Taking The Long Way Home

It was a most wonderful, and successful Vegan Thanksgiving here, with a full table, overflowing plates, good wine, and lots of love. Think you can't have a Holiday Feast without a dead animal artfully displayed on the table? Think again, my friends! I've cooked a lot of Thanksgiving dinners in my time, and I know my way around a turkey. Normally you'll hear the opening round of compliments to the chef - The turkey is perfect! So moist! Who made the green bean casserole? I love this stuff! Pass the potatoes , etc... and then talk turns to other things, depending on the group around the table. This was the first time in all my years of feeding people that the conversation pretty much stayed on the food. I went all out and cooked for two days straight, creating a meal like non of us had ever experienced, and it was awesome , if I do say so myself. You can read more about it on my other blog, PositivelVegan , and get all the menu details and recipes. Try one dish at a ti...

I wonder what most of us are thinking more about - Thanksgiving, or Black Friday. I'm hosting a small family feast this year, and my vegan menu is pretty extensive, largely experimental, and probably more labor intensive than I think it will be. That's where my energy is going this week, from list making, to recipe notes, to shopping and prepping ahead wherever I can. I'm excited to be doing all this, so it's not a chore. I'm thankful that I can do all this, and I'm doing it because I want to. The Taos Folk Holiday Show that I'm in starts Friday though, and even though I thought I was prepared for it, it's taking up more of my time this week than I want it to. Set-up is not the streamlined event I'd imagined. I was led to believe I would drop my inventory off yesterday, and the show's designer would display it artfully for me. Not so... I don't even want to go into the details, but I will say I spent several hours there yesterday, doing a...

I've been putting a lot of thought and energy into the Taos Folk show, which starts the day after Thanksgiving. I need to have my inventory there on Monday, which means I have a lot of organizing to do over the weekend. Since I haven't done a show of any kind in several years, I'm thinking a lot about just why I'm doing this one. Sure, I hope to sell some beads and make some money, but really, for me, it's more about adding to my customer base. Whether or not people buy my work at the show, there's great potential for getting them to shop on my website later. I need to make the most of the exposure a five week show can bring, and I want to keep shoppers interested for years, not just weeks. The show promoter is happy to have her artists do all the shameless self promotion we want, so I'm working on a guest book, where I hope to gather a lot of email addresses for my Beadist Mailing List. To entice people to sign up, I'm entering all new subscribers ...

It's been years since I've done a show of any kind, and the time has come to get myself out there again. Please join me, and many other talented Taos Artists, for Taos Folk. It runs from nest Friday, November 25 (the day after Thanksgiving) until Christmas Eve. We'll all be there opening night, with good food, great, affordable gift items for everyone on your list, and lots of festive fun. If you come to Taos for the show on any other day, and would like me to meet you there, send me an email and I'll schedule it in! For more information, visit the TaosFolk website . I hope to see you at the show!

My friend and neighbor, Kat Duff, has just started a wonderful, entertaining, informative blog called the Secret Life of Sleep . Kat is working on a book on the subject, and has attracted the interest of two different publishers, so I trust we'll get to read all about it eventually. Until then, I look forward to her blog posts, where I'm already learning some interesting things about why I'm up in the middle of the night, reading a blog about why I'm up in the middle of the night. I know I'm not alone in this! Here's to a good night's sleep, or at least part of one!

When my post about Sushi was featured on BlogHer the other day, the editor over there gently suggested that I get myself on Twitter. Excited to be a featured blogger, I was eager to please. I had tried Twitter once before, but never really caught on to what to do with it. I could figure out how to tweet, but couldn't figure out why I should. Still, I decided to give it another go, so I re-opened my Twitter account, updated my information, and loaded the app to my phone. Okay. All set. Now what? First maybe I should explain what I'm doing on BlogHer in the first place. I write both of my blogs on Blogger. It's where I started out, and I like and understand the software. TakingTheLongWayHome is more of a personal journey sort of blog, so I've been happy to have it sit in one place, waiting to be found by people who know me. But when I started PositivelyVegan , I knew I wanted to try to reach a larger audience, and I knew they were out there somewhere, all the newly ...

I have three cameras. One is a nice Sony Something-or-Other that I take bead pictures with. It's lets me adjust lots of things, and have more control over my pictures, but it's too big to carry everywhere. So I also have a cute little pink Olympus that fits in even my smallest purse. It does some pretty cool things too, and used to travel everywhere with me... until I got my iPhone. When phones these days have cameras that can do the job on an everyday level, there's little need for me to haul around extra gadgets, so I've been putting the phone's camera to the test. Granted, there aren't a lot of settings to fiddle with, so there's not a lot of control, but in the right light, or even in the right moment, I can get some very satisfactory photos. I'm certainly not a professional photographer. I don't know my aperture from my elbow. But I like to try to capture what I see, and if it's ever possible to have a camera implanted in my eyes, I'll...

Spring forward, fall back. Phooey! I think Daylight Saving Time is kind of silly, and wish we'd just quick messing with Time. I could move to Arizona, where they've stopped trying to outsmart daylight, but I'm happy in Taos, so I pretty much ignore clocks all together, except on the two days a year when I have to try to remember where all the clocks in the house are, and then reset them all one hour in the appropriate direction. This morning I woke up when the sky was light, like I usually do, and didn't think about the time at all. When Rick mumbled that it was "really" only 6:30, I said, I don't care. I'm awake , to which he replied, I wanna be like you... And we both got up and started the semi-annual Clock Hunt. It's sort of like an Easter Egg Hunt, and as with hidden eggs, even though we're the ones who hid them, there's always one that goes missing. Fortunately, our computers and phones reset themselves. They're so smart. But...

I never seem to have time to read, but for some reason I've been ordering a growing stack of books lately. Cookbooks are my favorite, and I'm adding nutrition books to the list to help me with PositivelyVegan . I guess it's all a business expense, but it doesn't matter. I'd buy them anyway. I'm also ordering various books to give as gifts this holiday season, but to be honest, most of them are for me. There are no novels in the mix, which is odd. Normally I enjoy checking out of my own head and into someone else's for a while in the evenings, usually at bedtime. But now I don't care much about fiction because the new and ever-changing realities of our world are so fascinating to me. I've been listening to things like the Aware Show and Hay House Radio while I make beads. Maybe that's where all this is coming from. There are so many interesting people out there, talking about cutting edge, changing-world stuff, and of course all of them have a...

The last few days have been absolute Taos Perfection. We do a fabulous Halloween here, and this year it felt like it went on for days . There was a quiet spot in the revelry on Sunday evening, when we went out to watch the sunset on the mesa with friends. It's a magical place out there, with enormous views in all directions. I stood in one spot, and took pictures all around me as the sun slipped lower and lower, and the light changed with each passing moment.  Halloween has its own wonderful, but very different sort of magic. The whole town gathers in costume in the plaza area, and while the kids beg candy from the local businesses, adults visit and enjoy the small town spooky celebration. It was such fun to have our little grandson Jacob along this year, for his first Halloween at 6 months old. He is truly a magical part of our lives. And here we are at the start of another November. Already? I feel like we're living in a time warp, where nothing, especially time, behaves ...