Favorite Carols

While exercising today I was listening to Christmas music played on the harp.  Strange music to exercise to but I get tired of listening to the lady on my exercise cd so I turn her down and play my own music.  But listening to the harp cd made me think of my favorite Christmas music, and while I like all the standards, you know "Oh Little Town of Bethleham", "It Came Upon A Midnight Clear", "Away in a Manger", "I'm Dreaming of a While Christmas",  my absolute favorite Christmas Carol is " O Holy Night" a French carol written in 1865 by Adolph Adam, and my favorite version is sung by Bing Crosby, an oldie but a goodie.  I also like his version of the Little Drummer Boy done with David Bowie and his version of "Do You Hear What I Hear".
Another favorite is "What Child is This?" done to the tune of Greensleeves with the words being written by William Chatteron Dix in 1865,

But for a really modern version of a carol I LOVE "The Carol  of the Bells" by the Trans Siberian Orchestra is fantastic.   I looked for a You Tube version to put on here but they're all bootlegs with poor sound and picture quality, so I'll just put the album on here, think I'll be exercising to it tomorrow.

What are your favorites?

Christmas Cactus, Sometimes

My HalloThanksChristKing Cactus

I've written before about my Christmas cactus and thought I mention it again.  I bought it 6 or 7 years ago at Christmas time and it was in full fuschia-colored bloom, it looked glorious.  But unfortunately it's not a reliable Christmas cactus.  Some years it blooms as early as Halloween and some years as late as Martin Luther King Day in January.  This year it has decided to bloom between Thanksgiving and Christmas, but it is beautiful, hope the blooms hold on till Christmas.  The one in the laundry room, a white one, is also a little calendar challenged!

Its Partner in Crime

The Smells of Christmas

I'm so impressed with me, I multi-tasked today, I did my Christmas cards while I baked gingerbread people and only one of the envelopes got any gingerbread on it, pretty good.  Now they may not be the prettiest folks I've ever made, but the they are tasty and they just smell so Christmasy.
But look at my poor little Bear jar, his tummy is so empty, I see some cookie baking in my future.

Poor Empty Bear

Decorating

Note the train without all its track

If you enter this house you are in danger of being covered in ivy and having a bow stuck on you.  I need to stop decorating, and if I could find the rest of the track to my miniature train I would.  The tree is done and nearly everything else is too, including me.
I love Christmas, I love being with my family and cooking for them, surprising them with presents--things they wanted and some they didn't know they wanted.  I don't get stressed out by Christmas, it's a time when I actually slow down, think more about others and how much they mean to me.  I really enjoy making gifts for them, though I'm not sure how my fingers feel about it all.
Next I need to do cards, wrap packages for mailing and make some gingerbread people--I love the smell of ginger, even more than the scent of pine, ginger smells like Christmas to me.

Entryway

Dining Room, almost done

I'm off to look in one more box to see if I can find my track, nobody wants to be off their track!

On the First Day of Christmas

Well actually on Dec.2 it begins, the tubs come out, Thanksgiving disappears and I try and figure out where everything goes.  Miss Kitty brings her friend Tail to inspect the first tub down.  I've been working like a demon  an angel on Christmas presents and Mac has finished 2 paintings for the Etsy shop.  Tomorrow we get the tree!

Washington D.C.

We have traveled all over the world visiting most of Europe's capitols, but we had never visited our own capitol until our daughter moved there, and now I can't understand why we didn't go sooner.  It's a beautiful city and though we've now been many times I don't think we'll ever see it all.
This trip we visited some of the Smithsonian museums, an absolutely incredible collection of 19 museums that were originally funded by an English scientist named James Smithson (1764-1829).
We went to the Freer Gallery a creation of Charles Freer who was a 19th century collector of American artists and amassed the nation's largest collection of James Whistler's work, and it is this rotating collection I always want to see.  On exhibit this time were a number of small engravings, water colors, drawings and one magnificent oil painting, Sweet, Silent Thoughts.  His work is so luminous that it makes me despair of ever painting anything worthwhile.
Then for something completely different we went to the Air and Space Museum to enjoy the history of American flight from the Wright Brothers to the Apollo modules to the Mars rover.  We expected the museum to be packed but it wasn't and we had a great time, could have spent the whole day there, but lunch called.

Charles Lindbers's Spirit of St. Louis

Apollo 11

One of Amelia Earhart's Planes

The Wright Brothers' Plane

Next time it's to the American History Museum, they've got Julia Child's Kitchen and I must see it.

Travels

We're back from D.C. where we went to spend Thanksgiving with our daughter and we had a wonderful trip, it had all the best elements, a visit with our daughter, good food and great sightseeing.
We had a good Thanksgiving dinner with her in Annapolis at Buddy's Ribs and Crab, and just like last year it was wonderful, not too salty as buffets can be, loads of seafood, many meat choices, 4 different seafood soups  and tons of veggies and desserts.  We stopped just before we had eaten too much.  The best part of going out for Thanksgiving, besides not having to cook, is not having a ton of leftovers that you feel obligated to eat.  Buddy's was packed, and for good reason, good food at a reasonable price and open on a holiday.
But even better than that the next day April took us to a Cuban restaurant she'd discovered  in D.C. called Cuba Libre.  It was actually a  rum bar and a fantastic restaurant.  Looking over the menu, deciphering the Spanish, deciding how hungry we were,  we started ordering.  And we ordered enough tapas to fill two tables, chicarrones, albondigas, gauva bbq ribs, papas rellenas, and pulpo. Mac and April raved about the pulpo, that was fried baby octopus, and I preferred the papas rellenas, stuffed potato skins, and the albondigas, those were meatballs.   For dessert we had pudin diplomatico, warm banana and chocolate  bread pudding with a rum and pineapple sauce,   tocino del cielo, flan with a candied orange salad  and dulce de leche, the best ice cream I've ever eaten.  We forgot to take pictures of anything but the meatballs (albondigas) and the desserts.
The setting was beautiful and the food was even better.  And as a final touch, your bill is brought to you in a cigar box, oh funny is that! We all love Cuban food which is a cross between Spanish, not Mexican, and Caribbean food.  Can't wait to eat there again.
Our last morning there we hit the Honey Bee Diner an old-fashioned 50's diner that serves breakfasts big enough to feed an army, and needless to say the place was packed.

We always laugh about the fact that when we get together we always eat, but isn't half the  fun?

It's Thanksgiving tomorrow and I just want to mention a few of the things I thankful for.
First my husband and daughter, the two people who make my life worthwhile. Each day is a gift and I am thankful.
I'm thankful for my extended family and friends who are spread all over the place but are always close to me in my thoughts and heart.
I'm thankful we're all in good health here and wish it were so for all our friends too.
I'm thankful that though I'm blind as a bat I can still see.
I'm thankful for Miss Kitty our furry friend who keeps us on our toes.
I'm thankful we only have presidential elections every 4 years, it just seems like we have them all the time.
My knees are thankful we're having a dry Autumn.
I'm thankful I don't have to cook tomorrow.
And I'm thankful for Blogger, it's just so much fun reading blogs!

My Life As a Turkey

Last weekend we watched an interesting/strange program on PBS about Joe Hutto, a naturalist, who spent 18 months raising a family of wild turkeys in Florida.  He'd found a bowl of 16 turkey eggs on his front porch and decided to incubate them, imprint them on himself and raise them.  The show reenacted the 18 months he spent living with them, living closely, very closely, spending hours a day in their coop after he'd lost one to a snake, with them.  I can't imagine being that close to turkeys, we lived near, a mile or two away, from a turkey farm in Colorado and on windy days boy did they stink!

The program was intriguing, I loved his relationship with Sweetpea and Turkey Boy, I liked that he learned to mimic their vocalizations, but I didn't need to see him eating a grasshopper or really believe all the personality attributes he gave  to the turkeys, a bit of wishful thinking at times I think.  I don't think I realized that turkeys flew, I mean I know chickens fly short distances, but it was wild to see the turkeys fly up into the trees to roost.  We saw a flock of wild turkeys the last time we were out on Cumberland Island, they we certainly a long-legged bunch, darn near as tall as  me, but then I'm not very tall.
Wild turkeys are rather different from our domestic ones, they look taller and definitely have smaller breasts.  Our domestic ones have been bred to have huge breasts so there'll be lots of white meat at dinner.
After 18 months of being their mother the turkeys all left him, except for Turkey Boy, who eventually turned on him and attacked him.
He's now living in Wyoming with a herd of deer, rather a strange man.
Here's Mac's painting of a turkey he did a few years ago.

Reading, Reading, Reading

Back on August 18 I began keeping a Reading Journal for a couple of reasons.  I wanted to keep track of what kind of books I was reading, what I liked or didn't like about them, and how many books I was actually reading.  Now I've always been a "heavy" reader.  I keep books in the family room, in the bedroom and in the bathroom.  I knew I read a lot, but even I was surprised to find that since August 18 I have read 35 books.
A lot of crime books: In the Woods, The Likeness, Faithful Place --all by Tana French
The Complete Works of Agatha Christie Volume 1, the Early ¥ears
Found Wanting   Robert Goddard
The Crossing Place and The Janus Stone   by  Elly Griffths
A Duty to the Dead,  An Impartial Witness and Test of Wills   Charles Todd (a mother/son writing team)
The Closers,  The Narrows   by  Michael Connelly, I have 3 more of his waiting to be read.
I also read some classics:  Pride and Prejudice (for about the 100th time), David Copperfield and The Age of Innocence
I read a bunch of Rumer Goddens that I had read years ago or read for the first time:  Black Narcisscus,  Peacock Summer, China Court and I'm currently reading Greengage Summer by her.
There were several books I just couldn't finish.  I've tried for months, literally, to get through Steven Erikson's Gardens of the Moon.  It was highly recommended, I like science fantasy on a large scale, but I slowed plowed through nearly 400 pages of it, still had to keep looking characters up in the index at the front of the book to keep people, and things, straight, and finally realized I just didn't care enough to finish it.
I also couldn't finish How to Live in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu, too, too pretentious.
I also didn't like Book Lust by Nancy Pearl.  She's a well regarded librarian who has written a number of books on book recommendations, but I found her recommendations too politically correct to be worth while.  What do I mean?  Well, you have to read this African/American author, this woman, that immigrant, that homosexual, that single mother etc.  I don't pick my books that way.  I would recommend 1001 Books for Every Mood by Hallie Sphron PH.D. instead, I reading it now and finding lots of good recommendations.

But the books I've enjoyed the most were a family trilogy by Marcia Willet:  Looking Forward,  Holding On and Winning Through.
It's the story of 3 orphaned children, Fliss, Mole and Susannah whose parents and older brother had been killed in Kenya by the Mau-Maus, and they go to live with their Grandmother Freddy (Frederica) at the Keep in Devon.  I'm an absolute sucker for family sagas and this was a good one.  It reminded me very much of the Elliot Family Trilogy by Elizabeth Goudge (Bird in the Tree, Pilgrim's Inn and Heart of the Family), and in fact one of the characters in this book references those books.
The books follow the children from their arrival when they are 8, 5 and 2 till Fliss, the oldest, is in her 50's.  I was sad to see the last book end, but then I discovered that after a couple of years the author wrote one more about the family, The Prodigal Wife.  I've ordered it but I've held off reading it because I can't stand for the story to end.

So what have you been reading?

Ready For Poirot

I've cleaned the upstairs tv room, it needed it badly.  Sometimes I'm not very good about getting in there and sorting things out.  But tonight we're having a Hercules Poirot evening and I knew that it would not do, he would not approve of the room's condition.  So I vacuumed, dusted, sorted, folded and put the room, or at least the front of the room where we watch tv, in order.  As to the back of the room, Mac's pub, well, I don't know what Poirot would say, but I fear he would not be happy, and instead of solving the crime he'd be organizing things.

Before

After