A Little Catching Up

There was a lot of activity here in the days surrounding Christmas and New Year's Day. And you might have noticed there was not a lot of blogging! So I have some catching up to do.

I will start with the visit from our Seattle friend and her son. They arrived on the Wednesday after Christmas and stayed until Sunday. That meant we got to celebrate New Year's Eve with them. For the first time in awhile we actually celebrated Pacific Standard Time New Year's Eve rather than the Eastern Standard Time version. (One of the great benefits of living on the West Coast is that you can choose your New Year's Eve time zone and go to bed early if you are sick from the holiday running around, old and decrepit, old and have young children, or just old and boring!)

We started with my Seattle friend's all day cooking project, Boeuf Bourguignon, the most famous of Julia Child's recipes. All I can say about it is WOW! Well, maybe I can also say, TOTALLY WORTH THE EFFORT! Especially since the effort was hers and not mine! She is a great cook and also made an apple pie while she was here!

Later that night we had our second annual New Year's Eve Syllabub. To me the whipped cream on top tastes like an inproved version of Key Lime Pie. I am wondering if you could use syllabub to make Key Lime Pie more exciting! Julia Child I am not, so I will leave that to someone else for now!
As you can see here the game is more exciting than the drink! This one ended up as someone else's seconds! You saw the video of the pots and pans banging just a few days ago. What you didn't see is just how hard they were banged!This wooden spoon didn't survive the festivities!

We also spent time with Tap and Ruedy on Carmel beach. One of the reasons for the visit was to see Tap. They didn't come this past summer so the Seattle Boy hadn't seen her in a year and a half. That's a long time in the life of an elderly dog! She is just over 15 and a half and she still enjoyed the beach. She was a little easier to control than she was the last time we all went to Carmel beach. Her dementia was just enough back then to send her off with any group that came by and her deafness made it hard to get her back. (Those who know her know that she is well trained and had earned her off leash beach privileges, so it wasn't disobedience that caused her behavior.) This time she seemed to be more aware of her limitations and stayed pretty close or kept looking back at us. We all had a wonderful time walking the beach, using the remote control "crawler" car on the rocks, and enjoying a perfect (although quite cold) day.
The felt slipper making project didn't get any photo documentation, but it worked out really well! I really think felt making is like magic. It requires a lot of faith to keep working when the slipper is twice the size it needs to be, but eventually the shrinking happens and you have to be careful not to go too far.

Wow! This post makes us sound way busier than we were. It was really a lazy trip with lots of sitting around at home, ball throwing for Ruedy, knitting, and researching remote control cars and helicopters online.