Sylvia's Scenario

I've been feeling like one of Santa's elves lately busy working in my workshop.  It's always a big push to get our boxes mailed off to Japan to Nick's family and the grandkids and then once that's done, it's another big push to get all the almond roca  mailed out to everyone.  In-between all that, it's wrapping presents and putting them under the tree.  My dinning room or workshop looks like this: It's a good thing we aren't having anymore dinner parties...!  All I have to do now is get ready for Christmas and that seems like the easy and fun part.  We've gone to a few holiday events around town in-between all the preparations like at the Public Market they call Magic in the Market.  Just being at the Market is fun in and of itself but it's extra special at Christmas with all of the festivities happening. It's my favorite place of all Seattle.  And we are fortunate that it is so easy for us to get there because we just take the water taxi...

This recipe really hit the spot tonight with temperatures dropping and some snow is even in our forecast.  Will we have a white Christmas?  We always keep our fingers crossed that we will.  Bruce has been wrapping presents today, mine were mostly done and already under the tree.  Our cat isn't too happy about that.  This was his favorite place to sleep.  What happened to my cat bed? Last weekend, the grandkids joined in with the present wrapping.                                                                     You can probably tell which ones they wrapped.   The 3 year-old even wrapped two presents for his stuffed animals.  We had to look around to find something to put in a box to wrap for them, he didn't care what it was. Afterwards, he felt so accomplished and proud of...

Here is a recipe to start off the New Year in a healthy manner.  I made this salad for our New Year's dinner to take over to Nick's house. We had received an  Amana ham  from a vendor that Bruce worked with who sends us a ham every year.  Usually, we save it for our Super Bowl party but we certainly won't be having one of those this year.  So, we decided to have it on New Year's Eve and take it over to Nick's house. Nick's been home from work for 2 weeks since they have a break over the holiday and our granddaughter has not be going to preschool during this break so we figure there was less covid risk spending time indoors with them.  The grandkids were so eager to show us all their toys and have us play with them. I particularly had fun on their new gymnastic equipment that Santa brought them; a bar and balance bean that is low to the ground so you can't really fall off.  The beam was great for me to practice my balance, even though my granddaughter ...

You can probably guess we are back on the healthy eating wagon after a busy holiday of indulgence.  Despite not really entertaining that much, I still did all my usual Christmas decorating and baking this year.  In fact, I had time to do more!  We quarantined for 10 days before Christmas Eve so we could get together with my sister and her husband who did the same.  It's really nice to have a "normal" evening once in awhile like we did for  Thanksgiving .  I try to make it special with decorations and lovely table settings since we don't get to do this type of thing very often anymore.  And with all my extra time, why not?   The next day on Christmas is when our kids and grandkids came over for our first Christmas with Nick's family since they moved back from Japan after 7 years.  We had a quick turn-around time to put the board extensions in the table so we could all spread out and re-set the place settings.         ...