Busy Weekend!

Full points to My Beloved, having arrived home Friday evening after a week in Europe he fought jet lag like the pro he is and kept up with it all!


First priority Saturday was getting a tree...

Fraser Fir is our species of choice - short needles that don't drop and are kind on the hands when installing and removing lights and decorations

The trees are grown less than 100km from us near the cottage on Georgian Bay where I spent my summers as a child. They are sold near our home here in the city so its even convenient to patronize this familiar farmer. He's local, pleasant, helpful and his farm contributes to a better environment. (He used to sell live trees to the nursery trade but bagging the live tree's root balls left him with gaping holes in his soil and so ever lessening fertility. By selling Christmas trees instead he maintains his soil and the fertility of his land and can plant saplings between the stumps. It also allows him to sell direct to the public rather than wholesale which gives him a better percentage return.)

There are cheaper trees to be had but I haven't seen nicer ones and we are very picky about the kind of businesses we support.

Once the tree's home in the stand inside Its amazing to watch it relax as it thaws out and takes up water (Almost 2 litres over 36 hours!) and as you can see its about 30% wider too!

Among the other holiday baking and cooking I did yesterday I also had to prepare a contribution for My Beloved to take to the holiday bake sale today at his office. Its in support of a seasonal charity and is held in one of the departments he oversees. His request was for pound cake. I made two variations. Brown Sugar Pound Cake (bonus recipe - it yields two cakes out of a single effort so we get to keep one on hand)

And Chocolate Marble Pound Cake with White Chocolate Icing. The magic of the marbling never gets old!

In the end it took more time to cut and carefully wrap each slice than it did to prep the batter for either cake!

We squeezed in a little visit with family both after the Christmas Tree hunt Saturday and before dinner on Sunday and even managed a movie night with the kids once everyone had headed home. (Hancock - better and much different than I thought it would be!)

Amidst all of this I did get a bit of knitting done. The remnant Christmas balls are finished with about 10 inches of yarn to spare - I love that!) A post on that probably later in the week. I also did another dishcloth last night after dinner. Apathy has set in about the Big Cabled Pullover so its been shuttled off to the side - not that I actually have time to deal with it anyway!