3″ of snow in 3 hours. Wet snow.

We need to put the roof vent in on Monday. They’re forecasting 40 degrees right now. Our weather is nothing if not indecisive.

We made a brief foray to Costco, and decided to come on home—it was very slippery, and there were the usual crazy drivers who hadn’t planned to have to go slower.

We’re also going to mulch the roses Monday. We hope.

We’re not going to get this kitchen finished before January. But we have enough cleared for Christmas trees. We don’t go for stylish: we just have collected so many ‘favorite’ or meaningful ornaments over our lifetimes that we have to have 2 trees. We don’t have room for a really big one, but we can fit two smaller ones in—in the same room.

We’re now mostly in a cleanup stage, getting the drywall dust cleaned up, and so on.

I’ve promised Jane Mandarin Chicken for Christmas, which mostly consists of chicken, salt pepper, clove and cinnamon, plus mandarin oranges, stirfried; and sauced with a reduction of mandarin oranges and cinnamon. Goes well with baked sweet potatoes, and also with cranberry sauce.

Our family recipe for cranberry sauce is: cranberries, raw, sent through a hand grinder (coarse) with seedless orange slices and either walnuts or pecans: it’s not jellied, but kind of a real sauce, and if the oranges don’t supply enough sugar, you do need to add a bit, to taste. Real easy to do and quite good on its own: as a kid, I always used to have a whole bowlful of it just for itself.