Happy Thanksgiving

This has been a happy thanksgiving around these parts. Marty's mom and stepfather are here, and we had a fun day together. The food all turned out just right and I was very organized -- we were eating by 2:30 this afternoon. In all the years I've cooked Thanksgiving dinner, I think that's the earliest I've ever managed to get everything ready. Not that I think it's better to eat earlier, necessarily. It just worked out really well today.

Check out the picture up above. This is a platter that my mother-in-law, Anna, painted for us. I am so proud of it! The green goes perfectly in our dining room, and the peaches and plums are so pretty. I think this may be my favorite of all the things I have that she's painted, but it is very hard to choose among so many beautiful pieces. Today we served the turkey on this platter.

After dinner we unpacked 18 boxes from our attic. The house proper has been free of boxes for awhile -- a year or so -- but the attic still has lots of stuff that we need to go through and organize and put away. We've had my mom's china cabinet for over a year now, but we had never unpacked the china and crystal and everything. So this afternoon we brought the boxes down -- not all 18 boxes had china and crystal, I should say -- and unpacked them in the dining room. Anna washed all the dishes and glasses while Marty and Gene dried them and I kept unpacking more boxes. After everything was clean, Anna put the crystal in the china cabinet and we figured out where we want to put the rest of the stuff. Tomorrow we will reorganize some of the storage areas and see if we can get everything put away.

So we had a productive day. And Ziggy was very happy that there were 18 boxes of paper after we finished unpacking all that stuff. See?