Gourmet Thanksgiving Dinner

I just finished packing the trunk of our car to the brim with leftovers and kitchen supplies. Since Bryn never does anything by half-measures, he had brought almost the contents of our entire kitchen with us to Yakima on Wednesday. After our early morning multi-hour drive out here, he baked bread and brined the turkeys and did other things while I spent the day working on a school paper. Then, yesterday he and I spent the entire day in the kitchen (with assistants at various times for prepwork and cleaning) and finally got dinner served at 7pm. I got to play sous chef all afternoon/evening. I'm not even going to try and list the menu except to say that Bryn planned it all out based on flavors, everything was made from scratch, and there was a TON of food. And since most of the people we were serving had gone off of weight-loss plans for the holiday, they didn't want all of the leftovers sitting around. So I think I'm going to be eating leftovers for a week unless we can convince some friends to come over and help us!

This morning, I woke up already exhausted from the day before. Now that the car is mostly packed, all we have to do is gather our last things and drive home and unload the car and reorganize our kitchen. I'm crossing my fingers that I don't get called in to work this weekend, but having said that, I know it will be inevitable.

Still, it was a nice holiday spent with family and friends. Next year though, I am all for having Thanksgiving dinner made from prepackaged ingredients (stovetop stuffing, canned pumpkin, etc)!

Forty-Hate Hours of Homework

It has been a WEEKEND! Spent all day Thursday finishing my Environmental Design project/presentation and did that on Friday. I was totally wiped out afterwards, but wait, there was more! We got out of class at 4pm and then I had to quickly come up with a 5-8 minute presentation about Georgia O'Keeffe (luckily, I had already gathered some research materials a few days ago) and get to the Seattle Art Museum by 5pm where our class gave individual presentations about specific works that were hanging there. That lasted until 8 and then I came home and crashed.

Saturday I started working on my Interior Studio project/presentation and ended up missing out on a bday party I'd planned on going to (heartfelt apologies to the Esquire and Snotty) and was up working until 6am. Slept for five hours and then was at it again today all day. Finally got my presentation ready and then spent a couple hours building a model and I'm done before midnight!

Now I just need to find time to write my research paper, put together a presentation on my research subject, and study for the essay test that are all due on Tuesday afternoon in my History of Interior Design class. And did I mention that I have classes all day tomorrow from 9am until 8:20pm? I'm sensing another all-nighter coming up. Feels like this should be finals... Oh well.

I posted some of the stuff I was working on today. Not sure how I feel about the interior renderings, I may have gone a little overboard with the Gaussian Blur in Photoshop! I was trying for a less stiff approach than my usual digital work. You wouldn't necessarily think so, but I did ALL of that stuff on the computer, the renderings, stair drawing, and floorplan diagrams.

Even though I'm exhausted and still have a ton of work to do, I feel really good for having gotten so much done. And it didn't hurt that Bryn was cooking up a test turkey with dressing tonight in anticipation for Thanksgiving next week (he's cooking). I'd never had a brine-soaked turkey before and it was seriously, hands-down the best turkey I've ever tasted. He also baked his own bread for the dressing/stuffing. Snacktacular!