Missy's blog: Thanksgiving and the beginning of the Christmas season

This is what it looks like in Hawaii just now.

Here it is in Silver Spring.

The kids had time off school so mom took them to Great Falls.

Look at those children with no coats!!!

They are crazy.

Meanwhile Thanksgiving prep.

crazy children

My amazing apple pie prep

Megan made this great cake. Extremely fancy Nailed It inspired cake from the imagination of Megan is always impressive.

She decorated her door and then ran around yelling from excitement.

We did the Frederick Turkey Trot.

It was super crowded and disorganized this year. They had to move the race time back because packet pick up was so overwhelmed.

Its such a nice flat race and full of silly hats. I saw a guy with actual drumsticks in his headband. I imagine his hair was quite something by the end.

I also saw Donnie (my friend from Qiagen) I was so happy to see him. I miss Donnie. He is one that I have not much contact with anymore but really wish I did.

We went to Licia's for Thanksgiving dinner and everyone ate till they were satisfied. That took Kiernan about 4 rounds of food.

We went to the distillery to get more Bramleys for baking but the apples were all gone. We got hard cider instead. This one was called Scrumpy which is a hard cider type from the west of England. It is rough cider and has lots of apple bits in it.

We used the time off to go see family. We hung out and ate and played games. I forgot how giant the screen in their basement is. Megan played geometry dash to entertain and Kiernan did some Minecraft.

We continued our Nerdy Night with Lady Hawke.

I made French Food.

It went over ok but the movie was too long for Megan who was unimpressed by cheese bread and by long exposition.

Oh well.

Megan did the New Market Christmas parade with the Girl Scouts again this year.

I felt exceptionally Christmas-y.

I walked around taking pictures of decorated houses and cheering for the kids. This year they didn't want moms to walk with the girls so I had more time for wandering. There was free hot chocolate!

I even say a robotic mower. I love these big roomba looking things. Unfortunately they can only do like a 3% grade so we wont be getting one any time soon. They have a lot of smart features though. They have weather sensors so they don't go out when its raining and they have grass monitoring activity that means they don't mow where the grass isn't growing and they extra mow where it is growing fast. They take themselves back to the charging station when they need to and they mow at preset times to not annoy the neighbors.

Also the girls threw candy.

Some people were colder than others. I shall name no names.

I spent about 5 hours cleaning out my car.

I had been meaning to do it forever. It had tons of stickers and dried slime and dog hair and the trunk was filled with skates and camping stuff and blankets from picnics. Then when we were out one day Krishna said Missy you really need to clean your car. I felt so embarrassed. Oh man. It kept me up that night.

So as wee had vacation time I emptied it our and washed it and vacuumed it and scrubbed slime and dug out melted crayon and really it still was not clean.

The next morning I took it to a detailed and spent 200 bucks to have it done right.

I gave them a good starting place as I'd done so much before. They steamed the heck out of it and after 3+ more hours it was pretty good.

The smell of the cleaning fluid gave me a headache for about a week and there are still two places that need some work (chalk on the ceiling and a mysterious waffle pattern on the dash) but I've kept food and slime out of it for about 2 months now and so far so good.