Here's to Giving Thanks

The Thanksgiving holiday is officially over at our house. Right now I'm giving thanks that our house is empty of guests! We just returned from the airport, dropping off Megan and Andy for their flight back to Washington, D.C., and they were the last ones to leave. I love having company, especially for the holidays, but it is a lot of work. Planning three meals a day for four days of company is a challenge, adapting to the eight guests particular tastes and allergies. Then there is all the meal preparation and clean-up. I feel like I spent most of my time in the kitchen. Thank God it is such a beautiful place to work! We had a wonderful time overall, filled with tours of the construction at our landscape architecture company and of the composting facility (which Megan had never seen), the holiday train exhibit at the Missouri Botanical Garden (which I highly recommend), shopping, talking and playing games. It was hard to fit all of that in around cooking, eating and cleaning up. Good thing we are good at multi-tasking, so we could combine several activities together - like talking and eating, for example. Overall, we have a lot to be thankful for in our lives. Now I'm off to take down all the Thanksgiving decorations and put up the Christmas items in preparation for the SWT Christmas party on Saturday. We are doing a progressive dinner (light on the "dinner" portion), traveling to three different houses. We are the third house, so I guess I am figuring out desserts and an activity to end the evening. If I can pull it off, instead of planning games to accomodate 30 people, I am going to have everyone prepare packages to be sent off to soldiers instead. We are all blessed to be able to spend the holidays with our families, so I think it is fitting to find a way to thank the men and women who make that possible.

Strange Shipmates

I was commenting to my husband that we didn't really see anything too strange on the ship during our vacation- well, other than people trying to set new records in the Olympic sport of calorie consumption. Then he reminded me about Sparkles. Each evening as we went down to eat supper in the dining room, we spied a REALLY tall woman outfitted in a sequined gown. While two of the evenings on board were formal dress (cocktail dress for the ladies, and suit or tux for the guys), the other evenings just required dress casual for the dining area. Sparkles had a different sparkly dress for each night. Her companion on the trip was a rather small man, who was obviously out-shown by Sparkles as I can't tell you how he was dressed. When we commented on Sparkles at our evening table, a rather lively discussion ensued concerning "her" gender. One of our Scottish lasses insisted the "she" was really a "he". "You can tell by looking at the Adam's Apple," she knowingly assured us. So the next evening found the four of us looking at Sparkle's neck. Hmmmm.... Just might be a she-male after all. At any rate, this mismatched couple loved to dance! We found them frequenting the bars with dance floors. From the Wheelhouse Lounge (nicknamed the Wheelchair Lounge by the rock band) dancing to the smooth music of the jazz quartet to the Skywalkers Nightclub with its DJ and top forty playlist, you could locate them cutting the rug. Although, come to think of it, I didn't see them during country night line dancing. Maybe Sparkles couldn't find a cowboy hat to compliment her dress.

It's a Winner!

Last night was the Webster Groves Awards of Excellence Ceremony. We (well, mostly I) had submitted our addition for the architecture award. There were four categories to choose from when submitting, including craftsmanship, architecture, landscape architecture and historic preservation. In addition to the completed application, I supplied before and after photos of the house, drawings, and a narrative describing the project. I wanted to emphasize that we tried to not only ensure that the addition was architecturally sensitive to the time period of the house, but also that we were as environmentally conscious as we could be in the construction. We re-used trim, windows, doors, sinks and cabinets when appropriate. The siding for the new addition was made from cement board instead of virgin wood, and the deck is constructed of recycled plastic. During the awards ceremony, they showed slides of each project which won an award. For each category, the Honorable Mentions received a certificate and the Award of Excellence received a beautiful plaque. The best part was hearing the comments of the judges, as you could tell they really "got" what we tried to accomplish with our project. When we went up to accept our award, I said "if the kitchen is truly the heart of the home, then our kitchen was like the Grinch's - it was two sizes too small. Following completion of the addition, it grew three sizes." It seemed an appropriate analogy as we near the holiday season. As an added bonus to the evening, our landscape architecture firm, SWT Design, won an Honorable Mention for landscape architecture for their design of "BackFlip." A satisfying evening all around.