Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving!  Enjoy your family and friends.  Sorry, my Batman looks a little awkward and Superman clearly wears cowboy boots.

Love,
Marg

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DIY Last Minute Thanksgiving Table Setting

I hardly ever act as the host for Thanksgiving dinner, I’m the oldest of three adult children but as yet I’m unmarried.  My mom is still quite young at 50 and LOVES to host.  She is our hub, she is our home base.  She has perfected her turkey skills over years of trial and error.  She makes the turkey with stuffing, gravy made with turkey drippings, cranberry cool-whip salad, strawberry pecan salad, rolls, and bakes pre-made pies.  My step dad helps her with the turkey and said pies. 

My mom is Thanksgiving to me.  And also Christmas, and Easter, and Halloween.  She still works full time as an engineer and has a side job as a Pilate’s instructor.  There is no stopping this woman.

However, once every blue moon, I’m asked to host a dinner or little Christmas party, or Mother’s Day luncheon due to the fact that I live close to the airport and can accommodate out of town guests with tight flight schedules. 

Sometimes this happens with very short notice.  So for my ultimate Thanksgiving DIY, I wanted to show how you can put together a last minute table setting with stuff you can find around the house.  I’m assuming you all are crafters like me and have spare yarn, craft paper, and felt.  If you don’t, I encourage you to have some on hand.  You can make a million little crafts for birthdays, holidays and other special events.  

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Thank goodness for Thanksgiving!

The essentials.

Thanksgiving is not as flashy as Christmas, Halloween, Easter, Valentine’s Day or Fourth of July.   It stands alone as the least commercialized holiday in the United States.  There is no specific ceremony or opportunity to give gifts.  Of course it is still leaden with tradition, heavy with the expectation to gather with family.

Some hate Thanksgiving.  Hate the traveling woes or straight up hate their family.  We all have dysfunctional families.  We all have that one cousin or uncle that prefer to use the opportunity to air out grievances or use as a battlefield to incite new blood feuds.  Making the turkey course a little precarious right up through the dessert course, consuming pumpkin pie absolutely mortified.  This is the real reason there is a Kid’s Table.  Too much wine and too much turkey lead to the reveal of the family’s most salacious secrets.  That stuff is NOT for kids.

I used to dread what my family would say about my eventual weight gain, as it was customary for me to put on a few pounds after October.  I would hate having to squeeze into my nicest work clothes, as Thanksgiving was not special enough to merit a new outfit, unlike Christmas or New Year’s Eve.

I would hate the traffic to and from Austin to Dallas-Fort Worth for the Thanksgiving weekend.  Traffic once piled up so bad it took me 8 hours to complete a 3.5 hour drive.  We hate other people rushing around, with little regard to anyone else’s safety, to be with their own families.  Of whom we could care less.

But one Thanksgiving was different for me.  My father passed away days before.

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DIY Movember Magnets

 I'm not really sure if No-Shave Movember is still a thing, kinda of like how Fashion Night Out died a quiet death.  But who doesn't love mustaches?  It's one of the many hipster mascots that out there, along with cats, birds, and nerd glasses.

Like one my favorite Portlandia skits "Put a Bird On it", you can put a mustache on ANYTHING.

Just check Pinterest for "mustache" and you find coffee mugs, t-shirts, stickers, nail art, and more.  People are insane for anything with a mustache.

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(W) Reef Update #2

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas..... no, seriously.  My office building has already put up a giant wreath over the entrance and the Christmas lights up.

I get people wanting a head start on Christmas.  To FINALLY be ahead of the curve.  I get it.  I do.  Less than 4 weeks is not enough time for all the decorating, shopping, baking and spending time together that most people want to enjoy in December.

So I definitely sense a trend of people starting way early.

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DIY Pretzel Necklaces

In light of North Texas Beer Week, I wanted to provide a simple DIY for pretzel necklaces.  I like to make pretzel necklaces for brewery tours, beer festivals, beer tastings, and Oktoberfest.  Pretzel necklaces really have not caught on here in Dallas-Fort Worth despite our burgeoning craft beer scene.

You can simply string pretzels or go for a interlocking design like the one I made below.

You will need colored yarn, mini pretzels, and scissors.

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B*tch

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I called a co-worker a b*tch the other day.  I muttered it under my breath.  AND was overheard.  AND was confronted the next day by her boss and mine.

No big deal, right? But see we don't work at a nail salon, or a restaurant or any other semi-casual setting in which name calling occurs on a regular basis, like it's no big deal.  We work for a privately owned investment company run by a small number of general partners, that in another life worked as lawyers, business men, or IT geniuses.  There is a total workforce of about 70 people in all.  There is an upstairs floor and a downstairs floor, with a working elevator. There are several meeting rooms with black leather chairs straight out of any 90's era movie about Wall Street.  There is a tasteful lobby entrance with glass doors and a marble countertop. 

I work downstairs, nestled in the back corner of a cubicle farm.  I have business cards, my own direct number, a company email address, and even a gold plastic nameplate.  I talk to investors, financial advisors, and financial institutions from New York to Hawaii, from 9am to 6pm, 5 days a week. If I had called someone a b*tch, it was a HUGE deal.

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