Day #18

This is really the card for Sunday, but this weekend has been so messed up that we ended up doing it tonight. We love driving around and looking at holiday lights. My sister (wave hi, Sara) and family used to do this at home and she invented the term Christmas Craptactular to describe this particular type of holiday excess.

In the last week or so, we saw both of these houses on television and made it a mission to find them. The first one we saw on HGTV's Extreme Christmas: Bigger and Brighter. After the show, Jim somehow figured out who and where exactly this house was. We drove down there and there was a huge line of traffic, but so worth it. The lights were synced to music and if you tuned your car radio to the right channel, you could listen along to the show.

From there we went to the second house. This one we saw on the nightly news. Unfortunately, it was there because some teens were caught on home security vandalizing the display. The homeowner was out, handing out candy canes and talking to visitors. He said that whatever those kids were up to backfired, because he never had more support and help from the neighborhood in restoring the display. However, this will be the last year that they do the decorating, as it is just too much work. I'm really glad that we made it by.

Christmas Countdown

Do you remember those paper chains you made when you were a kid to count down the days til Christmas? This is a grown-up version of that. I saw this idea on Pinterest and I knew immediately that I wanted to do it for Jim. December ends up being so busy that sometimes we don't spend enough time appreciating each other in all the hustle and bustle. This countdown is just a daily reminder of how much I love my husband.

I took scrapbooking paper and made a card for December 1 through December 25. Then I took the calendar and and started planning my notes for the backs. Two-thirds of the cards have compliments on them. The remaining one third are either fun holiday activities or small things I can do for him. I made sure that I knew which days were weekend days, so that I could put activities on days when we could stay up later or when we had more time.

I can't show you any of the card backs, because he hasn't seen them yet, but I will give you some ideas that I didn't use. For compliments, you could say something like I love the way you look in that blue sweater. It really brings out the color of your eyes or I love that you always make time to have a tea party with our daughter/niece/godchild. Some examples of activities are a date to go ice skating or have an epic snowball fight. Making the dinner/dessert of his choice or doing a chore that he normally does would be great ideas, too.

The idea originally came from the blog The Dating Divas. The cards are hanging on the dining room wall and I think they add a cheerful decoration to an otherwise blank space. I hope Jim enjoys his Christmas countdown.

Turkey Rice Soup

My Mom always made turkey rice soup with the leftover turkey bones from Thanksgiving. I used to complain about this soup when I was growing up, but this year I decided I wanted it. I called my sister and asked her to look through Mom's recipe boxes and see if she could find it. No luck. Add this to the long list of little things that I wish I had asked Mom for or about.

I could remember that it started with the carcass and had tomatoes, rice, carrots and probably onion, because everything did, so I started with that and asked Google for some recipes. I found one that looked close, so I started there. I think I got pretty close.

Turkey Rice Soup

9-10 lbs turkey (bones and trimmings)
2 1/2 qts chicken stock
1 tsp salt
1/8 tsp ground pepper (fresh)
1 cup converted rice (regular) - I used a bag of boil in the bag rice
3 carrots (thinly sliced)
1/2 medium onion (diced)
1 bay leaf
14 oz can diced tomatoes (undrained)


Break up turkey to fit in a 5 quart Dutch oven; add the water, salt and pepper and bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce heat, cover and simmer for 1 1/2 hours.

Remove bones and meat from broth and cool until you can handle it, then remove the meat from the bones and cut it into bite-sized pieces.

Skim the fat from the broth, then add the meat, tomatoes, rice, carrots, onions and bay leaf to the broth and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer, covered, for 10-15 minutes or until the rice, carrots, and onions are tender.

Remove the bay leaf and serve.

Operation Christmas Child

This project has been my official kick-off to the holiday season for the last ten years or so and I really love it. Operation Christmas Child is a project of Samaritan's Purse International Relief, an organization run by Franklin Graham, Billy Graham's son.

Here is how you pack a shoe box. First, decide if your box is for a boy or a girl and what age - 2-4, 5-9, or 10-14. Next, get an empty shoe box. You can use a regular cardboard box, but I like to use a plastic one, because it can be used for something else later.

Then you fill the box with school supplies (I like to get these during back-to-school sales),

hygiene items, and

then the fun stuff (toys, small flashlights, batteries, hard candies)

I need pencil sharpeners, combs, maybe playing cards and some more candy, and then these boxes are ready to go. There are a few rules for what goes in a box. They don't want you to seen war toys because these kids see enough of that, so no army men, cowboy pistols or any of that stuff. They don't want you to send chocolate, liquids or breakable items (for obvious reasons).

Once your box is packed, label it and take it to a drop off location, along with a check for $7 to offset the cost of shipping them. This year OCC is doing something new. If you donate your fee on line, they send you a special label with a bar code that will let you track where you box goes. I'm very excited to try this out.

If you want to pack a box, you still have time. Drop off continues until Monday, November 21.

"Hello, Cleveland!"*

Way back in September, my best friend (wave hi Christine) called me up and said, "If I buy tickets to see Duran Duran four days after your birthday, will you come visit me?" Um, hellz yeah, sign me up! [n.b. We saw them play twice in 1988/89 in Atlanta and I haven't seen them since.]

I flew out to Cleveland on Wednesday afternoon before the show that evening. It was my first time flying Southwest, which is a little interesting. It was my first time at BWI airport, too. I'm not a fan - it's very difficult to find a bathroom there. The flight itself was short and easy, even though we were delayed nearly an hour taking off. Not really a fan of Cleveland's airport either; I swear there is not an arrivals/departures board anywhere in the airport.

For dinner before the show, we went to Bricco, which is directly across the street from the theatre. We had an appetizer of goat cheese in spicy marinara with fried pita and the bartender recommend a great wheat beer (Weihenstephaner) to me. I had the risotto for my entree and my friend had the parmesan crusted tilapia. All of it was great. Then we headed across the street.

The band was playing at Playhouse Square, in the State Theatre. Playhouse Square is the largest performing arts complex outside of New York City, with eight stages, 1000+ performances a year and over 1,000,000 visitors. The State Theater was built in the 1920s as a movie house and is the largest of the theatres at Playhouse Square. We got to our seats just in time to catch the end of the opening act, a band I have never heard of and that wasn't really my style. Duran Duran, on the other hand, is just my style and they sounded exactly the same as they did in the 80s. They played a great mix of their older hits and newer songs.

The next day, we went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. after lunch at Great Lakes Brewing Company. There are a lot of microbreweries in Cleveland and I think I had more beer while I was there than have all year (I tried the Dortmunder Gold, to go with my bratwurst and pierogis. We were in the museum for about four hours and seriously could have spent another two hours. They have thousands and thousand of pieces of memorabilia from the roots of rock and roll in bluegrass, gospel, jazz and blues all the way through a stage costume worn by Lady Gaga last year. You could spend a hour or more just watching the multimedia production that tells about all of the inductees.

For dinner that night, we went to Lolita, which is a Michael Symon (of Iron Chef fame) restaurant. For me, the highlight of the meal was the Big Board, a selection of house cured meats. Holy cow, was it good. There was prosciutto, sopressata, a lamb pate, a chicken liver mousse, a shredded duck packed under duck fat and a cured sirloin. I also had a good beer here, called White Rascal, from Avery Brewing.

Even though it was gray and raining horizontally, I could tell that Cleveland is really a pretty cool place to live. Friday night, there was a great happy hour party at my friends' house, with homemade pumpkin beer. We will have to go back in the summer for baseball and to see the art museum, natural history museum, zoo and the Great Lakes Science Center as well as all the parks that we missed on this trip.

* Bonus if you know where I got the title for this post.

Crossing One Off the List

Today I did something awesome. I paid off the last of my credit cards and scratched that off of my 101 Goals list. Now, I have two that I can use for emergencies and one that I use and pay off every month. It feels great!

Adventures in Commuting

Left Work - 5:30 p.m.
Got Home - 8:15 p.m.
Total Commute - 2 hours, 45 minutes
Normal Commute - about 1 hour

It's been awhile since I've written a blog about interesting things that happen on my commute. Today's was a doozy. Shortly before 5:00 tonight, someone fell or jumped onto the tracks at the Clarendon Metro station and was struck by a train. [Update - Metro authorities are reporting that the person intentionally jumped in front of the train. He was rescued from the track and taken to the hospital.] As you would expect, this created havoc on the subway system. Trains were not running between Rosslyn and Ballston - this is the way I go home.

Trains were running to Rosslyn where Metro was shuttling riders to Ballston by bus. I got on an Orange Line train to Rosslyn, only we didn't stop at Rosslyn because the station was so crowded that they were not letting anyone else off. Instead we were diverted to the Blue Line to Arlington Cemetery (6:17 p.m.).

I catch a train back to Rosslyn and get off there and we are informed that due to overcrowding, Rosslyn Station is now closed. Furthermore, the escalators are all out, which looks like this, so I walked up the longest escalator in the metro system (6:29 p.m.). Many people were in serious distress by the time they reached the tops and several ambulances were called to the station.

I finally get outside, but every bus is jammed full and not picking up any passengers, either the shuttle buses or the buses that normally stop at the Rosslyn Station (6:42 p.m.). At 6:56 p.m., Metro employees said the station was reopened, so I headed back inside.

After nearly fainting and sitting down in the middle of the aisle of the train, someone got up and gave me a seat. I just got way too overheated and stressed out. At 7:41 p.m. I finally got a break when I got to Dunn -Loring and the bus pulled up right when I got outside. One bus ride and a short walk later and I was finally home at 8:15 p.m. You can read more news coverage here.