Over the River ...

AND THROUGH THE PASS:  Christmas Day meant a bit (well a LOT) of traveling for us. We left Seattle at 7 a.m. on the nose. First stop: Lake Oswego, Oregon, for brunch with some family. Mercifully, holiday traffic was light, and we arrived there just a few minutes after 10 a.m.

I (lamely) neglected to take any photos, so I can't prove it happened. ;)

We left Lake Oswego (which is just south of Portland) about 1 p.m., destination, Bend, Oregon, another three-plus hour stint in the car (did I mention we had two dogs with us?).

Our trip took us through Detroit (Oregon-style), and we got to see the sizable Detroit Dam through the windows as we whizzed by.

Fortunately, traffic remained light, the weather was decent, and there was but a dusting of snow at the North Santiam Pass.

Mostly, it was dry pavement, and mostly blue skies.

We did encounter a snow plow that was pushing slush.

And we can now saw we've visited the Deschutes National Forest.

It was fun to experience at least a bit of a white Christmas!

We arrived in Bend a little after 4, and had a lovely prime rib and potatoes dinner, and then had barrels of laughs by gifting the kids' cousins with crazy candy canes in flavors like macaroni and cheese, clam, dill pickle and (worst of all) rotisserie chicken. They were delightfully disgusting. 

Christmas Countdown

FEAST: Saturday night, we headed up the monthly feast we and a group of friends put on at a local shelter for homeless young adults. This month's menu was an "Aloha 2018" theme. We had kalua pork and teriyaki chicken, white rice, macaroni salad, coleslaw, and a plethroa of Hawaii-inspired desserts.

We made a coconut, macadamia nut, pineapple yellow cake for our contributions to dessert. (It's in the upper portion of the photo above.) We also made 30 teriyaki chicken thighs, 10 pounds of pork, and 4 pounds of macaroni salad. And a couple of gallons of coleslaw. We were busy. 

As usual, Annabelle made a cute poster with the menu (an in-progress part of it appears at the top of this blog entry). As usual, I forgot to take any photos of the finished menu. :( Sigh. I did remember to take a couple of photos of the event in progress, but it gets pretty busy and so there are only a couple, including this one of Annabelle working it in the dish room. She is a dishwashing pro at this point.

HOLIDAZE: I don't usually post on Sunday nights, but I know our schedule is going to be wacky this week, so I thought I'd post while I could. We're busily trying to get our Christmas 'to do' list tackled. Believe it or not, today that involved a pressure cooker on our patio for a couple of hours. We were attempting to make vanilla extract for the first time ever. I've seen dozens of posts about how to do it on the official Instant Pot group on Facebook, however, when researching the process, I also found a couple of articles that scared the begeezus out of me, about how the vapors from the process could be potentially hazardous/combustible/burn your house down. So, we opted to put the cooker outside and keep a close eye on it. Happily, no fires, and it looks like it worked really well - hooray!

We'll be caught up in holiday bustle for the next few days, but will try to post when we can. In the meantime, Merry Christmas, and here's a short scene from our cozy fire tonight.