Yay, it’s that time of year again! No, seriously!

We’re enjoying the season in stride, with most of our shopping done -but not all! We don’t want to slip out of holiday mode. And I can’t keep baking, because I’ll run out of people to help me eat it.
We’re packing for our trip up to the High Sierras, where a couple of heavy snowstorms seem to be awaiting us. Also if all goes well, an igloo. Here’s our tree:

Yes, that’s a framed image of a tank next to the tree. We love Banksy in this house.
But more important than the holidays, have you seen the HotBooth App? Rather than making you fat or old (see Fat Booth or Old Booth), you can add makeup or accessories to your photo. Or a kitten. I’ve been playing with a pic of one of my favorite people, Avegail:

You can only imagine what I did with this photo:

One of our favorite things this season, though, was figuring out how make the Hawaiian Kettle Corn that we had as an appetizer at our current favorite restaurant discovery, the A-frame.

When you get it just right, which only happens if you go to Farmer’s Market and pick up actual kettle corn, it is so delicious, and you can’t stop until your hands are covered with butter and the japanese seaweed seasoning.
So we’re all geared up for a nice holiday season, and I’m sure it will only get better.

Late fall and feels like winter

I just realized that if I don’t post soon, i will only have a few posts between last Christmas’s Truckee post and this Christmas’ Truckee post. We’re supposed to go up there for Christmas with my family, and I can’t wait.
I also picked out an internal frame backpack as my Christmas present. Tim was about to buy me a coat at REI, and I was like, why buy a coat at REI when I can get a backpack? Tim already has one, and I was all jealous.
So yeah, I’m going to need to plan some backpacking trips.
In the meantime, I’m hosting Thanksgiving at my place this year, and so I’m planning out my shopping list. I’m hoping to be a little more organized than that one year when I was so busy cooking that I forgot to shower and get ready, and I spent the evening hiding from the cameras.
Tim is in NorCal this weekend, so I’m using the time to get my place ready and to play Black Ops (just kidding, OMG!).
I’m going to be making Roasted Sweet Potatoes and Apples with Thyme, Mashed Potatoes with Garlic and chives, Pecan Sweet Potatoes, Roasted Cauliflower, and hopefully some kind of rolls. Lisa is bringing up the Turkey, and helping me with stressing, I mean cooking. We can stress together. And if it gets to be too stressful, well there’s always a jacuzzi for after dinner.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to try to make a paper corsage for a prom I’m attending tomorrow.

Cactus, windmills, and Happy Winter Solstice

Oh blogsie, how I’ve missed you.
my friend Cris and I took a road trip the other day out to the windmills near Palm Springs. We did some photography and had some date shakes at Hadleys, and did some catching up. My favorite spot for photos was this little cluster of cacti. I thought it had been through a fire, but on closer inspection it didn’t appear that anything else around it had ever been burned. I guess it’s just from drought, but I’ve never seen any plant life get so dead and then come back to life. It must only stay alive way, way down in its roots. It’s a very humanoid looking gathering of Cholla. About 3 minutes into photographing it, I suddenly felt that old sense of being responsible for looking out for my friend, in case she’d never been around Cholla before. You don’t just look down when you hike around that kind of cactus, you have to keep looking down. You have to make sure one of those harmless looking chunks of the plant doesn’t cling to your foot. Sure enough, Cris had already found a cluster clinging to her foot, and then had it stick to her hand when she tried to get it off. And I had gotten a piece in my boot while on my way over to her. We both should have been supervised.