Yipes! I see that I have not crawled up to the keyboard once during the month of December. How did that happen?
Just the usual stuff goin' on in the household and the month was remarkable only by how un-remarkable it was. I'm just saying. Boring stuff: minor amount of baking; Christmas cards (try workin' off a list that I did not get updated at the end of the holidays for 2006); and so on.
We spent Christmas Day afternoon at the home of Leroy and Pat. Leroy is a really great guy and so is his wife Pat. Second marriage/alliance for both of them. Their daughters are all grown now - 3 are Leroy's and 2 are Pat's (or is it the other way around?). Leroy is full-time employed and does interior painting on the side. He is a super-great painter, hard worker and just digs in and gets his job done. He does the base coat painting for our faux jobs and believe me, we are so glad to have him work with us. He leaves a client's home neater and cleaner than when he started, which is how we like to do things, too. I marvel at how he is able to do the cut-in work without taping or using an edge. This is why we use him to paint and do not do that ourselves. Clients like to use him on other rooms (not the faux-ed ones), too.
Leroy and Pat are black and we are not (yeah, I think Drummer's pic is next to the definition of Caucasian in the dictionary). It was so nice for them to invite us over. They just cook up a whole mess of food, and their kids drop in during the day for a bit, munch on whatever, and visit with whoever happens to be there. Plus some friends of their daughters', too - coupla young guys who are more like brothers to the girls, than former neighbors. Pat and her sisters did the cooking and some of the baking (but a coupla pies did have Sam's labels on them!). Two big ol' pots (and I mean BIG) of gumbo - one of my favorite dishes in this neck of the woods. It was actually such a mild version that Drummer was able to eat some! Me - I like mine spicier, but it was still dee-lish. Our contribution was a bottle of Bailey's (actually it's a knock-off which was less expensive and just as tasty). If we ever gather at their house again, I can contribute some food - I definitely could do some cookies or think of a Yankee-type dish that someone might like? Leroy was also deep-frying a mess of fish out in his deep-fry cooker outside. I think we tried most of the meat or fish stuff, plus nibbled at the dessert.
When we left, they insisted that we take leftovers home. Their kids had supplied some take-out boxes (from Sam's - the kind with 3 separated pockets and a fold-over top), so we took some turkey and rice and chicken wings, some dessert, and a bowl of gumbo too. And then Drummer got sick and I was eating OUR leftovers, plus trying to keep THEIR leftovers in a still-edible state. After 2 meals of salmon (which should have been one meal, to feed 2), I had to throw the rest of the salmon out. I can only be so healthy, even if it is much-beloved grilled salmon (one of our leftovers).
Drummer, meantime, was doing all that he could to keep his meals in his digestive tract, long enough to be absorbed and light enough to keep him from ralphing up the contents. So we did the sick-tummy drill: Wednesday: ginger ale and soda crackers; then to broth and more soda crackers; then Thursday: Campbell's chicken noodle soup (and those damn crackers again). I finally had hope when he finished half of a baked potato on Friday night. Which was good, because we had 2 places to be on Saturday: a 75th birthday party for a lady from church, plus a wedding reception for a couple who got married a month or two before that.
So all's well that ends well. Drummer is well and I think he didn't pass it on to me. I was trying to be so careful with hand-washing and so on, and I hope that paid off.
Catch up with y'all in 2008!
