K's dad and stepmother moved out of AK this year, leaving us effectively alone in the state. It was heartbreaking, but I get it, dad still liked AK (if not the winters) but his wife was done, so they moved. That's love right there. That left us without anyone to celebrate the Holidays with. An awesome friend invited us to turkey day with her in-laws and the original plan was to spend it with them. Until we found out K's cousin not only really was moving back to the state, but was literally on the way, so we invited them to our place.

Which meant we needed to clean, no one comes to our house, not even friends, which means we tend to not notice what state the house is in. I'm not saying we are slobs or anything, but the house is usually cluttered and a visit is always a good reason to clean up. Since K works and I don't, usually, this mostly falls on me, which for the most part is fine…but my back means it takes a lot out of me and takes longer than it once would have. So for a few days before I put aside most of my crafts and cleaned, and cleaned, and cleaned. We didn't know where the Cousin would be living so I needed the sewing room (and click-clack) to be useable, just in case. Yeah, and the sewing room is generally a right mess, I have way too many crafts for the size of the room and horrible lack of storage in the whole flipping house.

K mostly worked on the unfinished addition/catch-all. It was a tight schedule, but it would have been fine…

…except first on the day before my washing machine started to smoke right at the end of the cycle. Sure that wasn’t a huge problem, but I did want the laundry baskets empty, and a house that didn’t smell like electrical smoke. But hey, that’s not that big an obstacle.

But the power going out around 8 pm the night before, that was a much bigger problem. K and I finished what we were working on by flashlight, then cursed the lack of light and the fact all our oil lamps, and most of the candles were at the cabin. :| It’s hard as hell to clean in a pitch-black house with only flashlights, not to mention you can’t vacuum, or in our case wash anything since we have a well and the pump is electric. Other than the stress of knowing some stuff wouldn’t get done and that the house would be messer than we hoped, the rest of the night was kind of nice. K and I played a board game until midnight thirty when the lights came back on. At that point, it was too late to really do much.

Turkey day had the issues you normally expect on that day, my roll dough acted weird, the turkey cooked way faster than we planned for, but ultimately it didn’t matter, we had a great day with the cousins! It’d been way too long since we’d been able to hang out with them and it was so fun getting back in touch. Having them at our house for the 6 or so hours there were here was worth all the interesting troubles, I’d have gone through twice that to have them over. THANK YOU B&K! It made our first holiday not having dad in state much easier.