Not feeling very clever today.

So Thanksgiving was awesome. I must say, in all humility, that my cooking was first-class. We had:

• turkey
• ranch mashed potatoes (with celery in it....that is so yummy to have a bit of a crunch in your mashed potatoes) (thanks for the recipe Maren)
• gravy
• dressing (homemade with homemade bread--the first time I ever made it--turned out just like how my mom made it!....the stuff is divine. I mean, think about it. It's bread with two cups of cream poured on it, and some onions and spices and other yummy stuff like butter. It was truly the stuff that dreams are made of. It was also the very first leftover to be completely eaten. sniff sniff)
• green bean casserole (I happen to love the stuff. My mom never made it when I was growing up, so although everyone thinks it's old news, it's still pretty novel to me)
• corn
• sweet potatoes (with lots of brown sugar and marshmallows on top, of course)
• stuffed mushrooms (Yum! that was mainly just for Kami and I--no one else likes mushrooms much. All the more for us!)
• jello salad (my favorite with a graham cracker crust on bottom, then cream cheese/cool whip middle, then rasp. jello with raspberries on top)
• pecan pie (all homemade, and the crust was pretty easy and tasty)
  

It was a delicious feast. I am sad that it is pretty much all gone now except for a little turkey. We ate it all weekend.

So as an adieu to the Thanksgiving holiday, here are a few things I've been feeling thankful for lately.
1. my dishwasher
2. that Kami did my dishes (MORE than once!) when she came to visit. And that she lives close enough that we can see each other really quite often! Yahoo!
3. that neither I nor my kids nor my husband suffer from any ghastly diseases
4. chocolate chips
5. that I am a female and so do not have to scrape the frost off the car windows on cold mornings (at least not on mornings when Brett is home.)
6. that I am not in school and so don't have to worry about studying for tests or writing lame papers
7. my camera
8. that I get to cuddle up to my honey every night and wake up beside him every morning (well, that last part is theoretical...I don't really wake up beside him, because he's gone before I wake up, but I could if I really wanted to I guess. Anyway.)
9. friends
10. that hair grows (although it does take a long time. sigh.)

Kami and Elena and Ana came, which was awesome! and which means I have some E-baby pictures to share.



The typical smiling Ethne-somber Elena shots. :)

We tried to get Ethne and Elena to take a nap together, but they just played and played, before finally crying of course.
Kami helped me put up our Christmas tree and decorate my house and make some decorations. Our house is so perty now. I also bought on-line the sheet music for "where are you Christmas?" and so Ana and I sang it a lot. I love that song. Brett started singing a version that had to do with "why can't I get this song out of my head?" Scrooge.


Did I mention that a while back when it started getting quite cold, Brett fired up his veggie-oil furnace? It is so nice and warm. It feels soooooo good when you are cold. It's such a hot blast--it's like standing in front of a bonfire. The downside is that it only blows into the kitchen, but that's all right. Oh, and that Kami had to call us after we left to go to church this morning that it was blowing smoke everywhere. Ooops. ...But that was just the one time. :)

In Sunday school today we were talking about the verse that says the love of money is the root of all evil, and there were quite a lot of comments, and one guy told about a man he knew who was trying to work hard in the church because he knew of the scripture that says 'after ye have obtained a hope in Christ ye shall obtain riches if ye seek them' and he wanted to get rich. So everyone was tut-tutting over this guy's bad motives, and then this funny older guy said, "Yeah, so did it work?" It was so funny. Maybe you had to be there but the guy is so funny that I was just cracking up. This is the guy who once told Brett and I that when he was the bishop, he had to bail his entire priest's quorum out of jail, including his son. Ha ha! It was for shooting bottle rockets over the freeway or something. Anyway, good times.

So, I was just thinking about the time when I was at a scholarship competition thingee, and one of the interviewer people asked me if I was a fly on the wall and I heard people talking about me, what would I hope would be said. What would you say if the question were posed to you?