Happy Holidays, one and all!

So much for keeping up with this again :). Ah, well. I’ve really enjoyed the holiday season this year, and it’s not over yet! I went to a couple wonderful “Friendsgivings,” and my parents flew out from North Carolina to spend the Christmas / New Year’s time with me and my sister, so we’re only just getting started. One thing we’ve all done together was see both Frozen II and Knives Out, which were both really cute. My mother also made a Low Country Boil for today which turned out very well, and it’s just been altogether pleasant.

Another thing I wanted to mention was that I made those calzones again for both Friendsgivings, and they came out very well. I really played around a lot with the recipe though — there was a lot of improvisation, some intentional and some mistakes that had to be recovered from. My best intentional tweak was that I added a full onion to the mushroom filling; quite tasty. Another was that I accidentally didn’t have enough spinach, but that didn’t seem to matter; the filling was still quite nice. But the mistake that I was really proud of myself about — I accidentally mis-measured the amount of flour I put into the dough, and so it came out very powdery and thick. I had to just improvise putting in dollops of water and olive oil until the consistency seemed to come together alright, and then threw in a bit of extra salt for good measure. It turned out really well anyway :).

I also wanted to give a shout-out to my dog. He’s been my cuddle buddy through all of this past year, and he’s just so understanding through it all. He may bark his head off occasionally and growl at my dad when he tries to walk him (it was so funny! He’s never done it before, but this morning he was just refusing to go on a walk. We speculate that it has to do with how crummy the weather’s been, since he’s so low to the ground), but he’s still such a cutie.

The knitting patterns are coming along quite well! I’ve completed the two V-patterns, so I’ll be posting those soon, and I’ve made a good start on the actual branching pattern. It’s not quite where I want it to be, but I think it’s getting there.

I’m also starting to get excited about doing a top ten list for the books I’ve read this year — considering I barely read at all until August, I do think I’ve made a decent stab at pulling together a good list.

And! I’ve been working on Goals for the Decade. So I’m pretty excited about that. Part of it is working on some professional certifications, which I feel like I’ve already made some decent progress on, so things are coming along nicely.

Anyway, I’ll wrap this up. Hope you’re having a wonderful holiday season, whatever you’re celebrating :).