Wednesday before Thanksgiving

It's almost Thanksgiving and I THINK I have all the groceries bought for my meal. Thursday we will go to my dad's for dinner and Friday I will make our Thanksgiving dinner at home. Here's a copy of the menu I have posted on the fridge at home:

Thanksgiving Menu
Friday, 5 p.m.
Exceptionally Tender Roasted Turkey Bird
Monumental Mashed Potatoes
Great Gravy
Stunning Salad
Radical Rolls
Sensational Sweet Potatoes
Creatively Concocted Cranberries
Super Stuffing
Perfectly Perfected Pea Casserole
Plenty O’ Pumpkin Pie

After reading the menu, my darling daughter commented on the fact that chocolate pie was not on there! Then my mother mentioned that grandma was making lemon meringue pie at her house. Sigh. So this morning before work I stopped at the store to get the ingredients for them. Of course, nothing is easy, and one store was out of lemon pie filling and I had to go to another one. But I'm done now. I think...

Monday I didn't work because of doctor's appointments, but I was able to get something baked that I haven't made or eaten for years. It's a Czeck bread we always called 'hoscah'. Pronounced 'hose kuh'. It's an egg bread that my great grandmother put raisins and other things in. The bread is braided and brushed with an egg wash to give it a beautiful sheen on top. I do not remember a single time in my childhood when there wasn't hoscah in the house. We also called it 'sweet bread' but if you say that now to people it means the innards of some animal! ewwww. So I made hoscah, and since the recipe makes two good size loaves, I took half a loaf to my great uncle who lives alone in town. His wife is in a nursing home and he was very grateful to get it. That made me feel good, giving it to him. I know it was part of his childhood, too (that was his mother that used to make it). I was so blessed, growing up knowing my great grandparents. Oh and I also put half a loaf in the freezer for my mother to take home with her when I see her this weekend! She lives 4 hours away and has my grandmother with her for a week, but will stop on her way home when she takes grandma home.

Friday is payday. I'm planning on ordering some Christmas gifts online. I hope they will get here in time!

I haven't been doing much sewing lately. This weekend that may change. My darling daughter finally got a lot of her stuff out of my sewing room. It discouraged me from going in there and sewing when I knew it was so cramped with junk. And there really was no reason for it to be like that...she has her own room next door. It just spilled over into the sewing room and never seemed to go back! I do need to take the vacume cleaner up and vacume at some point.

One of the gals on stashbuster put up instructions to make flying geese that I really want to try. They are three dimensional and look so neat.

Darling daughter wants to get her boyfriend's fleece quilt put together. It's probably just going to be fringe tied on the edges, but the fleece may need to be pieced together to make it big enough. Not a lot of work, but something we have to get on before Christmas sneaks up on us!

I've decided how to make darling son's signature quilt for his high school graduation this Spring. I'm going to just use six inch squares of muslin, alternating with six inch squares of all different music themed fabric. Some great people on stashbuster have sent material to go into it already. I'll be starting that after the holidays.

Last night we had stir fry chicken for supper. Tonight we are having meat loaf. Before I got married, when I lived at home, every Monday I would make meat loaf. My brother's still joke about it being 'Meat Loaf Monday'!

Tuesday Ramblings

Christmas is getting closer every day. The only person I have all their gifts bought is my mother. I have some good ideas for the kids and dear hubby, but other than that, I'm stumped. Even though this year it will be a little bit easier monetarily, because of my generous uncle, I still think it's silly to buy for every single person in the family. My adult siblings don't have the money to spend on everyone. And Christmas isn't about buying 'stuff'. My mother is going to be mad because I spent a little money on her, but I think she is going to be absolutely tickled pink with her present. Can't say what it is on here because she occasionally reads my blog.

Over the past weekend I was able to do more machine quilting on daughter's graduation quilt. The next time I sit down to work on it I should be able to get it finished. At least the machine quilting finished. I'll have to make the binding and attach it. And make a neat label, of course!

I've been tossing around ideas for a graduation quilt for darling son. Since he is so musical, I wanted to do something that reflects his talent. I've thought about a quilt made up of two different color squares with one the background and the other forming the shape of a guitar. I've also thought about making one out of musically themed material, however I don't have much of that in my stash. I made daughter's quilt completely out of stash and would like to do that with his. If it's not possible, it's not possible. I would like to get started on the top soon after Christmas. Time will sneak up on me, I know!

Last night I made sloppy jo for supper. We had that with some oven fried potatoes. Friday night I made clam chowder. I had been craving that for a couple weeks. I even brought some leftovers of the soup for lunch yesterday! Saturday night we went out to dinner with two of our good friends. We went to a bar in Prairietown that is famous for it's fish dinners on Friday. Now, I know we went on Saturday, but I still wanted to try the fish. They had a bluegill sandwich on the menu. It was pretty good and we really enjoyed being out with friends.

Sunday I made a beef roast with all the fixin's. It turned out great.

Saturday morning I went down to St. Louis to visit Grandma. We went to the grocery store and to eat at a family restaurant she likes. It was a nice visit.

Veteran's Day

Yesterday was Veteran's Day. I had the day off work, so I began machine quilting on darling daughter's graduation quilt. I have always been apprehensive about starting a project on the industrial Singer machine. There have been times I have started machine quilting on it, only to have it start acting up in the middle of a project. Yesterday I could not have asked for better results! I was able to machine quilt half of the quilt without incident.

I really think a big part of my recent success on the machine has to do with the fact that I cleaned out the tension mechanism. Not too long ago the machine was serviced, the motor changed out, and the feed dogs permenantly dropped. I would have thought the service tech would have cleaned out the tensioning mechanism. Maybe my first clue that it might not have been done should have been when I sat down in the shop to test it out before taking it home was the way he grabbed the material from me and pushed it through, like I didn't know what I was doing. He was very impatient. I don't have a different place to take the machine real close, so I joined an online group that fixes old machines themselves. I learned more from them and was able to do more for the machine myself than I paid the service tech for! Plus I felt really good about doing it myself.

We had chili and hot dogs for dinner last night. The chili had all day to cook in the crock pot and turned out really good! Monday night we had saltesa sausage, oven fried potato wedges and green bean casserole. The green bean casserole was a treat because I found a different brand of the crunchy onions. Aldi sells them, probably just seasonally, in a pouch for almost half what a can of the name brand costs. I bought a couple bags to see if they were any good. They are! Think I'll go back and get a few more bags to have in the cabinet.

Monday Afternoon

I didn't get as much quilting done as I would have liked, but I did get some hand quilting done over the weekend on Tennessee August. The weather has been warmer than normal for November. When it gets cold, I will be doing a lot more hand quilting because having that quilt over me is pretty warm! I usually have the quilt over my lap and legs and a cat behind me on my chair.

The bathroom tile is all set. Now it needs to be grouted and sealed. Then my darling husband wants to paint the bathroom. It will be nice when it's done!

I put chicken and dumplings in the crock pot for dinner, but my darling daughter requested meat loaf. I told her if she wants to make it, fine. So she's making meat loaf and we will have the chicken tomorrow. It doesn't matter to me!