Happy Thanksgiving!

We enjoyed our Turkey Day with Glenn's sisters, their families and friends, and his mom. Had plenty of smoked pork and turkey, with all the trimmings, and then a great nap in front of the TV while the Cowboys' trounced the Raiders. We contributed a giant salad, containing as many vegies as we could find, some homemade dressing and some cranberry relish. The latter was inspired by the poem below, found on Writer's Almanac on November 14. It took four days to "simmer" and was incredible!

Cranberry-Orange Relish

by John Engels

A pound of ripe cranberries, for two days
macerate in a dark rum, then do not
treat them gently, but bruise,
mash, pulp, squash
with a wooden pestle
to an abundance of juices, in fact
until the juices seem on the verge

of overswelling the bowl, then drop in
two fistsful, maybe three, of fine-
chopped orange with rind, two golden
blobs of it, and crush
it in, and then add sugar, no thin
sprinkling, but a cupful dumped
and awakened with a wooden spoon

to a thick suffusion, drench of sourness, bite of color,
then for two days let conjoin
the lonely taste of cranberry,
the joyous orange, the rum, in some
warm corner of the kitchen, until
the bowl faintly becomes
audible, a scarce wash of sound, a tiny
bubbling, and then
in a glass bowl set it out
and let it be eaten last, to offset
gravied breast and thigh
of the heavy fowl, liverish
stuffing, the effete
potato, lethargy of pumpkins

gone leaden in their crusts, let it be eaten
so that our hearts may be together overrun
with comparable sweetnesses,
tart gratitudes, until finally,
dawdling and groaning, we bear them
to the various hungerings
of our beds, lightened
of their desolations.

"Cranberry-Orange Relish" by John Engels, from Sinking Creek. © The Lyons Press, 1998

Avon Calling

Whew! It's been a while since I've updated this! I am still alive and well; still living in Austin; still looking for work.
This is a time of year for family-type events. I've been to a wedding, on my new mother-in-law's side of the family; attended a funeral, for my former father-in-law; and a gone to an inspirational memorial service, for a close friend of a long-time acquaintance. Over the next month, I expect additional family gatherings, as traditional over the holidays.
A project emerged from the death of my former father-in-law, which will keep me very occupied until gainful employment is found. His late wife was an Avon Representative for over thirty years, and had collected a broad variety of bottles, plates, figurines and jewelry throughout the course of her career. These were stored in sturdy boxes, in a non-climate-controlled cabin, in the woods of East Texas, and retrieved by my ex and my husband shortly after the funeral. I have stored, in a friend's unused garage, roughly 65 boxes filled with 20-30 items each. I've inspected the contents of nearly half the boxes so far.
While many of the cologne and aftershave bottles were created and sold specifically to be collector items, so many were produced that they have no great value, even thirty years later. Many of these pieces are dusty and dirty, and many boxes show signs of mold and deterioration. Some pieces look exquisite; some are quite tacky; some should have been tossed a long time ago. However, it has been an interesting journey through the tastes and values of middle America in the 1970's and '80's.
While the prospect of doing an inventory, and, further, cleaning all of the products for re-sale has been daunting, I am motivated by the fact that I am doing something my late ex-mother-in-law would loved to have done, to pass on to her grandchildren. She marked many of the boxes with their original sale price and year, so I know she was saving them as an investment. She would have been very disappointed to hear that some are worth less than half the price for which they were sold; but pleased that she had gathered so much, that it will add up to a fair amount of change if I can find enough buyers. I plan to put some of the nicer pieces on eBay; then hold a massive Avon Estate Sale once my inventory is complete. If that is not successful, then I will look into creating an on-line store. I am becoming more familiar than I ever wanted to be with the price of many categories of items, but it will serve me well as I begin to auction the pieces off.
For now - anyone interested in a little Avon?