MIA

Eesh. Looks like I've been MIA for a month. Sorry. We've been busy with winter and holiday preparations. No huge projects, but things that needed to get done before the cold sets in. We mowed the lawn a final time, cleaned up the yard and back porch, removed/drained the hose, put an insulated cover over the hose bib, covered all accessible plumbing supply lines with pipe wrap (a much bigger project than it sounds like), fixed our basement furnace (because of Tom's brilliance, we didn't even have to call a furnace company, which saved us at least 60 bucks), and got our security system fixed. The monitoring unit they originally installed was junk and continually gave us a "communication error" message. The siren would go off, but it wasn't sending the alarm information to the security company. They're giving us a few months service and upgrading our motion detector to a pet sensitive one for free. It was a favorable resolution to what has been an annoyance for several months.

I was also busy baking for Thanksgiving at Tom's work. I made a big double batch of pumpkin scones and a Mississippi mud pie. (The mud pie was very nearly a disaster. I unwittingly bought one box of instant and one box of cook-and-serve pudding. The recipe called for mixing the two together, which I did before I realized the difference in preparation. Trying to cook instant pudding just results in burned pudding. Bad news. Leave it to me to perfectly execute a from-scratch recipe but totally botch a box of pudding.) We'll be traveling to Baltimore tomorrow, so no big family ordeal for us. We'll be celebrating Thanksgiving together as a family of three for the first time, and that is something for which I'm truly thankful.