Thank you thank you thank you

happy thanksgiving!!

Yesterday Maggie and I made Thanksgiving dinner for Carolyn and her daughter. It was fun to spend a day cooking, since we haven't done that in a while. We definitely had to improvise a fair portion of the ingredients, but if I do say so myself we did a marvelous job. We made a chicken (first substitute) with stuffing and beets (that weren't so much a substitute as much as just a how could you not want a beet?? kind of thing.) We made green bean casserole and kumara casserole that did a damn good impression of sweet potato casserole. We made chocolate chip cookies because people here don't understand that their "biscuits" are no cookies and we've never been able to afford pecans. My favorite stand-in was apricot muffins in place of cornbread for the stuffing (let this be a shout out to the Lentz family stuffing recipe!!) which involved scooping out the jelly bits of apricot goo and letting them dry and then toasting them. Turns out the faint apricot flavor blends beautifully with chicken, so next year we might have to use cornbread in a fit of desperation when we can't find apricot muffins. But now that I've told you our secret recipe you all have to go kill yourselves now that you know it. Sorry.

Today we head to a farm in Blenheim with a couple who we feel good about. They need us to work in their vineyard. Apparently 'tis the season for "bud rubbing," words that I wish I didn't have to use in conversation with strangers for the next week. I'll let you all know what this actually entails. Something to do with grapes.

After bud rubbing, we go on a beach hike for a week, then back to Carolyn's because why leave a good thing? We really feel like part of the family now and actually want to work in the garden because we've developed a personal attachment to those little plants. Carolyn's got a new batch of hens that she was told would start laying in November. Well 3 days ago we got our first egg and there has been one everyday since. Just one, very small egg. Each day it is a little bigger, so today's might even look normal(ish) in an egg cup. Yesterday Carolyn was going through the list of what had been done and it went something like this: "fed pigs, fed chickens, watered tunnel house, planted kumara, collected the eggs - " Maggie and I shot her a questioning look, to which she rolled her eyes and corrected herself, "Egg. Collected the egg." Ha.

Life just keeps working out in our favor. Sort of in an eerie way. Little things just happen every day that we first referred to as "god jokes" (reference Maggie's blog for an example from a couple months back.) These jokes usually involve a prophetic quality or really strong coincidence. Last night the god jokes got to the point where Maggie said, "so maybe we are god....like in Harry Potter they find him and say, 'have you been able to control things and not known why, well you are a wizard.' So maybe soon something will find us and ask the same question and we'll turn out to be god." Not that we would presume to call ourselves gods for any reason other than our ability to predict the future and have things work in our favor. We apologized to god for being so presumptuous, it was just an idea.

Mom, remember how you used to run around gobbling for the week surrounding Thanksgiving? Never thought I'd miss that, but when will I learn to never say never?

Love and thanks to you and all.