We’ve started the Christmas season: GIAL dinner on Friday, buying and putting up a big tree on Saturday, a church dinner on Saturday night, a lovely Christmas cantata during church this morning, and a start on the Christmas cookies this afternoon.
Rachel got her tree up too with the help of her roommate and another friend.
The price of trees seems pretty good this year. I’m thinking of saving the decorating until Andrew and Laura and baby arrive this weekend.
Something else to be thankful for–a new dishwasher. Saturday morning I discovered that the load of dishes I had set to wash when I went to bed was dead in the water, so to speak. The dishwasher had died mid-cycle (I guess it got tired after doing 3 loads in one day). Just what I needed to deal with on the day of Rachel’s open house!
David and I managed to dislodge it from its drain and inlet hot water feed, and he and Gary dragged it out to the curb for Big Trash pickup. I was not too happy to learn that the dishwasher had no water shut off of its own, so now that meant that not only did I have no dishwasher in the kitchen, I also had no hot water.
I finished my food preparation and sent David and Sarah out to the store for the last few things we needed for the open house. Then Gary and I drove to Rachel’s and had a lovely time (see previous post). We got home several hours later and I immediately started in on cleaning up the kitchen. Six minutes later I noticed the blue bow on the dishwasher and only then realized that this was a new dishwasher! David and Sarah had managed to go buy a new one before the open house and then install it afterwords, and I was none the wiser!
Very nice early Christmas gift!
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Even though she has lived there since August, Rachel had her official House Warming/Open House on Saturday November 28. The weather was perfect, and her little brother and sister in law bought her some lovely flowers.
We prepared finger foods with coffee, iced tea, and punch for drinks. There were at least 50 people there over the two hour period and Rachel had a lot of fun showing off her new house. Her friend Sarah took lots of nice photos with a nice camera, so we’ll get to see those sometime.
She wasn’t really expecting gifts, but got several nice things anyway. We stayed behind to watch her open them after everyone else left.
Click here to see the photos from yesterday’s lovely Thanksgiving dinner. Press the “Slideshow” button to get a good view.
The church we are now attending has an annual Thanksgiving dinner. They took the chairs out of the sanctuary and turned it into a lovely banquet hall.
We started with a game using Thanksgiving words.
We had lots of good food. Note Rachel’s green bean casserole, her specialty.
And I made two cheesecakes, including this pumpkin cheesecake with caramelized pecans on top.
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| Baby Isabella's baptism and other photos around age 16 months |
Click on the photo above to go to the latest web album of baby photos. Less than a month for us to see her in person!
On Saturday I spent some time with Carol and was able to photograph her numerous quilts. Many of them are just quilt tops at this point, awaiting the next step of adding a batting and a back and the long slow process of hand quilting. They are all so beautiful. What a lot of work! Click here to see the new photos in the online album of Carol’s handiwork.
Last week Rachel got her downstairs bathroom remodeled so now she’s ready to finally have an official Open House. Being a child of the age, all her invites went out via Facebook. So if you didn’t get one, here’s the scoop:
Date: Saturday, November 28, 2009
Time: 3:30pm – 5:30pm
Location: My New House
City/Town: Duncanville, TX
Please join me on the Saturday after Thanksgiving in thanking the Lord for my new house! Take a tour of my house, eat, and mingle with my friends and family! Feel free to come and go as you’d like, however there will be a short time of prayer around 4:30pm.
I hope to see you there!
Let’s see if I can put a link to a photo album on her Facebook account. Click to view. If it works, you can see photos of her bathroom remodel.
Yesterday Ernesto’s crew installed a new threshold and tiled the entryway. Such an improvement!
I am so happy that we got a new patio door installed today! The seals on the double panes of the old one had broken, effectively obscuring the view of the back yard. That meant, among other things, that I could do no birdwatching.
Now I can see the backyard clearly–this is thru 4 panes of glass.
And another thing I like about this–a friend is paying the bill for this! The Lord is gracious.
In other news, Gary is off to Salt Lake City tomorrow through Sunday night for a conference.
