, other than the annual trip to eastern Pennsylvania for the family reunion, I have pretty much stayed in the greater Illinois/Indiana region.  Hopefully next year I will have at least another Seattle trip to talk about, if not that giant trip to Australia or the Middle East that I keep wanting to do.

UPDATE: Wow, I can’t believe I forgot about the Boundary Waters trip.  As Dad pointed out in the comments, I also went on an amazing canoe trip this summer with my family.  Obviously it was so awesome that it escaped my memory entirely, or alternately I really do need to get a little more sleep these days.  To make up for my horrible forgetfullness, I will mention one memory that does stay with me in a wonderfully vivid way: 

I am laying on my back in the middle of a canoe, looking up at a sky that is so full of stars it makes me feel like  I could be flung off the earth and into the milky way at any moment.  Part of my shirt is soaked from the water at the bottom of the canoe and a few stray mosquitos buzz by my ear, but the louder noises are the sounds of water brushing against the canoe and an occasional bat whirring by.  I had never seen such a bright night sky or one so clear that stars and treetops almost intermingled on the horizon, it is definitely one of my best memories of that trip and probably my entire year.