Getting ready for T-day

Hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving! A lot of prep goes into holidays and events here at the Becker ranch. Food, which is always a big deal here, plays an even greater role come holiday time. In an ordinary food week, we can barely fit enough chow in the fridge to get us through half the week. Finding room to squeeze in a 22-pound turkey required herculean effort, complex engineering, and the use of a table in the cold garage as a makeshift refrigerator.
Mmmm, butter. I'd say we go through at least four pounds of it in a normal week. Holiday cooking and baking pushes our butter consumption to a level that has a measurable effect on the commodities market. I spent two solid days in the kitchen cooking glorious butter-enhanced foodstuffs, most of which was consumed in a twenty-minute feeding frenzy.
Over the course of a few years' worth of estate sales, garage sales, and thrift shopping, I have amassed a lovely collection of pretty china, serving dishes, and silver plate. Real silver plated flatware and serving trays can be had for next to nothing; they are ubiquitous anywhere second-hand wares are sold, probably because nobody can be bothered to polish it anymore. I kind of like polishing silver, and started dragging it out to work on a little at a time during the week prior to Thanksgiving. The only snag in my plan was that I was still trying to do some school work with my children, and they are apparently very easily distracted by shiny objects. They are also very easily distracted by the sounds and smells of Christmas cookies baking, which is coming up soon!

Getting the full value

So, just how much fun can you squeeze out of one dead squirrel? Besides providing a meal for six people, little Mr. Squirrel has provided countless hours of entertainment for my young sons. Paul insisted on having a go at some home taxidermy, so I ordered him the necessary ingredients to go about tanning his furry friend's hide. Over the course of about three weeks, Paul defrosted the hide, scraped it, salted it, nailed it to a board, and soaked it in buckets of various tanning solutions. Here we are at the end of the process, where Paul is using my hair dryer to speed up the final drying so that he can bring his hide to church to show his friends. Oh yes, we did indeed bring a dead squirrel to church with us in a ziploc baggie! The hide is now nailed to Paul's bedroom wall, looking very squirrelly indeed. He definitely got his money's worth out of that squirrel.
We usually bring our groceries home in some of the free boxes we pick up off the pallets as we shop (because we usually shop in the kind of upscale places that plops out pallets of dry goods and makes you pay extra if you want bags for your groceries.) David sees no reason why he shouldn't get as much enjoyment as possible out of this empty cookie box before we send it out to the dumpster. We had three boxes waiting to be taken out to the trash, and David spent an equal amount of time sitting in each one.
In such a large family, there's no reason why everyone should have their own individual pair of shoes. Naomi, at age nine, now officially wears the same size shoes as me. She still has a lot of growing left to do, so she probably won't be pilfering my shoes for too long before she outgrows them. I do have two more daughters coming right along after her though....

Such is my life

So, I'm trying to learn a new song. It's actually an oldie that I kind of re-wrote the music for, to make it a little more bluegrass-y, and thus much more my style. Since there is no recording of it anywhere, and since I have not the brain capacity to remember the music in between practice sessions, I thought I'd try to record it myself so I'd have something to reference. As you can see, you can't bring out a video camera around here without all the riff raff coming out of the woodwork to get in on it.

Big (blue) Table

What do you do for a dining room table in a 20+ foot long dining room? You build one yourself, that's what you do!
By my very own little self, I designed, planned, and built a custom dining table to accommodate my extra-long dining room and extra-large family. We'd spent the last year debating our options for or newly-enlarged space; now that the floor was finally finished, the time had come to take action.
It was impossible to find an existing table that would have been long enough without having it custom-built. For the time, trouble, and expense of dealing with that, I figured I could make something myself for a whole lot less money. I based my design on this table from Pottery Barn that I liked. I would have had to buy two of the Pottery Barn tables ($$$$$) and pushed them up together to be long enough.
Not the best pics, but this table is just under 14 feet long, and can seat 18 people comfortably. I was going to leave the whole table in the same stained finish as the top, but as I got close to being finished with it, it just looked sooooo big and brown, so I did a distressed paint finish on the bottom. My house is finally starting to look like a real house again!

Squirrellicious

Since he was about five years old, Paul has wanted to go hunting. He made me promise him a long time ago that when he bagged his first animal, I would cook it for him. Well, my friends, that day has arrived. The hunter was victorious!
There was a good deal of deliberation, prior to the hunting trip, as to how the squirrel should be cooked if Paul was so lucky to actually bag one. Ideas such as Buffalo Squirrel Dip and Squirrel Smoothies were tossed around. Paul finally decided on Squirrel Marsala for his feast of triumph ( we are, after all, a higher class of redneck), which you see him preparing to dig into here. Five out of six kids declared it delicious; David and I abstained.

Ta-daaaaa

Remember these old floorboards? We salvaged them from the house of some guy who was remodeling last winter, and stuck them in the garage until spring. The kids sorted them and pulled out all the old nails, and back into the garage they all went until just last week, when I finally got good and ready to put them in.
I didn't get a "before" shot, but we'd been living with a piece of cheap carpet over the sub-floor in the addition since it was built last fall. It was a huge blessing to stumble on to someone (via a craigslist wanted ad) who was tearing out some of the exact mid-century era strip oak flooring that runs throughout the rest of the house, which we were happy to take off his hands. Above you see Paul helping me with the cleaning up of sanding dust, after we had gotten all the boards installed. FYI, it took almost exactly 2,000 nails, top-nailed, to hold this down. And all those nail holes had to be spackled over.
I'm very proud to say I did the whole job almost entirely by myself, which is not too surprising if you know me, but really threw the sander-rental guys for a loop. They looked up and down all five feet and 115 pounds of me, baby on my hip and a car full of kids, and talked me out of getting the heavier-duty drum sander (which I really needed) and into a pad sander (which didn't do what I needed.) At the end of the day, i only had to get the new floor to look as bad as the job we did on the old floor a few years ago, so it wasn't worth going back to the store to switch out for the sander I should have gotten in the first place.
I'm taking lots of pictures no, because as soon as I let the kids and dog back onto the floor today, it will never again look so clean and shiny. You can see the transition between the old and new- it really blends remarkably well!

Eeeeek!

*cue reel of a lady standing on a chair holding up her skirts*

We have mice in our pantry. Elena brought up a bag of frosted flakes this morning with a corner chewed open. This prompted the rest of the kids to rush down to the pantry to investigate, where they found a few more chewed up packages and some tell-tale "chocolate sprinkles". They seem to be coming in from our, ahem, "plumbing access panel" in the ceiling; how they got into the ceiling is anybody's guess.
I guess it was a good a time as any to clean and re-organize our pantry stocks. This is what our family room looks like (again), full of pantry items. The kids sorted through and pulled out anything that was nibbled, chewed, scratched, or sprinkled to toss out, while I got a broom and a bucket full of bleach water to scrub down floors and shelves. Then it was off to the farm store for mouse traps and poison, and some mouse-proof dry goods containers.
For your edification, those cheap little cartoonish mouse traps hurt a LOT when they snap on your finger. I managed to set two of them before remembering I'd need my fingers to play my guitar later this evening. The kids have checked the traps approximately every two minutes since we set them; we'll see how many volunteers step up when it comes time to empty the traps.