Back from the wilds of New Mexico
Nov. 25th, 2007 02:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
allyndraHello, flist! I missed you!
I'm going to go through my Friends page and try to catch up, but let me know if I missed anything while I was out of touch. It's nice to be home!
I was off in New Mexico, visiting my inlaws for Thanksgiving. A woman at work, on hearing I was visiting relatives for the holiday, said, "Oh, that's nice. At least you won't have to cook." Not so! My mother-in-law believes in a fair and equitable division of the cooking, and since she made (I kid you not) seven pies and four dozen cookies before we arrived, that left me with the turkey, the stuffing, the mashed potatoes, and the rolls. My sister-in-law did the green bean casserole, and my mother-in-law kicked in the yams. She also took over the gravy, which irked me, because I like the way I make gravy (flour and the fat from pan drippings in a roux, then add the juices from the pan drippings to form the gravy). I masterfully refrained from sulking over her giblets-and-corn-starch gravy, though.
It was a nice visit, and I rejoiced in their digital cable, watching Torchwood yesterday for the first time and Tivo-ing Hollyoaks to watch at a more reasonable time than the 1:00am when it broadcasts on BBC America. I had no chance to hop on lj, though, because my sister-in-law (an extremely sheltered girl of 19) stays logged on to her lj at all times. I didn't want to log her off and have her track me to my lj, because her parents would shoot me if she read my fic. I like to think of them as recovering homophobes. Devout Catholics, they had no doubts that homosexuality was a choice and a sin until my mother-in-law's favorite sister came out in her early fifties. In trying to understand what she was going through and how conflicted she had felt, my inlaws started to re-evaluate their stance on homosexuality. But they're still very uncomfortable with it, especially male homosexuality. Hence, the desire to keep them from my gay porn. :o)
My only real disappointment on the visit came from Chinese food. Soemhow, when I leave a place, I tend to miss the food more than the people. (After all, I can call the people, but the food is completely out of touch.) There's this little, junky, hole-in-the-wall Chinese place (the kind that leads my husband to make inappropriate jokes about cats going missing from the neighborhood) there that I adore. They have the best egg drop soup and chicken chow mein I've ever had, and the only fried rice I really like. When we first decided to go back for Thanksgiving, I said, "We're going to Taiwan Kitchen while we're there." But when we all piled into the car and drove down there, my hopes were cruelly dashed by a hand-written sign in the window, declaring them closed all week for the holiday. *is sad* We went to a mediocre Chinese buffet (housed in what used to be the Western Sizzlin') instead.
One thing that came as a surprise was the weather. One might expect that there would be little difference between the weather in the desert of Arizona and the desert of New Mexico, but it was a good twenty degrees colder there. We needed our jackets for the first time all year, and my son insisted on gloves. It was pretty neat to see the snow all over the mountain passes on the way home this morning, though. Heaven knows I won't see any of it at home.
It was a nice visit, and I rejoiced in their digital cable, watching Torchwood yesterday for the first time and Tivo-ing Hollyoaks to watch at a more reasonable time than the 1:00am when it broadcasts on BBC America. I had no chance to hop on lj, though, because my sister-in-law (an extremely sheltered girl of 19) stays logged on to her lj at all times. I didn't want to log her off and have her track me to my lj, because her parents would shoot me if she read my fic. I like to think of them as recovering homophobes. Devout Catholics, they had no doubts that homosexuality was a choice and a sin until my mother-in-law's favorite sister came out in her early fifties. In trying to understand what she was going through and how conflicted she had felt, my inlaws started to re-evaluate their stance on homosexuality. But they're still very uncomfortable with it, especially male homosexuality. Hence, the desire to keep them from my gay porn. :o)
My only real disappointment on the visit came from Chinese food. Soemhow, when I leave a place, I tend to miss the food more than the people. (After all, I can call the people, but the food is completely out of touch.) There's this little, junky, hole-in-the-wall Chinese place (the kind that leads my husband to make inappropriate jokes about cats going missing from the neighborhood) there that I adore. They have the best egg drop soup and chicken chow mein I've ever had, and the only fried rice I really like. When we first decided to go back for Thanksgiving, I said, "We're going to Taiwan Kitchen while we're there." But when we all piled into the car and drove down there, my hopes were cruelly dashed by a hand-written sign in the window, declaring them closed all week for the holiday. *is sad* We went to a mediocre Chinese buffet (housed in what used to be the Western Sizzlin') instead.
One thing that came as a surprise was the weather. One might expect that there would be little difference between the weather in the desert of Arizona and the desert of New Mexico, but it was a good twenty degrees colder there. We needed our jackets for the first time all year, and my son insisted on gloves. It was pretty neat to see the snow all over the mountain passes on the way home this morning, though. Heaven knows I won't see any of it at home.
I'm going to go through my Friends page and try to catch up, but let me know if I missed anything while I was out of touch. It's nice to be home!