Wrapping Up The Old, Prepping For The New

YUM! Low-Guilt Holiday Leftover Lunch

That was lunch, baked potato quarters with leftover chunks of Honey Baked Ham and cheddar cheese with a shaken salad in balsamic vinaigrette. The potatoes and cheese are leftover ingredients form my first ever made-from-scratch scalloped potatoes. This is a low-guilt, not no-guilt lunch because I try to keep my lunches around 300-350 calories and this is about 400. Now, true that I’ll resume Wife 1500 with a vengeance on January 4, but the leftovers in the fridge won’t just sit around and wait and I was in the mood for a lighter lunch than the holiday overload of the last week and a half.

There’s been plenty of good food, treats and I will totally confess that I really like my own baked goods too! My favorites from the brownies were the Cordial Cherries and Boughs of Peanut Butter, not to slight the candy canes and well, I think David left one classic chocolate on the tray and I‘ll let him have that for dessert tonight. I’m also a total sucker for the Mr. Goodcookies, which I after all, created to be the best cookies I’D ever tasted! We also have a couple of dishes of chocolates and yesterday, Pop brought the bag Auntie brought for us from San Marino, which has one of the wonderful dark chocolate and wafer tortes, for which the Fatherland is renown in Europe and a large, incredible, milk chocolate hazelnut bar that’s made in Milan. She’s sent us that chocolate before and it is pure heaven to eat! The gift bag also had a box of pocket coffee, espresso filled dark chocolates, and chocolate covered espresso beans. David said those two are for me.

gifts from the Fatherland!

I saw Pop yesterday because he came over after work to pick me up and we rode together to Angola, take 2, to meet Dave and Laura and bring the girls back. Boy the weather has just presented a huge family challenge for the holidays this year! As we sat together, ordering lunch and exchanging gifts in a smoky restaurant just off I-69, Tori gave a line that I wrote down for the scrapbook! “Wow, Christmas at a truck stop. Interesting.” That and another couple quotes will go on the layout from lunch yesterday.

David and I got a new “party camera” from his brother’s family for Christmas! I call it a party camera because it is easy to use and figure out for passing the camera around, unlike my past few point-and-shoots that people have had a hard time with. This one is a Canon and it takes great quality candid pictures, has a good auto setting for sharing the camera and a quality macro setting too. It is also much more jiggle-resistant when the flash is turned off than my old Minolta. The Minolta will still be my train camera for now, though. The Canon doesn’t have a viewfinder, which makes it essentially taking blind photos when the sun is behind you, and it’s very slow in getting ready to take a second shot, the picture quality is a little better, but it’s not a big enough improvement to make up for the limited capability in the field. But what it does for people, cats and ambient shots is wonderful! I was looking forward to getting some good photos for scrapping at lunch.

I passed the camera around, but I didn’t really get any great shots. The best one of the girls is blurry. We’ll chalk that up to getting used to the new auto settings. I took that one and it focused on the ketchup bottle in the center of the table! But I’ll use what I do have and some added journaling to get a good page anyway. A good rule is that just days after Christmas don’t take a new camera to dinner and expect many photos taken with it because people will be checking out the new camera and the niece who also got a new camera will pull hers out to compare and you won’t have good scrapbook photos! I don’t even HAVE one of Dave or Laura! I’ll see if Tori has any to swap from her camera!

It’s been a Christmas of some challenges, most from the weather, but I’m making up for that now. After visiting Grandma tomorrow morning, I’ll stop at Pop’s and pick up Tori and Rina to take them to lunch. There is a Cracker Barrel not far from where Pop is and that is one of our collective favorite restaurants!

Maybe tomorrow I'll have lunch pictures!