Pre-Thanksgiving, family style

Yesterday we had our second of three Thanksgiving dinners planned for this year.  Do you remember the pool party last summer that didn't actually happen quite as planned?  Well, we finally had a chance to make up that missed event with the same two families and all their little people. 

I thought you might enjoy how it all went down in a normally very child-free environment!

A pre-Thanksgiving dinner

As Thanksgiving is a very American holiday (Canada has their own version not related to ours), and as I don't live in America, trying to celebrate it has been an interesting challenge over the years, often frustrating, sometimes amusing, always successful. 

In Paris, I let the American community serve itself and only invited my French and international friends to my house for as traditional a dinner as I could manage.  Down here, my friends are still quite mixed, but my American friends are not part of a larger American community, so I try to involve them, too.  However, I have too many friends to invite for one dinner, so this year I've broken it in three!  I thought I'd share how we enjoyed the first one last Sunday.

Working a vertical driveway

Not only did we inherit the driveway from hell, it's done nothing but fall apart since we've been here.  Being as parts of it seem almost vertical, we can't just fill in the holes it has developed; but as I want to redesign its shape, we've never done anything very permanent to it.  As the hillside had eroded down right near its edge, part of my project was building it out a whole lot.  So now it was time to try to make some kind of a finished edge between the driveway and hillside.

A blank canvas to landscape

No, I did not fall off the face of the earth since my last post.  Nor did I fall off the side of the hill I've been working on non-stop for the past two months.  I haven't even taken the time to share with you, nor done anything else productive in my life, trying to reach a reasonable stopping point, especially before winter weather strikes.  But now I finally have an empty palette to design.  I thought you might enjoy what it took to get there.