Day 27 of Give Thanks and Hanukkah

Well, I guess GreaThings is officially over. I have to wonder, though—I think she didn’t update the list from last year, because according to the list it said that today, the 27th, is Thanksgiving. But I know of a certainty today is Wednesday. So it should have actually started on the 14th. Oh, well. :) Now I’m back to just doing the Give Thanks! x7 challenge. Two things ticked off my to-do list for November: GreaThings and NaNoWriMo. Now just Give Thanks challenge and issue #8 of the JOJ magazine to finish editing, and I’ll mostly be done with the major things this month!

Now, down to business. I’m thankful for:

1. More rain! We got another 6 1/2 mm. (1/4 in.) today. Looks like it might get pretty warm Friday again…I’m sure the plants will shoot up if that happens!
2. Windows Live Writer 2012 (not the latest version—I like 2012 much better). I use it all. the. time. when I’m writing blog posts. I greatly dislike Blogger’s online editor!
3. Photo editing software—my top two are GIMP and Picasa. I use GIMP a lot. I have Photoshop Elements 7.0 on my old computer, but I’m not using that at the moment because it has a lot of viruses and the hard drive is failing. So I’m stuck with GIMP, and I’m learning to really like it. It’s fun to figure out how to do things on there—Google is SO handy!
4. Warm fires on chilly days.
5. Sliced banana and raisins in milk. Yum.
6. The game of Mancala. We’ve been playing it a lot these last two days. So much fun!
7. My messy room. At least I have a room to myself! Hopefully, I can finish sorting and packing everything that is on the floor soon. I just started sorting for our move Monday, and I have barely touched it yesterday or today. I need to get it finished tomorrow, though—I had forgotten how much I enjoy things being fairly orderly!

Did you know that today is the first day of Hanukkah this year? Hanukkah 2013 begins in the evening of Wednesday, November 27 and ends in the evening of Thursday, December 5. I asked my brothers to help me make a menorah out of an old board, and they happily complied. We drilled holes in the board to hold the candles up. It looks pretty rough and rustic, but I love it.

This evening, we lighted the first candle. I didn’t have time to make any Hanukkah treats, and I still need to finalise a menu for tea the last day of Hanukkah. But Mum put some chick peas/garbanzo beans in the soup tonight without thinking about the fact that Israelis use chick peas a lot, so I decided that was our special little bit of Jewishness in our meal tonight. For a hurried evening, I thought the first night of Hanukkah went over pretty well. Sadly, we don’t have any dreidels, though. Hopefully the boys won’t notice. We’ve never celebrated Hanukkah before. It will be fun to see what happens the next few days.

Alright. I think it’s about time to head to bed. Tomorrow is another day! (Still trying to remember where that last sentence/quote came from….)

~Esther