We had a great Thanksgiving! We, of course, had the obligatory turkey and etc. dinner on Thursday. Which was fabulous. The only non-traditional element was this amazingly rich chocolate truffle cake. Yum!
My folks and I exchanged Christmas gifts, since we don't see each other over Christmas. Amusingly, we had given each other vases: they gave me a really sophisticated glass vase, and I gave them a coppery raku vase from the Seagrove pottery festival. The raku vase turned out to be a great pick, as they had just bought a rug for the living room which had the exact same green and copper colors as the vase. Thing is, I had never seen the rug and didn't even know they had bought it. I just thought those colors would look nice in their living room. Which, apparently, so did they.
I thought I wasn't going to get to see my Aunt Honey, since she was about to leave for a trip to Vienna (some people have it rough!). But she stopped by just a few minutes after we had gotten there, with her grandson David. Which was great since I hadn't seen David in a couple of years. He's almost 8 now and really growing to be a sharp kid.
My dad and I tried and failed to repair my bubble machine, alas. We determined that it's probably a bad switch, which would have been easy to repair if we could get to it. Unfortunately the guts of it are concealed behind this plastic cover that we absolutely could not remove. I suppose we could have broken it loose but then there'd be nothing protecting the works from the bubble liquid. I confess I'm rather bummed about this. I'm going to order another one, but it took me twelve hours to bead the old one.
Saturday night we made the Julia Child chicken dish, which turned out pretty well if I do say so myself. It tasted better this time than before, I think because last time we messed up the flaming part and had to add more cognac, so it ended up tasting too much of alcohol. We didn't have any long matches but Georg managed to ignite the cognac without burning himself. For dessert my mom had gotten these nifty fruit sorbets that came in fruit shells. Lemon sorbet in a hollowed out lemon and so forth. It was like having dessert in a restaurant!
After dinner on Saturday I went to my sister's apartment where we played with her adorable miniature dachshunds, Nellie and Monkey Girl, and tried on clothes. Laura gave me a few really nice things that she couldn't use anymore, like a beautiful wool sweater that someone had given her but wasn't her style, a cute knit top with a hole in it that I think I can repair, and a couple of skirts that have gotten too big for her. Whee! Free clothes! She keeps her things in really good condition too. Alas, my sister is so small that even clothes too big for her are still sometimes too small for me, so I had to pass up a pair of jeans that I would have really liked if they had fit.
During the trip I also read Time's Witness by Michael Malone, a police novel set in a thinly fictionalized Chapel Hill-Durham (merged into one town). It's the sequal to another book, Uncivil Seasons, about a pair of policemen. The interesting thing is that the first book is from the point of view of one of them, and the second is from the point of view of the other. Nice to get into the heads of both characters like that.
And Georg and I made friends with my folks' lop-eared rabbit, Panda, who lives in the spare room. They keep Panda's cage open, but he never leaves the room and is pretty good about going to the bathroom only inside the cage. On the other hand, he does have a bad habit of eating the carpet. Apparently he needs to chew constantly for his teeth, but the straw he's supposed to chew bothers my dad's allergies. So Panda chews the carpet instead.
Panda always hides under the bed for the first day or so, but after that he doesn't seem to mind us much at all. I tried to pet him once, and he seemed interested at first, but then he lunged at my hand! I was joking about my parents leaving us alone with a bloodthirsty killer rabbit, but we decided that Panda probably thought I had a treat in my hand.
And yes, we did go to Morimoto. It was amazing! Full report later.
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