Thanksgiving, Small Business Saturday, and Goblin Hunting.

1. Thanksgiving!

No major theme for Thanksgiving this year, but we substituted latkes instead of mashed potatoes and had a Jewish apple cake for breakfast as a nod to the first day Hanukah and Thanksgiving falling on the same day this year. We’re not Jewish, but we decided to try out some new recipes instead of doing the same old thing. I don’t have many photos from the day itself because not much was visually different from previous years, but I grabbed these two before the feasting.

 

     

 

The table before we loaded it down with food and my mom’s traditional elephant napkin holders. We used to use kids’ craft ones ages ago, but once those fell apart, my mom found these in her elephant collection and we use them for all the fancy holiday dinners.

 

But I had the opportunity to decorate my room for fall/Thanksgiving this year. The Thanksgiving decorations were in the clearance sections by the time Halloween was over, so I was able to grab some cool stuff for cheap.

 

    

Man, I love craft kits. Seriously. It’s ridiculous. You’ll roll your eyes at what I’m doing for Christmas craft kits. Also, apparently there are owls for every season. As I was grabbing these autumn owls from the clearance racks, I was walking past winter owls. Owls everywhere. I’m starting to miss other birds.

 

2. Small Business Saturday - New England Yarn and Spindle

We tend not to be Black Friday shoppers because it’s not usually worth it. Black Friday is usually Stay At Home and Eat Pie Day. We ended up leaving the house to go see The Hunger Games: Catching Fire because of my mom’s work schedule, but even that was crowded.

But I am all about Small Business Saturday. Starting a small business around here is hard. They often don’t last a year. A couple of years ago a yarn shop opened up just over the border in Bristol and we’ve been impressed and thrilled that they’ve stayed in business, so I decided to take advantage of their Small Business Saturday deal (20% off everything in the store) and support my local yarn shop.

 

 

Look at that gorgeousness. I’m pretty excited about all of it. I’m thinking I’ll sell a shawl out of that soft white/purple/blue in the lower right, there. I’ll do another Elf-like shawl, methinks. So stay tuned for that, folks.

3. Goblin Hunting

A few years back, a terrible smell started leaking into my bedroom from the ceiling whenever the heat turned on in the winter. It’s important to note that it only happened in the winter because I never smelled it when it was 100 degrees in the summer. Every winter, this smell would return for about a month and then would dissipate.

We figured that an animal got into the walls, chilled out in my ceiling, and then would get cooked and die when the heat kicked in. It started while I was still in college, so I would stick it out and cover up the smell with incense and candles while I was home and if the smell continued when I went back to school, my parents would do some in depth investigation, but the smell always stopped before I went back to school. This happened every year for two or three years and then it stopped.

It hasn’t happened in two years, but the smell started back up about a week ago and my parents decided it was time to take down at least a part of the ceiling and see  what’s happening.

Because the weird thing is that it would only smell in my room. It didn’t smell in the dining room except for right outside my door. It didn’t smell in the family room on the other side of the wall. It didn’t smell upstairs in The Gabbers’ old room or in the attic, which is unfinished and air from above the ceiling and behind the walls all circulates into.

So yesterday, while my dad and I both had off from work, I cleared out the worst smell corner of the room and dad took down the ceiling.

 

     

Dad brought the ceiling down and we were both expecting a wave of smelly death to come down, but once it was all open, the smell kind of… stopped. Dad found about a handful of fur, but no dead things or torn up stuff for a nest or anything. We decided to leave it open overnight to make sure we weren’t imagining things. Dad stapled up some garbage bags to keep debris from falling into the room overnight and I slept upstairs in The Gabber’s Old Room last night.

This morning, there was one brief mild whiff of the smell when the door was opened, but that was it. I’ve been in here doing stuff all day and there have been only a handful of times where there was a faint trace of that smell by the door for just a second. It just smells like sheetrock dust and regular room smell 85% of the day.

Also, my mom’s gotten a whiff of the dead smell once  in two different places in the house that are not adjacent to this room.

So, you know… goblins are messing about in the ceiling to annoy everyone.

Dad’s going to put up new ceiling tomorrow with a vent to see if it was a weird pressure issue between my room and the space in the ceiling, but if it comes back strong, we’re moving my junk up into The Gabber’s old room for real and using this room as storage.

Normally, I’d start putting Christmas stuff up all over, but I’m waiting for the ceiling to go up so I can put all of my normal things back into the corner.