Haven't made an entry in a while because I needed to rearrange some furniture, and then I got busy planning thanksgiving, and I was going to try to switch my journaling time to evening/night (it's morning now, so this is going great) and here we are.

Oh my god, this is going to be the best, fanciest thanksgiving I have ever done. I am pulling out all the stops. Spouse is going to be home and we are going to have a FEAST. I carefully planned out all my dishes and I am 98% done with the shopping. So I've been messing around with soda syrups and beverages lately and I got a couple books - one is on making soda syrups and another has recipes for home fermenting, from soda to kombucha to beer and cider, etc. I'm making a cranberry soda syrup from the first book and brewing my own ginger ale from the second (I also have a batch of hard lemonade going but it won't be ready until christmas, fingers crossed). We're doing a bourbon theme with the adult beverages. Bourbon goes in egg nog (which I am making). I've started the process of making "delayed blast fireball" from the D&D cookbook (cinnamon sticks and red pepper soaked in bourbon) and there will be stuff to make this drink called the man o' war, after the racehorse. It's a bourbon/orange pairing. Which matches nicely with this fancy orange dessert I am going to make which calls for orange liqueur. I also found a german drink recipe that is sort of a man o' war mixed with ginger ale, so thus, making ginger ale. I've not drunk much/any bourbon so I got two kinds, wild turkey (it has a picture of a turkey on it and it's thanksgiving, like how could you not) and this other rye bourbon, just so we can taste the difference. And I got an orange liqueur and vermouth, and a bottle of sherry for cooking. I am pretty chuffed that I have tied in these different drink options and dishes to a fairly short list.

I got these metal cocktail swords - they are so fun. Who wouldn't want a metal cocktail sword in their drink? Stab some cheese, stab your neighbor. I got fancy expensive cocktail cherries to put on the cocktail swords. Like, we are going to have super classy cocktails.

I'm using the same dinner recipes as last year for the turkey, stuffing and sweet potato side. I'm going to make regular mashed potatoes because we are going to have at least one guest (Daniel), possibly two (spouse's coworker), and mashed potatoes are cheap, easy and delicious for carb eaters. I found a low carb apple crisp recipe for dessert, and I'll make the fancy orange dessert (basically it's a fresh tangerine salad soaked in a boozy sauce - a friend made it for a party years ago and it was so good she gave me a copy of the recipe, which I have never had an excuse to make until now - one of the ingredients is star anise and I have a whole fucking bag of it to use up thanks to the international market). So that's pretty standard. Then I started planning the charcuterie spread (fancy talk for snack platter) and I have my work cut out for me. I have stuff to make 5 different dips/spreads, plus, fanciest of all ... I got cricket flour and I'm making a pumpkin chocolate chip bread with it. So I finally found the really good local organic health food store here and they have a display of edible insects. So cool! I am too squeamish to eat whole bugs, but ground up as cricket flour? Sure, let's try it! Well, they kinda suckered me because the package was labeled as $13 on the shelf, but when I checked out they charged me $20. :-( $20 for 8 ounces of bugs. Not exactly a viable meat replacement - I don't think I've ever spent $40 a pound for meat. But I'd already invested in the cricket bread idea so I got it anyway. For a special holiday treat, okay. Anyway, the snack platter should be a thing of beauty. I'm making a roasted carrot hummus from the D&D cookbook, smoked salmon dip, goat cheese dip, spinach/kale dip and a persimmon jam. I bought a persimmon on a whim, because I've never had one. Turns out there are two kinds - fuyu (tomato shaped) and hachiya (acorn shaped). Fuyu are the ones good for eating raw, but I got a hachiya because obvs I know nothing about persimmons and had to read about it in retrospect. I dunno, it looked pretty. So I am making a bit of jam with it, which should be good on top of the goat cheese dip. Theoretically, this should be an amazing charcuterie spread, right?

So last week I made a special trip to the brewing shop about 45 min away to get the stuff to start the hard lemonade, and while I was there I dropped in on their thrift stores. The local thrift stores are kinda crap. They are overpriced and the selection is sad. Possibly because we live in a lower income (but dense) area, there's a high shopping demand but a lower quality of donations. For instance, I wanted some small dishes for cat food, and the thrift store wanted $2 each. I bought new ones at target, $2 each. They price stuff so high you may as well shop at a big box store. So why even go, because the whole fun of a thrift store is finding a weird treasure for $1?

But this other town had two huge thrift stores loaded with good stuff! I got some mismatched glassware in the 50 cents - $1 range, and I found a couple clothing items. Got spouse a hawaiian shirt. It's been a running joke that I'll see an obnoxious hawaiian shirt and ask him if he needs it, and he always says no. So I spotted this thrift store hawaiian shirt (conservative for a hawaiian shirt, mostly dark grey with a band of colorful pineapples and ukeleles) and texted him a picture jokingly asking if he needed it - this time he said yes. $2.50 for a nice hawaiian shirt, done and done. It was a fine trip. One of the local thrift stores has a decent selection of nice glassware and china (not as good as this other store, but pretty good), so I went back there and got a couple platters and some bowls for thanksgiving serving stuff. I should have plenty of vessels for dip and whatever, all cut glass, and all of them together probably cost less than $10. It should be nice.

Months ago spouse and I visited one of the civil war battlefields (bull run, I think) and I got this blown glass oil lamp thing in the giftshop. Apparently they blow glass in colonial williamsburg and sell it in the different national park gift shops in the area.

This lamp.

I've decided to make this part of our thanksgiving centerpiece so I got lamp oil to fill it. Hope the damn thing doesn't shatter and burn the apartment down, but what good is having an oil lamp if you never light it? So the plan is to have that in the center with a wreath of some fall color foliage (which I am going to sneak around and purloin from the local area tomorrow morning - a snip here and a snip there is all I need).

But the piece de la resistance is the ridiculous ceiling hanging I have come up with. I don't know yet if it's going to be amazing, or sad kindergarten craft project. Could go either way. So last january we tossed our christmas tree because we assumed we would be moving before the coming christmas (I suspect this is what hexed us). I have no interest in buying another tree for this year. In the past I have done the thing where you hang a bunch of ornaments from the ceiling in a christmas tree shape. I know it's popular on pinterest recently, but I did this like 8 years ago (though I think I was inspired by a picture of someone else's). 1) you need a shit ton of cheap bulk ornaments. 2) the fishing line tangles like crazy. 3) you'll be making like 100 thumbtack holes in the ceiling for a decent looking small "tree". I donated the ornaments before the move here. So I want to do something similar this year, except I don't want to spend money on crap plastic ornaments or put a hundred holes in the ceiling.

So I am making a mural canopy out of a big cardboard box, and I'm going to hang homemade star ornaments from it. We'd saved this big box, about 24" on a side. Opened up, it is 3' wide by 8' long. I was hoping for a more solid, continuous piece but there wasn't anything better to scavenge from the dumpsters. I'm using paper mache to disguise the fact that it was a cardboard box with cut flaps. I made wheatpaste glue (just boiled flour and water) and I am applying big pieces of brown packing paper saved from amazon orders, and brown paper shopping bags opened up flat. I used the packing paper the thrift store wrapped the glassware in, etc. So far so good - the moisture from the wheatpaste does warp the cardboard some but I am not too bothered. The cardboard box, packing paper and wheatpaste cost nothing so I'm okay with it looking a little "rustic".

I went to the dollar store and got a roll of plain navy blue gift paper, and for some lucky reason they had a sky/cloud printed paper for classroom bulletin boards. I'm going to lay down a paper mache base with torn pieces of the lighter sky/clouds in the center and the darker navy blue gift paper at the edges. The reason being that this will add a good color foundation so when I paint over it with cheap craft paint I don't have to get opaque coverage. 3x8' is a big area to cover solid with shitty craft paint. The gift paper will save me a lot of work. So I'm going to do a night sky mural. I can get rid of some of my art supplies with this, too! For some reason I have UV glow paint, so I can use that, and I have a UV light because of course I do. I have some leftover student grade paint I need to get rid of.

So I'll paint a bitchin' night sky and then I'll take the thing and hang it from the ceiling with cup hooks, and then I'll poke holes in the cardboard for hanging the star ornaments. I got some sheets of posterboard from michaels (boo, hiss) that are gold on one side and silver on the other. 99 cents each, perfect.

The grand vision is to have the night sky mural centered over the thanksgiving table, with gold and silver stars hanging from it. I might try putting christmas lights up there, maybe, but there's the power cord issue and it will add weight. This will be our thanksgiving/christmas decoration in lieu of a tree.

Super cool right? Yeah ... maybe. Right now there's a big warped piece of cardboard on the floor. Today I need to paper mache the gift wrap layer and let it dry so I can paint tomorrow. The whole thing, mural and ornaments, should cost about $20 total, not including supplies I already had on hand. $2 for wrapping paper, $8 in craft paint, $4 in gold/silver posterboard, $6 in glitter and shiny paper and other add ons.

I'm going to have to either get lucky and find some scrap styrofoam in the dumpster, or buy some foamcore sheets at the dollar store to add rigidity to the mural. The box still flops around pretty good at the creased points despite the paper mache layer and I'd like for it to look as flat as possible when it is hung from the ceiling.

So that's the grand thanksgiving vision. When I bring spouse back from Hogwarts I want him to be stunned (in a good way, not a "what the heck did you do to the ceiling" way). And then I will stuff him full of delicious food and bourbon and cricket pumpkin bread all weekend long. Yessss.

I ran around and got as much shopping and ordering done as I could this past week so I have almost everything gathered. I have a couple things from amazon coming (craft paint, cheaper than buying at michaels, which we hate anyway). I have to get bacon and sausage on tuesday. Other than that I am set.

Oh my goodness, I have been working on MANY new things and I have so much to update, but it's like 11am already and I have a lot to do. I need to switch my writing time to the evening when I am low on energy, instead of siting here burning daylight. I guess I am naturally chattiest in the morning. But then I fritter away the highest energy part of the day. There's only so much daylight, and when the sun goes down my energy tanks.

Vitamins are going well. I did not end up having a headache last lunar holiday. My lunar holidays are coming up again - thanksgiving day and black friday, because of course they are. We'll see how that goes. But generally I am feeling good. I've restarted the intermittent fasting. Sticking to low carb.

More later, must be busy now.