Yesterday Banjo Man and I took a break from Thanksgiving preparations and headed to Galilee, a fishing port about ten minutes away, for lunch and a view of the ocean.
The sun was shining, the sky blue (at least for a while) and a chance to take a drive was too tempting to pass up.
Our destination? Champlin’s upper dock.
One of our favorite places to eat.
It’s the kind of place where you order from the window and then pick up your tray piled high with fresh fish and seafood when it’s ready. Downstairs is the fresh fish store and next door are the docks where the fishing boats pull into.
Three weeks and two days from now we’ll be heading out of Rhode Island to have some holiday fun. I bought new carry-on luggage to streamline boarding the plane. Smaller and lighter bags of more convenient shapes should do the trick. Banjo Man has a navy blue set.
I’ll let you know in January.
Merry Christmas to me.
I’ve been assembling little gift bags for Will’s 2nd grade class.
And last but definitely not least, we have moved the couch and set up the tables and chairs for this Thanksgiving’s feast.
I can’t wait to pick out the tablecloths, china and crystal. It’s a happening! Banjo Man and daughter Nancy think my decorating joy is hilarious. I ignore them. This afternoon I will start auditioning tablecloths.
I bought a new I-phone so I can take better pictures at Christmas. It arrives today, so I hope I can figure out how to use it before we land in Texas.
Anybody have any tips for learning an I-phone 15? My present phone is an ancient SE.
Today is Number One Son Ben’s birthday!!!! You all know the story of how I went into labor at a hockey game while on a date with my father and how Ben was born 11 weeks early and almost died several times while spending six weeks in a neonatal care unit.
We have been so luckyto have him.
It’s a bit disconcerting to think that Christmas is only a little over a month away and that Thanksgiving is still a week from happening. But we will be ready!
Wednesday nights are very intense around here. By “intense” I mean that Banjo Man and I are all in, remote in hand, and comfy with our assortment of blankets as we lounge on the couch.
“Survivor” is on at 8. “The Summit” on from 9:30-11:00. Often we record it, because 11 PM can seem like 1:00 AM. Which means that Thursdays our serious TV-watching begins at 6:30 when I hit the “Library” tab on Youtube TV.
Here’s what CBS says about the show: Sixteen strangers embark on a 14-day trek through the perilous New Zealand Alps to reach a distant peak. Each holds part of a $1 million prize, but only those who survive the harsh terrain, Antarctic winds, and intense challenges will win. They face eliminations and twists from the “Mountain’s Keeper,” testing their morale and unity. Their greatest challenge is to stay together and reach the summit on time—failure means losing the entire prize.
This tends to be confusing, as the strategy of winning most or all of the million dollars is a complicated and ever-changing process. We have not figured it out yet.
If you have “On Demand” on however you get your tv shows, you should check it out, if only to watch wide-eyed as people attempt to do things they never in a million years thought was possible.
Before I tell you about the latest tv show we’ve discovered, I want you to celebrate my new computer with me. It’s up and running, hopping through sites on the internet as quick as can be. I haven’t set up files and photos yet, but I spent hours yesterday copying the photos I had stored on cd’s into a flash drive. Maybe after another cup of coffee I will start the process of transferring them.
It’s a little scary.
Banjo Man and I discovered this show a week ago and we absolutely love it. The Pasta Queen was a big hit on TikTok (not something I know anything about) and rose to fame with her Italian cooking videos. She appeared on Amazon Prime recently and we’re so glad she did.
She’s funny and gorgeous, plus she travels around Italy to show how the Italians do food. Whether you want to learn to cook the real Italian way or not, it’s a fun show and a wonderful break from football (sorry, guys).
This casserole–appropriately named “Spaghetti Chicken”—is not for everybody, but I have to tell you that Banjo Man absolutely loved it. He wants me to make it in Austin. He wants me to make it at the lake. He wants me to make it again, right here in Rhode Island.
A couple of weeks ago I didn’t know what to make for dinner. We needed food and I wasn’t feeling all that energetic. But…we had cooked chicken breasts, spaghetti and a bag of shredded cheddar cheese. I had only one can of mushroom soup, so I halved the recipe. I usually substitute celery soup for cream of mushroom, though.
We had a visitor Monday morning and Banjo Man, impressed with his size and good health, took about 27 photos.
Here’s one of them:
Meanwhile, back here in the office, I still await my new computer (ordered from Amazon). It should arrive any day now. Am I excited? Oh, yeah, I sure am!
For those of you who asked how I’m feeling, thank you. I have been to the dentist twice this week as there seems to be confusion as to what is causing the pain in a molar. A fancy 2D x-ray machine showed no obvious issues, but I know there is something wrong with this tooth and I wait for the dentists to come to that conclusion, too. So I take Ibuprofen and Tylenol all day long and hope that next Tuesday’s appointment will end this eye-watering dental drama.
And I continue to sew! The little lap quilts for Will’s 2nd graders are slowly being finished.This has been a fun project and so different from my typical “everything must be perfect” quilt-making.
Time to head off to a routine cat scan. Then…lunch out? I hope so!
I have not forgotten about blogging, I swear. There have been…issues. My computer is very, very slow. As in “barely operating”. I bought some software to clean it up, but nothing has worked so far. Banjo Man has offered to drive me to Staples today to buy a new computer, so I will be back in business later this afternoon (she said hopefully).
Why is he driving me instead of me doing it myself? Well, first of all he wants to stop my dithering about repairing it/buying new/stalling by walking me into the store and making sure I leave with a new computer.
Second, I’ve been dealing with this ongoing low-iron = no energy problem. People, it has not been fun. BUT I finally bit the bullet and had an iron infusion last Thursday. Fingers crossed for increased energy and the ability to go up and down the stairs without stopping to rest (and whine). I haven’t been able to stand for any length of time, meaning we actually sent out for pizza Monday night.
It was so good I had to take a picture.
It took me three days to assemble a chicken spaghetti casserole, but I got it done. I will share the recipe in the next blog post. If you’re a ten-year old boy (or Banjo Man) you’re going to think it’s fantastic.
Third, I have a toothache. The dentist warned me last April that she thought a particular molar would be a problem eventually and it would be a “nightmare” (her word) to remove. I will not bore you with the grisly details, but as you can imagine this information did not fill me with joy. I hope to get an appointment asap and start the process. In the meantime I’ve dug out my five-year old supply of Percocet.
Has it been a long week? Oh, yes, it has!
Here’s the bright spot in all of the medical drama:
My nephew and his sweet wife are expecting their first child in January. So of course I had to make a quilt. This has kept me busy for a couple of weeks now and has been a happy distraction.
Another happy distraction? A friend’s garden:
I do hate to see the end of fall decorations, but they’re lovely while they are here.
This is a bin of leftover quilt batting. Strips and chunks of batting from years of quilt-making have been saved. Why, you ask? Because it is easy to zigzag them together to create bigger pieces, “new” batting to use in new quilts.
Last May at the lake was very cold and cloudy, the kind of weather that makes me want to hole up inside and sew. Which I did. The summer food was prepared and frozen, stacked in the freezer for the upcoming days of family dinners. So I bought “travel the world” and “explore the wilderness” themed fabrics for son Will’s future second grade class.
That project finished, I had the bright idea to create little quilts for story time using the leftover fabrics. Little quilts are great fun to make, so I made seven of them before the weather changed, the sun came out and my Texans arrived.
Now that I’m home it is time to quilt them. I dragged out several bins of batting and began to measure the strips.
Clearly this was not going to be the easy project I’d envisioned.
Here is the fabric I bought for the 2nd grade projects:
The pennants outside of Will’s classroom.
These pictures are out of order. I’m sure there is a way to fix that, but I haven’t figured it out yet. I’ve been working on the blog post for three days and had to stop to install and run new software to speed up and clean up my computer–and it didn’t work.
So…zigzagging batting strips turned out to be a bit of a challenge. Maybe even a nightmare. I gave up and ordered a king-size batting on Amazon, which I will cut up into four pieces for the four remaining quilts. I have shoved 2/3 of my old batting scraps into a garbage bag and have kept a bin of the larger ones for a time when I might possibly be able to use them.
The floor of my office is now empty and I am much happier.
As for my computer, I am going to take it to the experts this week. It’s barely usable and I waste a lot of time sitting here waiting for it to move between websites and programs and photos.
I bet you all know what I mean.
Tomorrow I will return to piecing chunks of fabric together to make quilt backings.
Game cameras, ring cameras and maybe even in-real-time have shown proof that there is a bear wandering around our little wooded neighborhood.
Yes, I live in the country. In the woods. We are used to deer, foxes, and turkeys strolling past our house. We have even spotted an elusive fisher once in a great while. And last spring Banjo Man exchanged stares with a bobcat perched on a stump next to our house.
But a bear? I am looking out the windows frequently in hopes of spotting said bear. Maybe we need a RI game camera (ours are up at the cabin 3000 miles away) after all.
We have been home five days. I did not get dressed yesterday. I sipped tea and took naps. I’m obviously not recovering from our 15-day road-and-plane trip, not yet. As I told Dancing Mandolin Player on our phone call yesterday, I may not get dressed again until March, when Banjo Man tells me it’s time for us to drive to the airport and fly west.
Maybe our local bear and I are feeling the same urge: hibernation until spring.
is there any more pie? 