Thanksgiving: 5 Lessons Learned

There are a few things I would like to share about hosting Thanksgiving for the first time as November and the holiday weekend come to their ends. Actually, there are many many many things that I'd like to share - but since it might bore you all, I'll stick to the biggest things :) Overall, it was a wonderful experience! I tried to prepare in advance as best as I could, but there was still a lot to do once my family got here.

1. Family is the most important and best thing about the holiday!

When it comes down to it, it doesn't matter whether you do it the way you always do it. It doesn't matter that you can't celebrate where you've always celebrated. It doesn't matter whether every tradition goes off without a hitch. It doesn't even matter if the food turns out poorly! If your family isn't there, no one is there to notice anyway.

2. You can never have enough platters and serving pieces.

 

I'm totally serious! I have platters, bowls, all sorts of things in or on which to put food, but I definitely underestimated! Thankfully, my mom didn't. She had a few little bowls, trays and other things stashed in her car in case the occasion warranted them. I guess after you do this for many years, you use the same dishes for the same food item, but I had not planned each thing out!

3. The amount of cleaning is incredible!

Plus, it's even harder without a garbage disposal! I'm pretty sure my mom and Grammy normally took care of the cleaning! Lauren and I always helped out setting the table, getting drinks, clearing the table, and staying WAY out of the way of the kitchen. This year, my mom and I probably did the same amount of dishes before dinner while we were preparing food, as after dinner. I actually enjoyed doing the dishes after dinner and dessert to just get the house back in order, but before dinner it was never-ending! I didn't think about doing all the pots and pans and utensils so you can use and re-use them over and over and so you can clear some counter space to keep yourself sane!

4. The biggest thing of hosting your first Thanksgiving is having help from someone who has done it many times before.

I'm not going to lie, I really enjoyed making cookies, brownies, pies, and other desserts. I even didn't mind making the mashed potatoes and green bean casserole. But I had NO clue how to do all those things and more, and cook a turkey at the same time, and get everything to stay warm and be ready all at one time. My mom just stepped up and led the charge! She has always done Thanksgiving at our house so she's got it down to a science. I definitely couldn't have done it by myself! Nor would I have wanted to try. Actually, my plan all along was to wait and see what she suggested!

5. Flexibility makes the holidays so much nicer and stress-free.

 

Chris and I are both very thankful for the flexibility shown by our families this holiday. We were not able to travel due to basketball practice on Thanksgiving, but it didn't end up mattering in the least! Our entire families including all of our siblings (and we have a lot of those!) took time out of their holidays and away from their friends and houses to come spend time with us! This quality is especially important to us because the season falls over several major holidays and we really appreciate the effort our families (and friends!!) have made.

So here's to our first Thanksgiving! Maybe next year I'll share more lessons about planning for leftovers when you are a two-person family, managing 8-foot tables, and having someone who is willing to make all last minute grocery runs...

Lights!

We actually have a house to decorate this year! Last year we lived in an apartment with no outside entrance, so we hung a wreath on our door and were done with decorating. This year, we've got an outside entrance so we felt we should do our part and decorate.

Chris hung some lights and now I think we're ready for the season to get started! He didn't even need a ladder or stool to set them up.

Now we just need to find the time to get a tree!

The leash

For your enjoyment...

My brother-in-law Robert has a series on his blog called "Kid on a leash" to which I have now contributed twice. The premise is:  when you see a kid on a leash, take a picture, and if you're sneaky enough to get a good picture, he'll post it! So without further adieu... check out:

Kid on a leash (at a football game) ...AND...

My favorite (because this poor girl was literally being dragged without her feet touching the ground by her leash).. Flower-girl on a leash!

You can thank me later :)

37th Annual Turkey Bowl

Obviously I personally haven't participated all 37 years, but it's a Hall family tradition that I've participated in as long as I've been able to kick! In recent years, I've even been getting it over the bar! This year, every kicker in our group got it over at least once.

I made a 15 yarder.

Lauren made a 10 yarder.

Eric made a 30 yarder.

My dad made a 30 yarder.

My mom made a 15 yarder.

And Chris won our VA competition with a 43 yarder.

Now we just have to wait until all the scores come in from all the participants around the country to see who won the whole thing!

Happy Thanksgiving!!

Don't let this picture fool you - I have no idea what I'm doing!

Thankfully my mom is here to oversee and do all of these cooking-related things that I'm not sure how to do!

I mean, check out that cornucopia - only a pro can put something like that together!

I hope everyone is enjoying their holiday and getting to spend some time with family! Happy Thanksgiving!

In preparation mode

Want to hear the craziest thing we've done recently??

I knew you did...

Chris and I decided to host Thanksgiving this year.

Yes. You heard right. THANKSGIVING! We are in full swing getting ready for Thursday. Last night we did all the parts I enjoy (i.e. all the baking). We made cookies, apple pie, muffins, brownies, and a few other non-baking, dinner related things.

While I was trying to juggle all the tasks related to cooking multiple things at once, which I don't often have to do, a timer went off. I panicked. I called Chris into the kitchen to pull some cookies out of the oven and I think he got a little more than he bargained for. You see, Chris has been on cleaning duty the last couple days. He's been vacuuming the whole house, dusting, and de-cluttering between football and college basketball games.

I asked him to do a couple tasks which he felt a little uncomfortable handling, so I put him on cookie duty. We were making snickerdoodles, so that consisted of picking up dough, rolling it into little balls, and rolling those balls in a mixture of cinnamon and sugar.

His first response was, "Okay, I need to hydrate before I take this on."

Then he got to work.

I think he did a pretty good job!

Which left me free to get the apple pie and other things done before bedtime.

We're slowly but surely getting ready. Bring it on, Thanksgiving.

The new biz school

I won't say much about this because many of you won't be interested, but when we were in Williamsburg last weekend, we decided to check out the new business school since neither of us have yet seen it from the inside. It was crazy! I can't imagine how much it took to build this thing. A few highlights that may be of interest:

Each door (includes every classroom, computer lab, individual study rooms, group study rooms) had a miniature TV/computer thing installed on the door. It's a touch screen! You touch the screen and it says whether the room is currently available or occupied. Another couple pushes and you can get a complete schedule of all activities for any day (scroll through the calendar) so you know when it's available for use!

Another highlight of this building is that each room and hallway has at least one flat screen TV streaming HD; again, this includes EVERY study room. One of the coolest rooms reminds me of Wall Street. There are flat screens all over the walls, floor to ceiling windows, stock tickers, and every computer has dual monitors.

Plus, the lobby is gorgeous. This picture doesn't do it justice, but you could seriously have a wedding reception in here.

I guess they can all thank the donors for these crazy improvements... it certainly will boost the business school in rankings!

Frustrated

I'm annoyed. I can't upload any pictures! I even have a post already written for you all but every time I try to upload my pictures I get a little message that says [failed]. I'm giving up on it for today. Plus, I know you are all anxiously awaiting every post I put up about how awesome life is in Farmville, so I'm sorry. So much happens here so quickly that if my pictures don't upload tomorrow, too, you might miss something! Unfortunately you're all just going to have to just sit back and relax. I know, this is a tragedy, right?

I would just not post at all today, but I promised Maggie I would join her in posting everyday just for the month of November. And let me tell you - it has been exhausting!! I don't think I knew quite what I was committing to, especially with Thanksgiving coming up. Anyway, I hope everyone out there has short work weeks! I got exciting news last week from the president of the college that we now get Wednesday off, so tomorrow's my last day this week :)

Smith Wedding

We had a great time in Williamsburg this weekend! One of Chris' teammates got married and had an amazing wedding. Here are a couple pictures for all of you who know and love Hawley and Jess.

Their reception took place in a barn, which fit their outdoorsy personalities perfectly.

Chris had to take off after the ceremony to get to his game (H-SC played a game in North Carolina last night for those of you following the schedule), but nevertheless, I sat at the basketball table. It was great - every time the basketball team gets together there are more and more females at the table as they start getting engaged/married.

Here's a picture of most of the old team at the wedding. I would have photoshopped Chris in if I knew how :)

As I was single for the evening, I had a great time hanging out with a few friends from school that I hadn't seen in awhile.

This was their cake; later in the evening all the bridesmaids (there were 15!) put their bouquets in the mason jars around the cake.

The entire wedding was amazing and we really enjoyed wishing them the best for the start of their new life together!

Extra plastic

We had a little car incident in Williamsburg this weekend! A piece of plastic on the underside of the car fell part-way off and was dragging on the ground. Chris had to get down there in his suit to pull it off.. or I guess actually cut it the rest of the way off. We're not entirely sure what this piece of plastic does, but for now, it's sitting in the trunk of the car!

Off the mark

Something is a little off today! I have accidently turned on caps lock at least three times and continued typing without noticing. I normally try to run errands around campus all at once, but today I've had to go out at four different times because I would forget something or something else would come up. A professor came up and asked me to unlock her office because she forgot her keys and I could not find mine anywhere. Turns out I had left them in the door when I unlocked my office this morning. This stuff doesn't seem like much, but they've made me feel a little off the mark all day long! It may be because I was a little rushed this morning trying to get everything together for the weekend as I headed out the door.

When lunch came around I decided to take my break in the library to unwind a bit.

Check out these comfortable and inviting chairs:

They have leather chairs with footrests for students! I remember W&M having couches to read or study on, but definitely not these chairs that you just sink into as far as the eye can see. I almost took a nap! Let's hope my little break worked out because I'm driving to Williamsburg tonight and don't want to still be off while I'm driving!

Rain, rain, go AWAY!!

What is the deal with all this rain??
The road to get to work is flooded, I have to jump over small rivers to get into the car, and the ground is so wet that it can't absorb anymore water. The backyard is also flooded!


I've heard this weekend is supposed to be much better - good thing, too, because we're headed to Williamsburg again!

Thinking about trees

I'm ready to buy our Christmas tree.

Is that bad? I know it's not Thanksgiving yet, but it's cold and nasty out today and if it has to be this gross, it better be the Christmas season. I'm a little nostalgic, too, because last year we went with a bunch of friends to pick out our tree and this year it'll probably be just us.

Actually, I may have made that experience more glamorous in my head than it really was because when I just went back through and searched for that post, I re-read it quickly and saw that last year I was allergic to our tree. I had totally blocked that out of my memory. In my mind our tree was just awesome. Well, I may be allergic to our tree again this year, but I am still ready for it!

Let's see if I can wait until after Thanksgiving...

Leaves

Our landlord is pretty particular about his houses. He owns a lot of them and rents them out. It's not that he always wants to fix them up or anything (our house is fine, but it's not in great shape), but just that he likes to keep track of everything that's done to them. This means every house he owns is painted the same color (on the inside) with the same brand of paint. He also hires a guy to mow the lawns and do any landscaping. It's actually great for us because we didn't have a lawn last year and therefore, we don't have a lawnmower. We were happy that we get to prolong buying one for at least another year; however, the guy who comes to do our lawn doesn't come that often. It normally isn't a big deal, but because it's fall and leaves are plentiful, it's gotten really annoying. The leaves get dragged up onto the front porch and then dragged into the house. They're everywhere!

Yesterday the guy came out to rake the leaves finally! Weirdly enough, they all got raked into piles on the street. I'm guessing this is normal protocol for Farmville though, because there are piles of leaves in the road in front of all the houses on our street. It makes it a bit hard to park. I'm starting to wonder who comes to pick all these piles up! In the meantime, our walk is covered in leaves again just 24 hours later. I now know why our neighbors own their own leafblower.

Violin

Here's a fun fact:

Bet you didn't know Chris played the violin, did you??

He serenaded us with a nice rendition of "hot crossed buns" - I think that song is all he remembers how to play!

Wait...what??

How long have we lived in this house? 3 months and 7 days. We moved in 2 days before my birthday...so a total of 99 days. Well, guess what!!

We just found out we have another closet! We had NO clue that it was there. There are a number of reasons that we didn't suspect its existence.

#1. There are two doors on this closet. The first one opens fine and we have this little cubby at the top in which we keep things like the food processor and blender. The front part opened only halfway down and behind it was the open space at the top, and this little flat panel that my mom was convinced used to hide a fold-down ironing board. We kind of just assumed there was a little nook at the top, the flat panel for the ironing board and that was it!

#2. It just didn't open. We tugged as hard as we could when we moved in and just assumed it didn't actually lead to anything. It must have been painted shut...

#3. Our house has an apartment attached to it. The apartment falls basically behind our kitchen. We figured if there had at one point been a small closet there, perhaps our landlord had turned it into storage space for the one bedroom apartment behind us and shut off our access to it.

Anyway, Chris was getting the blender out today and accidently dropped something. He got up on a chair and saw that one of the attachments to something had slipped through this little crack in the bottom of the cubby. He could see it but he was going to have to fish it out. In doing so, the door just popped open! There are paper towels, light bulbs, a broom and dustpan just hanging out in there unbeknownst to us over the last 99 days. Now we just have to figure out what to do with our new storage space!

Goodbye Halloween

A couple days ago we fiiiiinally threw out our pumpkin. When Chris picked up the pumpkin, he was surprised at how heavy it was. It was FULL of water. Because of hurricane Ida, its been raining down here for days on end without any reprieve. I thought this picture was funny because it kind of looks like the pumpkin is throwing up! I'm so glad the rain is over!!!!

Sideways screen?

I don't know if this has ever happened to you before. But yesterday, it happened to me. I was working right along but for some reason my computer was lagging behind. It was working so hard that I could hear its struggles. I opened task manager to try to see what was causing it the most pain to run but it seemed to be doing okay. I tried to stop typing and give it a little bit of time to catch up but it was no use. All the sudden it just gave up...or so I thought. With its last breath the screen went dark and I sighed. At least I had saved my work frequently.

But no. It wasn't done! With another flash the screen came back to life!

But something wasn't right. The computer obviously miscommunicated with the screen and I had no idea what to do. I was going to try to close down my email and restart the computer but it was difficult! Apparently the mouse had communicated with the screen because it wasn't oriented in the proper way. The mouse moved the way it should move if the right side of the computer was up and the left side was down. I knew I was in trouble. I then tried to just turn my head and pretend the bottom of the screen was actually the side (confused yet??) but I didn't do very well. By the time I navigated up to the "x" to close my email, the computer froze again.

I would have attempted googling the situation to figure out how to fix it, but with the mouse behaving improperly I just gave up and called the computing center. Fortunately this has happened to someone before (really??) so they walked me through the steps to fix it. I didn't even have to restart!

Scouting

This week Chris had to drive to a nearby state to scout a future opponent. I decided to go with him to keep him company!

He was obviously paying very close attention to the game and players. Unfortunately, one team was killing the other team from the start, so the game wasn't all that interesting. At one point I decided Chris may need some of my helpful observations, so I looked over to see what he was writing. It was something like "blah blah blah flash to the elbow blah, etc." Completely unintelligible. I read a little further and saw a lot of "reverse blah blah" and "in the lane blah blah cut". It wasn't that I didn't understand the words when you broke them down, it's just that the combination made absolutely no sense. He seemed to have everything under control.

Then I realized then that I had to amuse myself another way. I started with celebrity look alikes. Let me tell you - this game was not hard! Guess who I spotted?

That's right! Joakim Noah. See the resemblance? This dude obviously thought he was awesome to try to pull off hair like that.

After that game turned out so successful I decided to wait and see how long it would take the score to get to the next palindrome. I started at 71 - 17. Sure enough then it was 81 - 18. Then it hit 91 -19. At the end, the other team went on a little run to end the game at 93 - 25.

Hopefully H-SC will do better against them than this team did!

Vaccinated

Yesterday we headed to the health center on campus and got our H1N1 vaccinations. I was so nervous!! I heard about that Redskins cheerleader who claims her seasonal flu vaccine gave her a neurological disorder, but later I heard she may have been making the whole thing up. Then, when Chris was getting his shot I jokingly asked the nurse whether the shot would paralyze me and instead of comforting me, she said, "Well, that is a possible but rare side effect of the vaccine. I'm not sure whether you should get it if you have doubts."

Not helpful.

But I was already there and the vaccine was free, plus I work with students who probably never wash their hands all day long, so I figured I should just go for it.

So I did. And I was paranoid the rest of the day.

But here I am over 24 hours later and doing fine. I've got none of the side effects of which they warn you, plus hopefully now I won't get H1N1. I also helped myself to a lollipop as I was leaving the office because I felt I deserved it. I opened my google reader this morning to find this article on another person suffering from what they think are serious side effects related to the vaccine, but I think I'm in the clear now.