Happy Thanksgiving Recovery

I hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving. We did - we spent the day in Anchorage with my sister and some of her in-laws. We became part of the extended McCormack family! Thank you to Carole, Joel, Carolyn and Peggy and Pat, we really enjoyed ourselves. I think the kids had the most fun digging tunnels in the snow...

I tried making a non-shortening pie crust for the apple pie I brought, it just didn't seem right. If I can find this stuff, I'll try it for whatever pie I put together next. I used to hate making pie crusts, but I finally figured out a few years ago that all of the ingredients and utensils need to be almost frozen for the crust to turn out. Duh.

In spite of all the encouragement blaring from the radio to combat-shop at 5am on Friday, I slept in and shopped instead at 10:30am. I heard that people were parked outside WalMart at 1am, to be the first to get in there and save big bucks. Well, I'm not an expert, but doesn't it cost loads of money to run all those Wasilla-style rumble trucks' engines for hours at a time?

The girl-cousins are easy to shop for, but I don't have a clue what to buy for boys ranging in age from 6 to 11. I'm at the point in my auntie-ness of just sending money. I know just what 3-year-old loud silly self-centered car-loving boys would want for Christmas, but for the older ones, I can't even guess. When I was that age I remember getting things like shirts. And socks.

So my brilliant husband figured out that the car needed some antifreeze. Now it warms up, yay! We only had to suffer through one city-drive with the kids fighting over whose turn it was to use the scraper on the inside of the windows. My next hope is for some studded tires, since the poor mamavan could only get two-thirds of the way up the neighborhood hill tonight. Hopefully the hill will be scraped and sanded tomorrow when we drive to the city for the Nutcracker.