When I was in high school in the Philippines we had a few extended times off of school which were designed for boarding students to travel home to see their families. We had a week off in the Fall, three weeks at Christmas and another week off for Spring Break. All in all, you got to pack up and leave for a decent amount of time every 8 weeks or so. It became a pattern that you could count on.
I saw some parallels when our school decided to consolidate some Fall in-service days and create an entire week off for students for the week of Thanksgiving. For teachers there was parent conferences and meetings on Monday and Tuesday, but then we had W-F off. With the weekend it created a nice complex of days at home.
We now have three weeks till Christmas break, so hopefully, we can regain and maintain our focus until then. We are talking about teenagers, here.
As for the break…
Wednesday, Thanksgiving Eve, we had a healthy amount of snowfall. It was beautiful snow that stuck to everything and made our world a short-lived winter wonderland. The less wonderful part was the snow causing traffic that took Carol an hour to get home from work that afternoon. We all definitely have a love-hate relationship with the white stuff.
One of the main teeth-clenching attributes for me is the way that it gets tracked into buildings. Those puddles you see everywhere were okay at ski lodges in CA, but for daily living it’s not okay.
The kids loved the snow and we spent time making a snowman and tempting frostbite. I took some photos (non-digital), so perhaps they’ll show up here someday. Anyway, snow play does make hot cocoa taste even better, so that was a nice diversion for the weekend.
It only took about 12 hours for the snow to take on a soggy gray appeareance as the normal November weather eroded the bright whiteness. With a little rain by Friday and Saturday we got back to the dreary damp Fall that we expect.
We took the Holiday weekend to clean up the yard for winter. This meant getting rid of the pumpkins on the porch that the squirrels had been gorging themselves on. Also stowing away all of the pool paraphenalia and yard toys. That stuff seems so silly when there is snow on the ground.
I also put in the needed time to organize the basement hobby-room. It had become an unpassable storage room that no one in the house wanted to walk into. Now it’s a room again. A place where I can take apart my coffee roaster for the third time and try to figure out why it stopped pumping out scorching air on Wednesday night, as I was roasting. It’s that kind of room again…
As a nod to the title of my blog… I took the two turkey carcasses from Thanksgiving and made a few gallons of rich stock. Carol used some of it to make some wicked Turkey Pozole. That was a new and exciting twist on the leftovers from the grand spread.
That’s all for now, hopefully it won’t be a month till I post again.