It’s Cookie Central at our house this week. We started with the fussy ones: Frosted Sugar and Shortbread Cookie Sticks – to get them out of the way. They require frosting and sprinkles so take more time than others. Twelve more kinds to go. I even got YA onboard today!
When do you start your holiday baking (if you indulge)?
While America now knows the Friday after Thanksgiving as Black Friday, for the last couple of decades at our house it’s been Tree Friday. For many years this was the day that Child and I headed out to chop down a tree for the holidays. These days I head down to Bachmans (they have a 25% off fresh trees on Black Friday and they are really close by).
In fact, it was 7 years ago on Tree Friday that I got my nickname from Jacque. Dale had written that day a great bit about Black Friday and used some Shakespearean language to get us going. My bit was:
But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the north and Hansen Tree Farm is the sun.
Open up, fair Tree Farm and await the crowds
Who, already stuffed and sleepy from yesterday
Swing saws and other implements of destruction.
Jacque came up with Verily Sherrilee that day.
So what about you? Taking part in Black Friday shopping? Online purchasing? Just taking it easy?
It seems to me that Thanksgiving has more expectations attached to it than any other day of the year. I like to read advice columns in the morning (makes me feel like I have a good handle on things); for a couple of weeks the columns have been filled with angst about Thanksgiving.
Grandma doesn’t want to host dinner and two of the daughters are throwing a fit because it will spoil the day. Uncle Joey always drinks too much and everyone is worried about whether he will spoil the day. Cousin Mary has a new boyfriend who is a vegetarian and everyone is worried his dietary needs will spoil the day. Grandpa won’t come because he has a new puppy that isn’t welcome and it will spoil the day. For so many people Thanksgiving seems to be encased in amber; it must be exactly as it’s always been and it can’t be spoiled.
As a person who moved away from home at an early age, got divorced and then became a single parent, I have never had a chance to cement a list of requirements to make Thanksgiving Day overly static. There is however, one thing that I have been in charge of for many years – the thankful project. I’ve done a paper Mayflower w/ little scrolls that people wrote on, I’ve done a large cut out turkey whose feathers became lists of what we’ve thankful for, I’ve done a large tree with leaves for the thankful thoughts. This year I’m doing a big poster board covered with square of different papers and have a handful of markers for everybody to write with. I love doing the thankful project as it really brings it home to me where my focus should be, rather than on whether the potatoes are the way I like them.
One of the things that I’ve written down for the last couple of years on the thankful project is “baboons” (which I then have to explain). I am beyond grateful that I’ve found a community of folks who are thoughtful, caring, sincere, well-read, funny… all these things and more. I’m thankful for this past year with you all on the Trail and looking forward to the year coming up.
No question today – just heartfelt thanks for all of you!
We’ve just gone over the 6,000 followers mark. Makes me think about the beginnings of the Trial Balloon, then the Trail Baboon, Dale, Jim Ed and TLGMS.
Do you have a favorite Balloon or Baboon memory?
Have you ever been waking up in the morning and hear the phone ring, then become fully awake and realize you just imagined it? If so, you may have experienced an auditory hypnagogic hallucination.
In August of 2015, Dr. Laurence Knott of the UK wrote: “Hypnagogic or hypnopompic hallucinations are visual, tactile, auditory, or other sensory events, usually brief but occasionally prolonged, that occur at the transition from wakefulness to sleep (hypnagogic) or from sleep to wakefulness (hypnopompic). The phenomenon is thought to have been first described by the Dutch physician Isbrand Van Diemerbroeck in 1664.[1] The person may hear sounds that are not there and see visual hallucinations. These visual and auditory images are very vivid and may be bizarre or disturbing.”
And Wikipedia describe it this way: “Hypnagogia is the experience of the transitional state from wakefulness to sleep in humans: the hypnagogic state of consciousness, during the onset of sleep. Mental phenomena that occur during this “threshold consciousness” phase include lucid thought, lucid dreaming, hallucinations, and sleep paralysis.” As you can see, there are several other “conditions” mentioned, that I don’t have the time to explore here.
I love what is sometimes called the “twilight time” as I drift off to sleep, and frequently have little vignettes play out before my eyes. Rather than thinking of it as a medical condition to be “treated”, I often wish they would last longer.
Do you experience any sort of hallucinations upon waking or falling asleep?
The deadline for renewing our State psychology licenses looms large this week. Husband and I sent in all our papers and fees for renewal a couple of weeks ago. Imagine Husband’s surprise yesterday when he received two notifications from “Google ” telling him that he had better renew his license immediately, along with a link to do so.
I am happy to report that Husband didn’t fall for this apparent phishing attempt. He had already received confirmation from our Psychology Board office that everything was in order, and that any communication from the Board was directly from the Board, not from Google. I contacted the Board office to report this scam attempt.
It amazes me how clever scammers are. It also surprises me how easy it is to fool people. Our State Government IT office sends State employees fake emails at work to try to teach us to spot suspicious communications, and a special button to click to report an email as either fake or suspicious. It is pretty easy to spot them, I think. Our agency IT guy told me, though, that 50% of the fake emails are actually opened by staff who don’t suspect a thing or are too trusting. That is a big concern given how devastating it would be to have our system, with all our clients’ confidential information hacked or compromised.
I hope none of my fellow psychologists are duped by these phishers. It is an anxious time around the renewal period, and anxiety makes it hard to be wise sometimes.
What are your experiences with scammers or hackers? How do you keep yourself safe?
I am an only child. When I was younger, I cringed when I said that to people, as I invariably would hear the same phrase “Oh, you must be spoiled”. It always made me want to apologize.
Spoiled, to me, brings up images of the nasty girl from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I think that people can be spoiled in good and not so good ways, and I have tried to spoil my children and the people I love in good ways.
Our daughter is coming home for Thanksgiving. We haven’t seen her for six months. Thanksgiving is her favorite holiday, and she has great expectations for her trip home. Every year we “spoil” her by letting her plan the Thanksgiving meal. She has old favorites, and likes to try new things as well. She doesn’t help prepare the food, but leaves it to us. This year she has requested French bread, an apple crisp for desert, cranberry salsa, a basic turkey dressing, butternut squash casserole, mashed potatoes, a simple turkey that is covered in cheese cloth and basted with herb butter, and, of course, green bean casserole. She also wants cranberry mimosas.
Daughter has also asked that she gets a down comforter on her bed, and has other favorite food requests for the 10 days she is home. I think this is a very good way to spoil her.
How do you spoil the people you love?
I often feel like I own every kitchen toy possible. Then I get another catalog in the mail or see an ad on the internet. My latest acquisition is a spiralizer. Dreadful if completely accurate name.
It has 3 different blades so you get 3 different widths of spirals and you can use it on a wide variety of fruits and vegetables (zucchini, onion, potato, pears, apples, carrots, beets). Pretty much if you can stick it onto the machine, you can probably makes spirals. Before I bought it I checked out several books from the library to see what kinds of dishes could be prepared – ended up purchasing two cookbooks as well (and yes, I did get rid of two old cookbooks when the new ones arrived).
Of course, the day I had time to mess with it, I didn’t want to go shopping so I just made up a recipe using ingredients I already had in the house.
Sherrilee’s First Spiralized Chilied Potatoes
1 large yellow onion, spiralized
3 large Yukon gold potatoes, peeled and spiralized
2 T. butter
1 can of Chili Beans
1 can of tomatoes w/ chiles
1 pouch of Taco sauce
1 T. chili powder
1 T. cumin
Salt & pepper to taste
2 c. shredded pepper jack cheese
Saute onions in butter until translucent in oven-proof skillet. Add potatoes and cook for 8-10 minutes until they get soft. Add beans, tomatoes, taco sauce and spicing to taste. Top w/ cheese and heat in 350° F oven for about 15 minutes until cheese gets nice and melty.
YA loved it. Good recipe for a cold, rainy weekend even if I feel badly for participating in “verbing”!
What new verb do you detest?
Today’s post comes to us from Occasional Caroline.
Occasionally, I start writing a comment on the Trail and my comment gets so long that I think I should just make it a blog of its own. So here goes. This started out as a reply to the 11/7 Old Favorites post from BiR.
Something that happens quite a lot, is that I “discover” something in its early stages, when it’s free-to-inexpensive, and easy to get seats to. Then it grows and grows, until it’s expensive and you have to get tickets well in advance or buy a whole season if you want to get in at all, and finally it’s out of my price range and a long term commitment.
Two examples are Talking Volumes and the Music at the Zoo concerts. I know that if they hadn’t grown, they probably would have been gone long ago, but I liked being in the little group who appreciated what they did and the way they did it and that they appreciated everyone who was there and we knew it.
In the early years of Talking Volumes, they had 5 or 6 events per season and they were spread out between about September and May. Now there are 4 or 5 and they all fall between October and early December. Too much, too close together. It feels like a job to go and they commit a lot of seats to huge book clubs. It’s just not the same.
When my sister and I started going to concerts at the Minnesota Zoo, tickets were $12-$15 and the hard wooden bench seats were labeled for approximately 20 seats per row (that’s an arbitrary number as an example, I’m not sure of the actual numbers). Several years in, prices started going up but all the seats were still the same price and if you purchased early enough, you could get one of the boxes at the top of the amphitheater if you purchased all 4 seats in the box. You had a good view and a chair with a back. Then one year they renumbered the bench seats and a row that formerly had 20 seats, now had 25. Fine if everyone on the bench had a 12-inch or narrower rear-end, but pretty cramped if there are even 1 or 2 plus size folks in the row. And prices continued to rise. My sister started getting the standing room only passes which was a good deal and it was easy to decide at nearly the last minute to take in a show. Now, when you buy a SRO pass, you have to choose your concerts when you buy the pass. None of this is terribly out of line, but when you started when it was simple, spread out, and cheap, it’s just not the same.
I hope to discover some new start-ups to support until they price themselves out of my range. I did hit on a promising one with daughter #2 last Saturday. She lives in Lakeville and had spotted an interview with Lorna Landvik interviewing Lakeville’s own Loretta Ellsworth at the Lakeville Area Arts Center. Tickets were free and since we are big Lorna fans, she asked if I’d like to go with her. It was fantastic! The book Loretta had written (Stars Over Clear Lake) takes place partially in the 40s and features the Surf Ballroom. We were expecting a Talking Volumes-type event, which would have been fine, but this far exceeded our expectations. First, a chorus from a Lakeville high school performed a variety show of WWII-era music. They came out in different size groups, ranging from 1 to 20 members and almost all of them were excellent and all of them were well-rehearsed, enthusiastic, and charming young people. Then came the interview which was good and made you really want to read the featured book as well as Ellsworth’s earlier, young adult novels. Then, there was an excellent concert by the Hoplions Westwind Swing Band. They played a rousing set of big band, 40s tunes that was excellent. Great musicians and singers and a fun playlist. It was a wonderful show and we will keep an eye out for others like it in Lakeville, until they get to popular, too much in demand, and too rich for our blood.
Anything just not the same for you anymore?
Today’s post comes to us from Jacque.
Sometime this last summer I saw the strangest thing—a male peacock crossed the road in front of my car in hot pursuit of a turkey hen. They disappeared into the woods at top speed.
“HMMM, I thought. Did I really see that?”
When I got home I told Lou about it and we had a good laugh, labeling the pair “The Odd Couple.” They were kind of the Julia Roberts and Lyle Lovett of the bird world. Remember that one? Two mismatched, high profile celebrities that impulsively got married then inevitably they divorced.
In September before I left for Ireland, I saw a blurb about a similar thing somewhere else on the news or on the internet. I searched YouTube, that faithful documenter of daily life, for similar henomena and came up with an impressive visual library of involvement between peacocks and other fowl. It turns out that peacocks “sleep” with anybody. Apparently, peacocks and peahens are the sluts of the fowl world. I suppose if you have all that impressive featherage, it cannot be wasted.
Here is a YouTube of a news report of a peacock in Victoria, Canada and a domestic turkey .
What sight causes you to say, “Did I see that?”
Trail Baboon 