Alkahest my heroes have always died at the end

One last comment on the day – K and I went out to get a Christmas tree this afternoon.  The place we usually go was just about out of trees.  In fact, they had run out, but spoke to another tree seller who hadn’t sold all of his trees yet and they bought a good chunk of his stock.  Even still, there were only five 7 foot trees, a bunch of 6 foot trees and an 8 foot tree.  Unfortunately, the only decent tree was the 8 foot one.  Fortunately, we’ve got high ceilings 🙂

Now, back when we used to get a Christmas tree at home, my father’s least favorite part of setting up was getting the tree in it’s stand and perpendicular.  For the past two years, that’s been my least favorite part too.  You climb under the tree, tighten some screws, have the tree fall over on you, stand it back up, loosen some screws, tighten others; repeat until it’s close enough and then have the tree fall over in the middle of the night.

This year, it finally (laugh all you want) occurred to me that the smart way to set the tree up is to leave it bound in it’s netting while putting it in the stand.  This works great.  No branches to climb under, it’s easy to tell if the tree is vertical, etc.  When done, bring it in the house and cut off the netting – perfect!

We’ll post pictures once it’s decorated.

Why didn’t someone tell me about this sooner? Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) and Stephin Merritt are the Gothic Archies who’s new CD is the Tragic Treasury: “Music for a Series of Unfortunate Events.”

For a sample, see Funtime OK (a mp3 blog), or Youtube:

My favorite so far is “Shipwrecked.”

I hope everyone’s having a good Thanksgiving. So far, ours has been great. K’s parents are in town which means: a) her father gets to see the house for the first time; b) we’ve got help cooking dinner; and c) we’ve got a reason to cook more food!

I started off the morning by (finally!) finishing the snake cage. I put the frames around the vents and put glass in about 3/4 of each vent (losing too much heat otherwise). I installed track lighting in the top and put two 75 watt grow bulbs in it. After they were on for an hour or so, the temperature rose to 81 degrees. Just about perfect. Eventually, we’ll replace the grow bulbs with heat lamps that produce no light, only heat; but for now, these are great. Luke’s basking right now and seems to be enjoying it.

We just finished dinner (did I mention more people == more food?). The menu was:

• Turkey breast (for K’s father) and pecan crusted salmon for the rest of us
• Cornbread stuffing with mushroom gravy
• Walnut soup
• Avocado, tomato and olive salad (no lettuce!) with a balsamic vinaigrette
• Whole wheat rolls
• Green beans with walnuts
• Cranberry sauce

Dessert will be pecan pie. I tried something new with the pie – rather than using corn syrup, I used maple syrup. I’ll update later regarding that experiment.

I hope everyone’s enjoyed their Thanksgiving and have given a lot of thought to what they’re thankful for.

[Update: Using maple syrup in the pecan pie rather than corn syrup is a winner. I’m glad K ran across that idea.]

K’s parents are in town and staying with us. Okay, that’s not a typical thing to be thankful for :-), but I like her parents and this gives me a great excuse to take most of this week off. I lost 54 minutes of vacation last month, I would like to avoid a repeat.

Hopefully, I can get caught up on a few things while I’m out of the office

I took the day off for my birthday.  I got to sleep in late and get some things done around the house.  I managed, I think, to get rid of whatever was smelling up one of our air ducts, I tarred up part of the roof and repaired the fence where the dog kept getting out.  After that, I headed up for the Poindexter small group meeting and then his talk (more on these later).  On my way home, I picked up some take out from the local Mexican restaurant.  We ate dinner, made a cheesecake and walked the dogs.  I opened presents when I got back.  K got me a hand full of things I had wanted:  the Library of America Writings of Washington and the Writings of Thoreau, Jared Bernstein’s All Together Now: Common Sense for a Fair Economy, and the Pinky and the Brain DVD 🙂  Tim Powers’s On Stranger Tides is still being shipped.

All in all, a very good day.  Oh, and the obligatory picture of the birthday cheesecake: