Happy Ho-Ho 2008

[ click to enlarge! ]

Catching Up

The holidaze and the accompanying chaos that it brings, has made me somewhat remiss in posting. I hope everyone had a wonderful and joyous Christmas! Victor and I drove down to Houston to visit my father and some of the wonderful in-laws from his second marriage. I am so thankful that they keep in contact with him after Margaret's passing earlier this year. I did reminisce a bit with Dad about some of our past Christmas's when Mom was alive - especially our "tradition" of opening up a nice yummy box of Chocolate Covered Cherry candies each Christmas eve. Houston is about 4 1/2 hours away, and we didn't have a petsitter - so it was something of a "drive-by Christmas". We only got to spend about 4 hours down there, but had a wonderful meal and good company.

As to doggie news - Ginger came into heat (she's in Washington to be bred) and was bred to Harper about the time we were munching on the Christmas ham. Also, the litter Tyler sired was whelped in California, with the result being 1 girl and 4 boys. All boys are chinchilla colored too, a favorite for me. Mom is our Duncan's sister Cinder. I can't wait to see how the little darlings turn out! You can see current pictures on their page in the Talisman Hounds web site.

We also managed to get more pictures of our pups playing out in the yard - both Duri's litter and Sassi's.

Our Thanksgiving

We had a somewhat untraditional Thanksgiving...in terms of the food at least. Certainly we thought of those things for which to be thankful for, of which, despite any daily grumblings, are a-plenty. We were tied close to home for the holiday since our club (Lone Star Borzoi Club) was hosting a lure trial the next day and there were other trials the rest of the weekend, including the ASFA Regional Invitational. After ticking through the logistics - it just wasn't feasible to leave town for the day.

Not being much of a homemaker or cook (I'm an "open-box-add-water" kinda gal) I could not bring myself to cook a turkey for just Victor and myself. Since we had a huge package of stew meat in the freezer, the day before feast day I googled up a recipe for a Spicy Beef Curry Stew. I didn't exactly follow the directions to a "t" - except for the spices used, and they were multiplied to fit with the quantity of beef (4.3 lbs - I said it was a HUGE package!). I set everything up the night before and through the night the house filled up with exotic spicy scents.

Towards lunchtime I just threw some sweet potatoes into the oven to bake while Victor and I took to the yard to attempt some photo updates. We brought out the lure toy for the Spells pups to play with. Ascensio, Nox, "Whitey", and Boy #2 are really wanting the "bunny" - closely followed by Pest and Monkee's daughter Faina. QiQi also got into the midst of things - although we hadn't been able to get her interested in a race practice at the beginning of the month when we attended GIT's LGRA meet.

After the hour-long (or more) photo session, we returned into the cozy temps of the house for our late holiday lunch. We ordered "Evan Almighty" on pay-per-view as our entertainment. That was about as close to a holiday movie as we could get - and I couldn't talk Victor into watching "Mr. Brooks", and teased him with the idea of ordering "Hostel" (no thank you!). The stew turned out pretty darned good and the meat was falling apart in the slow cooker. We topped it off with a low carb, crustless pumpkin cheesecake.

We then prepped for the trial the next day - but definitely an easygoing and somewhat relaxing day. Thank goodness for that ;)