November catch-up...Thanksgiving and M'Dar

After St. Maarten, we are playing catch up for November. We had a few days of great weather when we returned, which made the blow of returning much softer.

Here’s a rundown:
We canned.
We unpacked.
We tried to find things while unpacking.
Matt mowed.
We united the cats all together. Yeah, Matt was more excited about this than anyone else.
We hung some pictures.
We canned.
We unpacked.
We had our first guest, Shantelle stayed 1 night with us.
We talked about St. Maarten.

But the big highlight includes hosting Thanksgiving. Our menu included a ham, a smoked turkey, homemade dressing (despite Matt telling me the Pilgrims would be disappointed that StoveTop wasn’t used), scalloped corn, green bean salad, mashed potatoes, salad with homemade croutons, and gravy. We ended the meal with pumpkin pie but I gotta admit, we did a damn good job. I can’t complain. Matt’s grandma even had two pieces of pie…they were her sized, which was ¼ of Matt’s portion. The night ended by Wendy and Trent stopping over for a tour, a talk, and a bit of wine. Mom and Dad also came and at the end of the day, Matt and I agreed, it was a dang good day.

The other highlight was my Christmas gift to my Grandma. We had agreed that in lieu of a gift under a tree, I would take her out to Gwen Sebastian’s Home for the Holidays concert. We made an official date of it include pre-game apps at Toasted Frog and post-game apps at Humpback Sally’s. Aside from the cold, it was a really nice night. Gwen did a beautiful job, she sang some of her own stuff, a few covers, but it was her Christmas stuff that I wanted to hear more of. When her mom came on stage and they harmonized to “O’Holy Night” it was really beautiful.

I got the Christmas cards out too. The holiday this year has me very hopeful and I’m looking forward to it. And Matt's grown a beard to torture me.

Best meals: Thanksgiving dinner, our pork belly dinner with side of cranberry chutney and grits, and pasta with peppered bacon, asparagus, and white wine.

Three days after we returned from St. Maarten
MJR: I wonder if my dad has figured out where to get Presidente yet?