Let the Memories be Made!

Well, the holiday is over, the turkey eaten, the friends departed, and the fun ended...well, I wouldn’t go that far, but Thanksgiving is finished and the Christmas season is now upon us! On Thanksgiving morning, someone told me, “Let the memories be made!” and with that fresh in my mind, I watched carefully throughout the day for the making of memories. Here is what I found:

First thing on Thanksgiving morning, Mommy and I have the tradition of making the stuffing and starting the turkey together. This memory was started a few years ago, but each time the amazing smell of the sizzling butter, onions, and cooking bread cubes, etc of the stuffing fill the kitchen, Thanksgiving officially begins. This year, I decided that the smell was so AMAZING that I nicknamed the stuffing the “Amazing Goodness.”

Another memory made was that Julie’s classmate from her honors class joined us for Thanksgiving. She’s from India and a Hindu, therefore, she had never experienced the joy of an American Thanksgiving before. Not only did she experience a cultural event, but she also witnessed the joy of a Christian gathering and heard the gospel. She was a delight to have with us and we hope to keep this friendship up!

At almost every gathering that we have at our house, we love to play the game Catch Phrase with our guests. (If you don’t know what Catch Phrase is, it’s a wonderfully fun group game where you describe a phrase or word without using that word and then you pass this disk thing on to the next person, and you go round and round until the timer goes off) Anyway, we love to play it, and it’s always a crowd pleaser and it pulls out such fun aspects of personalities that you would other wise not know about! We played several games in a row of this, and as always, the calm-under-stress and the spastically-jumpy personalities showed themselves.

On the day after Thanksgiving, we had dinner with our good friends the Morrisons. It was a spontaneous get-together. I think those might be the best gatherings...those you aren’t expecting. It was nice to spend time with them, tease one another, play Uno, and just have a good, relaxing time eating chili and left-over pumpkin pie...not together of course.

And, as always, even though those memories are made and Thanksgiving season is past for another year, there’s always many things to look forward to. Christmas decorations are going up throughout the house, the lights are hung on the bush outside, the Ladies’ Christmas Tea is this Friday, the Messiah concert is this Saturday, and a Boy Scout Ice Skating event on Friday...and...and...and...I think you get the idea. So, yes, the memories have been made, and we’re looking forward to making more!

Julie and Catherine Bake a Cake

The title of this tale should really be "Catherine Plans, Bakes, and Decorates an Ornate Cake despite Julie's Sabotage Attempts." In favor of clarity, however, the editor in deep self-consultation with the author has chosen the more succinct and elementary title that you will observe affixed to the top.
Editorial notes aside, we may now proceed with the story proper: Long, long ago (last weekend), Catherine came over to stay at Julie's house for several days. Although both had completed a tiring week of VBS, they decided in their typical genius style that that weekend and no other would be the perfect time to complete a mission of epic proportions and disastrous repercussion - it was time to begin their long and laborious pursuit of fondant cake making. Yes, that is correct. Catherine and Julie chose, of their own volition and at a time of unideal conditions, to bake and decorate a cake with that stuff professionals use for wedding cakes, presidential balls, and UN committees (well, the part about the UN is mere supposition, but it sounds like something they would spend their time on!)
It all began on Friday night, when they returned home from the VBS ending program to make the fondant. NO! They did not purchase the fondant because it costs something close to twenty dollars. Instead, they made fondant. I will now divulge a secret known only to the masses: fondant is made out of powdered sugar, marshmallows, Crisco, and water mashed together and kneaded from a gooey mixture into a semi-firm ball. Right. Just what I would have chosen for a Friday night after VBS. Furthermore, rather than following the typical dying procedures, they chose to make brown fondant by adding coco powder. (In their defense, somewhere on some website, the suggestion to use coco powder was made, and therefore was not a mere whim of their hallucinating brains.) They also cut strips and started drying rings of fondant over a foil-covered broom handle for their bow.
Saturday morning, the adventurous explorers awoke early and baked the chocolate cake, which would serve as the top half of the two-layered cake. After a brief intermission, they returned to make the larger bottom layer - yellow cake. Then, Catherine left the yellow cake in the care of Julie to run quickly back to her house and do vacuuming or something like that. Vacuuming at a critical time like that was not Catherine's wisest move. Less wise was her relinquishing of the task to Julie, master saboteur of all kitchen productions. The batter made it into the pan, and the pan made it into the oven, but the cake never made it out of the pan. Or at least not in one piece. Following the clearly delineated plan of the mission hidden in the recipe, Julie tried to free the still very warm cake from the pan only five minutes after the cake had left its warm and secure place in the oven. DISASTER #1! The bottom half of the cake fled the warm environs of its pan, leaving the hapless top to fend for itself as it clung to the bottom of the pan. Disaster #2 followed shortly on the heels of the first: Julie panicked and swiftly dumped the remaining layer of cake onto the top of the other, causing it to crumble hopelessly into crumbs and pieces. Sheryl and Mommy flew to the rescue, but it still looked sadly mangled.
Leaving the cakes in the freezer to cool and reassemble at will, Catherine and Julie took a much need break to attend a picnic/pool party for five hours in which time they thorough exhausted all the remaining energy they didn't have after VBS.
By the time they returned home to continue the cake production, life was not looking up!!! Catherine immediately started making icing for this beautiful cake. Unfortunately, all semblances of powdered sugar had departed the house (ahem, we will not pry further on the whereabouts of that sugar), so Julie was dispatched on the mission detour "Operation Get Sugar," otherwise known as a trip to the grocery store. Victorious, she returned with two bags of sugar and one bag of flour.
Icing was made, the bottom layer assembled, fondant was warmed and rekneaded. And suddenly, both girls experienced Disaster #3. Coco changes the consistency of fondant. The wonder substance of fondant suddenly becomes a crumbly and simultaneously gooey (but delicious) mess of coco, marshmallow, crisco, and water. Julie suggested adding more crisco, and at first her second attempt at sabotage seemed to gain the upper hand as the mixture turned more gooey and even more crumbly. Catherine saved the cake with some well timed water (I told you it was the universal solvent) and together they got a sheet of coco fondant rolled out, only to find it hopelessly affixed to the counter top. They huffed and they puffed. They pulled and they pushed. But the mixture had no desire to move in one piece.
Admittedly, they were at a stand still until Catherine's math degree saved the day. They remembered that two halves make a whole. Consequently, Julie rolled out half the fondant, which only covered a third of the cake. A little more manipulation got the entire bottom covered (if you call a holey, crumbling sheet of brown goodness a cover). Assuring themselves that all would be well, Catherine and Julie recalculated their decorative imaginings and chose to ignore the other ball of hopeless coco fondant in favor of some blue and normal fondant for the top covering. Success was short lived. Although the blue cooperated in the rolling department, there was simply not enough of it to cover the entire second layer beautifully. Undaunted, the adventurous duo placed the blue sheet of fondant over the top of the cake and stood back to admire their work. This is what they saw:Please go ahead and laugh. It's very funny!
To cut an already too long story shortish: this cake somehow was transformed from the blue blob perched atop a brown blob into something much more satisfactory thanks to a few well-positioned circles, bows, stripes, and ribbons to mask the underneath. And the following pictures will allow you, patient reader, to judge how far their art of camouflage succeeded.And so as all good things come to an end, so ended the adventures and misadventures, the sabotage attempts and the happy successes of Catherine and Julie's cake. And there too must end my chronicle, because an author can only roll out a story so far before it and its readers are thinner than fondant!
So they all lived happily ever after, except for the cake which was cut up and devoured.

The End

Slide Show of the Carlson Invasion

We've been back from Washington for two and a half weeks. After looking through the pictures many times, we've scaled our four week vacation down to eight minutes. The first song is called "Overture" by Patrick Doyle, and the second song is called "Northern Lights" from the CD called Soundtracks for Classic Books: Music for Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. I'm not sure who wrote the actual piece.
If you are a cousin, aunt, uncle, or grandparent of the Carlsons, and you have a favorite picture of our time together that did not make it into the slideshow...I'm very sorry, but I had to choose about 96 (more or less) pictures out of the 1800 that we had, so bear with me. Enjoy!

Two Random Specific Events

Well, the Carlson Chronicler gave a general synopsis of our trip and invasion out west, but I decided to describe two random specific events for you all. The first is mostly really exciting for me personally, because I met my favorite living author, Douglas Bond. The homeschooling convention out here in Seattle is in the beginning of June, so my mom and I were able to attend with my Aunt Susan, Aunt Joyce, Elaina, and Katie. I went on the express purpose of meeting Douglas Bond. He was really sweet and down too earth, not high and mighty at all, and was very willing to talk. We were able to do so for several minutes about the books he working on presently, and the ones he's going to be fervently working on to finish by September. :-) (If any of you really enjoy John Knox or would like to know more about him, keep an eye out for his book coming out sometime after September!) I bought his new book, Guns of Providence, which finishes the trilogy Faith and Freedom. I've been really looking forward to this book, and how exciting to buy it from the author himself! He even signed it for me! This definitely was a highlight in my vacation.

The second event occurred last Friday, the 25th of June. Aunt Joyce announced to the cousins that we should walk to the nearby woods about a mile and a half away and collect some firewood in order to build a bonfire and roast marshmallows. So, all of the 14 cousins present at the gathering clamorously tramped off to find the wanted firewood. In the woods, various smaller asundry sticks were gathered. Then, we found it. The log. The 37' 2" tree trunk. Simply laying on the forest floor, it was free game for the needed firewood. So, 12 of the 14 cousins (the two youngest, Allison and Sarah, carried the smaller sticks on which to roast the marshmallows) picked up the great log and started the trek back to the house. At one point, we saw a family approaching us on the road, so we quickly set the log down and all sat on it. Apparently, they didn't see us carrying it, but simply saw 14 kids randomly sitting on a log by the road. We told them we were all cousins, and such other small talk was generated. After they passed us, we quickly picked up the log, and recommenced our walk back home. As we neared the house, walking along the sidewalk, the several cars that passed us waved and honked. We must have really been a sight. We sent Allison and Sarah on ahead to tell the parents to come outside because we had something to show them. As we came into sight with our treasure, the parents' mouths dropped open, and then continued to drop as the log just continued and continued. With a small saw, we were able to cut enough pieces for our desired bonfire. Ah...another memory made.

Invasion of the West Coast

Recently, the innocent and prosperous people of Washington state have experienced a influx of people, noise, and fun to such an extent that many are considering moving to New Jersey to fill the gap that seems to recently have opened. The Carlsons are in WA terrorizing - ahem, I mean, visiting - Mom's extended family as well as Dad's dad! Sixteen cousins can singlehandedly destroy the peace of a typical suburb with their laughter, running, yelling, and other carrying on, but then add fun-loving uncles and aunts, and the suburbs are really in for a trip!

We Carlsons arrived last week on Monday, spent the first week with Mom's youngest sister's family, weathered (and even enjoyed) a rainy day, had one full family renunion, and many other unofficial gatherings. This week, we stuffed the borrowed car with our luggage and then head over to stay at the other sister's family, with whom we toured Seattle, had coffee at the ORIGINAL Starbucks, and then headed to the woods for a hike.

This Wednesday, the Carlson caravan again broke camp and took the long trek up to Anacortes to visit my dad's dad and his wife! We had a lovely time with them, eating at Royal Fork (a family tradition), getting sunburnt on the beach, and climbing all over a dry-docked snagboat, the W.T. Preston.

This weekend, Pastor Daddy will assume his vocational role and speak at a singles' conference at Emmanuel Baptist Church. We still have over a week to continue with our cousins to reak havoc all round the countryside, so Washingtonians, my word of advice would be - Watch out!

Celebrating the Blessing of a Wonderful Woman

Last Friday was Mother's birthday. For her birthday, her two sisters came out and surprised her. It was quite an adventure, because Sheryl and I had to get the house cleaned and our bedroom ready without her discovering! As it turned out, my dear trusting mother did not suspect, and even if she had suspected that something was up, she would not have guessed the truth.

My dad picked both of his sister-in-laws up at the airport mid-afternoon and then brought them immediately home. When Sheryl saw Dad pull up in the van, she rushed into Andrew's room, "You have to have a question NOW." Apparently, Andrew had a bonfied math question, and so kept Mom's eyes off the window while her sisters entered from the garage. Then, my dad led them into the room where Mommy was sitting unsuspecting, and he turned her around. Utterly surprised, all she said was "It's my sisters." Mission complete.
Thursday evening was sister time, so the three slipped away to Applebees, while Miss Ronda and we three kids jumped into food action: shopping, baking, prepping. On Friday, the gang headed into the City via bus and then took the subway all the way up to Brooklyn to visit the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. The gardens were spectacularly beautiful and the weather was perfect for strolling about plants and flowers. Each of the gardens had a theme which defined which plants were planted there. The first garden was the Japanese garden centered around a pond shaped in the Japanese character for "heart." The path around the garden was quiet and relaxing. The garden to earn the award of Most Creative was the Shakespeare Garden which had plants referenced in Shakespeare's plays or sonnets. Many of the placards had the specific quote along with information about the plant. "The king is but a man. The violet smells the same to him as to me." - Henry V. The garden adjacent to the Shakespeare Garden had a multitude of raised beds with flowers of distinct texture and smell. Designed particularly for the blind, this garden was geared to assault the senses other than sight. Pretty cool idea! In search of more beauty, we set out to find the rose gardens, only to discover that April is a bit too early. Great horticulturalist we are! However, the quest of the roses (sounds like something from English history) led us directly towards what was in bloom. The main attraction of the gardens towards the end of April are the rows of multicolored azaleas. The photo-op was priceless as well!
After about four and a half hours of strolling about and soaking in the natural beauty that God designed for us to enjoy, we took the subway back into Manhattan. A slight miscalculation on the part of our fearless leader we rose to the surface on the wrong side of Manhattan - at Grand Central Station instead of Port Authority. Not realizing the mistake until we had existed the subway, we headed out on foot to cut through the jungle of NYC. Everything has its blessings, and this time blessing took the shape of McDonald's ice-cream and a peek at Times Square - almost exactly 24 hours before the recent terror attempt. Finally, weary but triumphant, we spotted Port Authority and consequently our ride home. Once home, we ordered Chinese food and enjoyed a relaxed evening opening presents and celebrating the wonderful gift of our mother, wife, and sister.

Hitting the Slopes - Carlson Style

Snow on the ground, untrampled, unused is beautiful and picturesque, but when, I ask, have the Carlsons ever chosen picturesque over fun? As soon as snowflakes start descending from the clouds, thoughts start to accumulate in the three little minds in the Carlson home: sledding, snowballs, friend time . . .

By Friday, we had cleared our schedules sufficiently to hit the slopes of the Lee's backyard. Paul and Hannah Sullivan joined us. Andrew is despicably flawless in his stearing abilities. He and Paul built up a treacherous jump at the bottom of one of the runs. Hannah and Sheryl had some difficulty in ever reaching the jump, because, well, let's just say they're women drivers, and also apparently like the taste of tree bark. At one point, they managed to hit the jump and went flying into a gully full of tree branches, leaves, and assundry sharp objects!
After a little while, Jackson Lee, the grandson of the Lee's, came out with Mr. Lee to try sledding. Jackson was a little unconvinced at first that fun could be included in sledding down a hill with snow flying into his face in danger of branches, stumps, and thorns, but Mr. Lee with his typical lawyer logic told Jackson that down at the bottom of the hill was "Oblivion" a special place for him to visit. That changes things! Jackson was quick to jump onto "Jacksonian Express" after that for memory-making runs into Oblivion. Of course, we were all curious as well to see Oblivion, so the rest of us followed Mr. Lee and Jackson into blissful forgetfulness . . .
In keeping with Danielleian tradition, we executed several sled train rides. The most successful one was with Hannah and me (Julie) on the same sled in front steering, with Sheryl, Paul, and Andrew on seperate sleds behind pushing and steering. A very unsuccessful run was with Andrew and Paul lying on the same sled and holding onto Sheryl. It was unsuccessful because Sheryl had to also hold onto them, which left Hannah and me pushing all the weight as well as steering.

Ah, yes - We love snow!!