Snowy busy December

This must be the first time in recorded history that I unintentionally woke up before 7am on a weekend AND feel very rested. Have a lot to do today so this is a good way to start. I think this happened because we fell asleep on the couch watching Simpsons around 9pm last night. What a Friday, haha. We were both beat. My work has had mandatory overtime (5 hours per week) for about 6 weeks and it's wearing on me. And our business keeps picking up so it seems anytime we're not at work we've got something that has to be made for what we call "Job 2".

Thursday night we had a break, though. We were scheduled for Chris to give a class on herbs at the store, but they postponed it due to weather. We got about 3 inches of snow Thursday afternoon. Part of why one of our tasks today is to check out an electric snow blower at Home Depot that we saw online. Shoveling 200+ feet of sidewalk and a driveway with a sideload garage isn't fun. Good exercise, sure, but it's a pain. Especially doing that on a Friday morning before leaving for work.

So since we got to play hooky Thursday night we were able to clean up the living room, vacuum and rearrange the couch so we can set up the Christmas tree soon.

On the food front, I can't think of a lot of new exciting stuff we've done for dinner lately. However, to take for lunches at work the last couple weeks I've been making some recipes I've found for bean, lentil, grain, and other hearty salads. E.g. Southwestern Lentil Salad, Mediterranean chickpea & pasta salad, Zesty Adzuki Bean Salad, and Quinoa Pilaf with Almonds and a couple others.

Now to clean up the kitchen and make some Cozy Baking Spice for sale. It's a pumpkin pie spice with cinnamon, ginger, cloves, mace, and nutmeg. I called it Cozy Baking though so it wouldn't be restricted to pie. I used it for Snickerdoodles a couple weeks ago, it's great on oatmeal or rice pudding, spice cake, etc. Virtually anywhere cinnamon would be used. We can hardly keep it on the shelf this season - we've already sold 22 so I'm making 12 more jars momentarily.

Hoping to get the Christmas decorations up today or tomorrow. If we're feeling ambitious, we might write up a Christmas letter and send some cards! Merry Christmas!