Sunday, January 4, 2009

01.04.09

Well unfortunately, the snow storm wasn't all it was cracked up to be. I think we ended up with about 2 inches. A lot of it got blown around today. I did manage to get a few good shots of some cold house finches this morning, one of my husband grinding concrete in the basement, and snow swirling around on a neighbors roof. But today I knew I had to post a photo to commemorate the first of our monthly, family dinners for the year 2009. In this photo a pot of water was being boiled for the homemade noodles...yum!
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I have two younger sisters and last year the youngest had a New Year's Goal of getting the three of us, along with our husbands/fiance, together one Sunday of every month for dinner. Kelly and her fiance did an AMAZING job. Each month there was a theme and not only was it evident in the dishes they prepared, but also in the table settings, the dinner favors, and even the quotes that she printed on the back of our place cards. And they never skimped on the food...believe me, no one went hungry.

I am very happy to report that we made it ALL 12 months. Now, I won't say there weren't a few close calls - especially the month my middle sister, Renee, had her baby - but we managed to get all of them in. We were even lucky enough to have our parents join us for a few.

Well this year we wanted to continue the tradition. Renee and I, along with our hubbies, will be sharing the hosting responsibilities this year. We decided to go with an Italian theme - this gave a great excuse to try some new wines! Tonight marked the first of our dinners and it was FANTASTIC! They did a great job and everything was delicious...needless to say, there weren't many leftovers. I'm looking forward to cracking the Italian cookbooks over the next few weeks and finding some tasty dishes for February.

I have come to truly value this time with my family. I look forward to catching up with everyone and seeing my nephew. And it never fails - some childhood stories or memories get shared. (Some are better left in the family "memory vault.") Just tonight we talked about my grandpa & grandma's candy dishes. We all had something different that we remembered about the candy, based on which type we liked. I always enjoyed eating my grandpa's black licorice. I was taught from an early age that family is what truly matters in life.

2 comments:

  1. Jennifer,
    How did you (or what did you use) get the photos in review. Love it. Realized I still did not fix the comments issue, but should for my next post.

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  2. Via Twitter I saw that someone else had created a blog for their photos, so I started playing around in the "Customize" option. It's the Slide Show gadget. I had trouble getting it to work at first, but finally got things figured out last night. It wouldn't pull from my Flickr account, but since I have a Picasa set through Gmail, it automatically made me an album for the photos that are posted in my blog. (Didn't even know it would do that.) All I had to do was make that album public and tell it to pull from that particular album.

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