Jenyfer Matthews

The year continues to zoom by and I realize that December is doing the same thing and that I better get a move on with Christmas shopping or there will be a riot on Christmas morning. The problem is that the children are getting to an age that the things they really, really want are getting more and more expensive. They have made no secret of their highest priority wishes but I need some ideas for lesser things as well. Unless they want to get a lot of socks. I know they need those.

I can remember making my own Christmas lists. I was always organized and prone to over-thinking and I can remember one year in particular that I made my list in outline form. I broke it into categories for toys and clothes and there were sub-categories and very specific directives for colors and styles. I really really really wanted the satin shorts and knee-high boots and rabbit fur coats that were all the rage when I was in 2nd or 3rd grade and I never did get any of those items. I’m still disappointed. I was however the only one of my peers to have had a kick-and-go scooter. Can’t remember what happened to it, but I suppose it got given away in one of our many moves. Wish I still had it – not only was it cool, it is collectible now!

I can only imagine what my own children will put on their lists. I had such modest wishes by comparison – an Easy Bake oven was a huge thing. Who doesn’t want to bake a cake with a light bulb?? Now both kids desperately want iPod touches. They obviously have no sense of what things cost. I blame that in part on the fact that the vast majority of their friends have iPhones already. Really?? I don’t even have an iPhone. I guess that is what I get for living in a prosperous community.

I’ve asked them to make me lists and I’ll see what I can do. I’ve managed to keep Christmas fairly modest in years past so we’ll see if I can do one wow present and fill in the rest with socks and books and things they need otherwise. I used to find shopping in Egypt a challenge because of the lack of good quality items to buy. I find it challenging to shop in the US because there is just too much…

Or a weekend. Whatever.

Sorry to have abandoned ship for what – a week? – but things were impossibly busy and I couldn’t form a string of coherent, interesting thoughts. I’m not sure that this will be interesting either but I wanted to check in.

So, I did finally finish stripping the finish from my stairs and sanding them. Then I spent two days last week cleaning up the dust from all over the house. I really should have taken the time to block off doorways, etc. Lesson learned. There is still dust on the shoulders of the hanging clothes in my closet which means the dust had to fly through the air and turn a couple of corners. Wow.

I even put up our Christmas tree and a few other miscellaneous decorations.

I am older than I care to advertise on the internet, but this year was the first year that I hosted Thanksgiving dinner. Thanksgiving isn’t really that big a deal to me and I’ve happily accepted invitations to other people’s houses for the occasion or skipped it altogether in years passed but this year it just seemed right to host. If you can call it hosting when your guests bring the turkey! I did make all the rest of the food for eight though – a cheese ball, mashed potatoes, mashed sweet potatoes with garlic (yum!), stuffing muffins (for easy serving portions), green beans, a crab apple pie (my own preserves) and a pumpkin pie. I even opened three cans of cranberry sauce. All in all, dinner was a hit and my guests even left me the smoked turkey carcass.

Friday morning I got up at 5am so that I could get my son to a tennis tournament in a town two hours away. It had been snowing most of the day Thursday so I wasn’t sure how the roads would be. The roads were fine and he won his first match. He played again at 3pm and lost and because he lost he was slotted into a match at 7:30pm. Having gotten up so early for his first match he had no steam left for the late one and he lost to a boy he might have beaten if he had played the next morning. Oh well, another time.

My daughter was playing in the same tournament but she didn’t play until Saturday. So we stayed at a hotel and got up at 6am to get her ready for her 8am doubles match, which she and her partner won. They played doubles again at 10am and lost in a tie breaker which is always hard. Then she played singles at 2pm and 6pm and won both of those. On to Sunday!

Sunday we actually got to sleep in til 8am which was kind of exciting. My daughter played at 1pm and again at 5pm and won both matches – and the entire tournament. Super exciting! Even more than usual because she had four tough opponents to get through to do it. Of course having driven two hours to get there, we had to drive two hours home again…

Monday I did approximately 68 loads of laundry, put up some outside Christmas decorations, boiled the turkey carcass in preparation to make gumbo, and made two lasagnas because I have voracious children. I took things somewhat slower on Tuesday but I did put up some more outside decorations and made the turkey gumbo – amazing and a highly recommended use of your leftover turkey. I never gave much thought to turkeys having vertebrae until I had to fish all the bones and yucky bits out of the pot after it had boiled down. I used my canning pot because it was the only pot I had big enough to hold a turkey carcass.

And now I’m babbling so I’m going to stop now.

I have a couple of days to chill out before I drive my daughter to Indianapolis for her next tennis tournament. Then I’ll have a couple of weekends off – not sure I’ll know what to do with myself!

So there is this Facebook “thing” going around where you list facts about yourself that no one else would know. I got tagged on of my friend’s posts and posted a list of my own given the number of facts she assigned me. It was surprisingly difficult to come up with the right number of facts given that I am always chatting about whatever. There doesn’t seem like there is a whole lot left to reveal.

Only there always is. After I posted my list, I used some hand sanitizer that someone else offered me that I didn’t realize was cinnamon scented. AGH!! I like to cook with cinnamon, I like the flavor of cinnamon, but I did not want it slathered all over my hands. All I could think of after was 1) when could I wash my hands and 2) no wonder people use cinnamon as bug repellant.

It’s not just the scent of cinnamon I don’t care for either. I used to try and wear perfume because it seemed like the thing you were supposed to do but I could only ever put it behind my knees – any further up and it made me insane and gave me headaches. I really dislike being in stores like Bath and Body Works or even the cosmetics areas of department stores because of the overpowering smell. Ironically I was once hired to be that person who attacks people with perfume samples in a department store – I had to spray Obsession on people. I was pretty ruthless about it as well – I stood at the top of the escalator for a while because there was no avoiding me there!

I won a very expensive bottle of perfume in a sweepstakes while in the United Arab Emirates once and still have most of it in the bottle. I mostly buy fragrance free detergent and soaps when possible, though I do really like the scent of some shampoos. However if you ever smell in cinnamon in my house it will be because I’m baking something!

I decided it was stupid for me not to use a resource like a wood burning fireplace to heat our home when we had no power and it was projected to be well below freezing for the nighttime low.

I dropped the kids at the tennis center and went in search of wood. I bought three bundles of wood at a gas station, which were not particularly impressive looking even to a city girl, and came home. The thermostat in the house read 59F. I turned on all the gas burners on the stove and started a pot of soup cooking. Then I took my hatchet outside and went behind the fence to find that tree I cut down last year. I found a length of tree trunk that would make two nice size logs so I went to work with my hatchet. I got two nice logs, though I suspected they might be too wet to burn.

Just cooking soup and running the burners on the stove bumped the heat up to 61F. I decided to go ahead and try the fireplace to bump it up a bit more.

I used some sticks that had fallen from our tree, some newspaper, and some old bills that needed shredding as kindling and got the wood going. As you might also imagine I don’t have any fireplace tools but I did have an old piece of rebar pipe I found in the yard and it made a decent poker. (Improving is my middle name) I got the fire going nicely and was quite enjoying it when our power came back on – Monday evening, three days ahead of the power company’s projection. I won’t say I’m sorry it came back but I did continue to sit by the fire just because I could.

I didn’t end up using the logs I cut from the tree trunk but I’ll keep them in case of future outages – and I might even go gather some more.

I was out of town for a tennis tournament this weekend (of course) and drove home yesterday – arriving just in time for a violent thunderstorm, or what seemed to me like driving in a hurricane. I couldn’t have been more than 30 miles from home when I drove into it. The rain was coming sideways and was so hard I could barely see the road. I am happy I don’t have a higher profile vehicle because it was bad enough in my little car. I put on the flashers and just kept my eyes on the car ahead and on the right hand lane line.

It started to slacken off a bit as I approached town. There was a small tree down on the exit ramp, blocking one lane so I went around it. Then I turned left onto the main road, intending to go straight so I could drop off my daughter’s friend before going home. The road was closed – downed power line? It was pitch dark so I couldn’t tell. I turned around and tried another route. That road was closed because an enormous tree fell and was blocking the road. I went back the way I came in and looped back around. I finally wound my way back to my own house, bringing my daughter’s friend with me because I doubted that I’d be able to get her to her house.

Our power had gone off about 4pm and is still off even now. My daughter’s friend’s father retrieved her about 6pm last night and said that he’d had to do some considerable winding around to get to our place – his neighborhood was also hit hard. They live a five minute drive from us.

My car was out in the driveway because our garage door is electric but I didn’t want to leave it there because it was parked next to a basketball hoop and there was still a high wind warning. My neighbor came over to give me a lesson on how to disengage the motor and open it manually – good to know! He also said that he’d been out looking around and that he was pretty sure that a small tornado had touched down at the edge of our neighborhood where I saw that big downed tree because there were several houses right there with trees on them. I am not only grateful that our house was fine but that I stopped to get the girls ice cream so I didn’t arrive a little earlier when it was all going on!

Lucky me, I have a friend who got her family a suite at a hotel where I can hang out and charge up my toys. No school today because of power outages. No power at our house still. The silver lining is that we still have water – which is something we always lost along with power in Egypt – and that we have a gas water heater and a gas stove. We have a wood burning fireplace for all the good it does since we haven’t got any wood and don’t know how to use it ha ha! But I can make a pot of soup and we have warm clothes so we’ll just pretend we’re camping. Without a fire…

Since I did absolutely nothing productive last week at all, I finally got off my butt this week to get going on a long overdue project: the staircase.

When did I rip all the carpet up? Sometime back in March? I know I like to mull things over before I get totally immersed in a project but this is ridiculous. I could use my back injury as an excuse but that is all it would be.

I had read some things about the process, the first step of which is stripping the old finish. I haven’t been terribly impressed with how my paint stripper deals with varnish so I thought I would skip a step and just sand off the old finish. Dusty but no nasty smell or chemicals.

It is not necessarily a super fast process however.

There are eleven risers to strip. I wasn’t planning on doing them all in one day, but so far I’ve only gotten four done and I’m already bored with the sanding.

And I have to do the landing at the bottom as well.

I may end up giving that chemical stripper a try tomorrow after all because it would be nice to get this done sooner than later. Maybe even before next March…

I missed seasons when I lived in the Middle East – the United Arab Emirates in particular. You might think that near unrelenting sunshine would be a great thing, and it certainly does make getting dressed in the morning easier, but even that gets old. The only thing that differentiated “seasons” was the degree of heat: in “summer”, which was May – October, it could get up between 110-120F (with humidity) with lows in the 80s at night and in “winter” it was more pleasant at 70s in the daytime and 40s at night. But I think you need some inclement weather once in a while in order to appreciate the sunshine more. I used to decorate my house with seasonal quilts and wall hangings because there were times when I’d look outside and forget what time of year it was.

It wasn’t quite as bad in Egypt that way because there was slightly more variation in the weather, but not much.

I definitely notice the change in seasons here in Michigan, and with them, a change in my appetite. With the cloudier skies come cravings for grilled cheese sandwiches, macaroni and cheese, and bread. I mentioned before that I hadn’t had much motivation to get much done recently and that is certainly true. But I did manage to motivate myself enough to try and new recipe this week: chicken pot pie.

I found a couple of different recipes and then did a mish-mash of techniques and was pleasantly surprised by just how easy-peasy it was to make. I sauteed an onion and garlic in a 1/3 cup of butter and 1/3 cup flour. Once that was “fluffy” I added 1 3/4 cup chicken broth and 1/3 cup half and half which thickened up rapidly. Add to that some peas, frozen corn, diced (homegrown) carrots, and two cups of cooked shredded chicken and salt and pepper to taste.

(The only thing I’d do differently next time is add some mushrooms to the filling – I had some but forgot to use them.)

Here’s where I got a little lazy – I made the filling in a cast iron dutch oven and it was a generous amount. Instead of bothering with pie crusts, since I assumed the pie would be runny anyway – I opted to top the filling in the same pot with biscuit dough and bake it in the same pot.

YUM. Ultimate comfort food for a cold, dark evening. So good that even though I am on my own with the children this week there were next to no leftovers. I should have taken a picture but I was too lazy to even do that. Maybe next time.

I mowed my lawn yesterday for what I sincerely hope is the last time this season – not because I dislike mowing the lawn more than I dislike shoveling snow, but because my lawn mower has been acting up and I can’t smell the freshly cut grass over the gasoline fumes. Ugh.

But who am I to make any predictions about what is going to happen next with regard to the weather and my plants? My trees are nearly finished dropping their leaves – aside from the apple tree which has dropped the last of the apples but is still covered with green leaves – and the tomato plants froze more than a week ago, but I am still getting a few strawberries here and there as well as raspberries. They got a late start due to my pruning last year. Guess what I won’t be doing this fall!

It’s not just the kitchen garden plants that can’t make up their minds either. The peonies have dried up and fallen over, the hosta look pretty sad and done for the season, but the rose bushes are still blooming as are my chrysanthemums – which incidentally never got the memo that they are annuals. They have come back three years in a row and spread a little more each time.

I’ve pretty well cleaned out the kitchen garden bed – it looks so much bigger without the tomato jungle in there – though there are still carrots to be dug up. I should probably mulch the asparagus too but it still looks surprisingly perky.

I was trying to decide if there was a connection between this sense of being between seasons and my mood lately. Maybe so. Don’t hate me for saying so, but I’m kind of ready to see some snow.

I’ve been in such a strange head-space lately. My brain teases me with all these great ideas about things I could make / cook / accomplish – usually late at night or at some otherwise busy moment when I don’t really have an option but to think “I’ll do that tomorrow / next week / later” but then when that quieter moment arrives, I feel like doing nothing more than curling up in a chair with my laptop and wasting the day on Facebook or Pinterest.

(Pinterest is particularly ironic as it feels like you are being productive as you “pin” ideas for crafts / home improvement projects / recipes that you’ll make “later”)

I haven’t wanted to do very much of anything that takes any effort at all. I’ve had to get out and rake leaves a few times and even though it is a boring chore, I do tend to feel better once I’m done. Is it the fresh air? Or is it just finally getting up and moving my body and doing something? Whatever it is, I need to just power through this funk and get myself going again.

Soccer season is done for the moment but I don’t expect my weekends to be that much quieter as tennis tournaments take the place of soccer games – usually at greater distances from home. It’s pretty much too cold to do any furniture refinishing projects in the garage so I will either have to make a mess inside or work on re-upholstering things instead. In truth, I have no shortage of things I can do to fill my time – like finally finish re-doing my staircase. What I need most is a kick in the butt to get going…

Generally speaking, I have always liked Halloween. I love the decorations, carving pumpkins, and handing out candy to trick-or-treaters. Even when we were abroad and lived in an apartment building, I would have decorated the inside of our house by mid-October. When we got back to the US and had an actual lawn to work with I had fun putting out the fake gravestones, spiderwebs, and real jack-o-lanterns.

Not this year.

I kept telling myself that I’d get around to it, at some point. As time kept passing, and I was no more in the mood than before, I just kept not doing it. I haven’t even worn any of my many Halloween earrings more than a couple of times this month. Few of my neighbors seem to have done much decorating either so I blend right in. We live on a loop and had very few trick-or-treaters last year so I decided to do something different this year.

I’m just going to skip decorating and leave the house lights off.

This anti-Halloween mood has extended to my children as well. Every year they wait til the last minute to decide what they want to dress-up as. Or, they decide and change their minds last minute. I indulged them as I could when they were younger but now that they are 11 and 13 I’m not feeling so accommodating. I asked them each a couple of weeks ago what they wanted to be and got no answer. I asked them again a few days ago and got a few vague ideas. Last night at 9:50pm my daughter asked me to take her to the store so she could find some accessories.

Sorry, kid – you had all month to make that request.

My daughter managed to pull together her own costume by cutting up an old t-shirt and borrowing an afro wig from a friend – she is Redfoo from to pop group LMFAO. He happens to play tennis too so it is somewhat relevant.

This morning I asked my son if there was a party at school and what he was going to wear. He said he’d bring his vampire cape with him and put it on when he got to school. We got in the car and had just arrived when he announces he forgot his costume. I wavered just for a moment but told him I was sorry but that was his problem. A tough lesson for him perhaps, but when exactly will he learn to take more responsibility for organizing his things if mommy is there to fetch every time he forgets something? And just how many times do I have to remind him of something before it becomes his problem? (Yes, I feel slightly guilty about taking the hard line but it had to be done)

I only feel a twinge about not giving out candy tonight – if we had few trick-or-treaters last year it will only be worse this year since the forecast calls for rain and more rain today and tonight.

And heads up : there are only eight more Fridays until Christmas… Ugh…