Thanksgiving!

I'm incredibly excited about Thanksgiving tomorrow!

We have spent the holidays overseas, away from family, since our marriage began. Richard's first base was England, and now our second is Turkey. We lack the money and ability to make it home to see our family and the ones we love during the holiday season. Instead, we make a small family locally to share our holiday season with. Thanksgiving is my tradition (Christmas too, but that's a later post!)

Every year we have had others over to our home for a "family" style dinner. I still remember my first year as a spouse, cooking a giant feast for 10plus people (half of whom I didn't even know!) and it turned out amazingly! Since then, I conquer Thanksgiving with vigor and joy. I enjoy having people around me, and have always enjoyed cooking. Thanksgiving Thursday is my time to get together with a military family, whom would otherwise not have the joy of a "family" meal.

This year will be our biggest party yet! I find this kind of funny since we've only been at this base for a little over a month and a half...

Thanks to Richard's work schedule he has to work Thanksgiving day. ALL day... (He also has to work Christmas day... but hey! That is this life.) Anyways, we created our normal Facebook event because everyone knows it isn't official until it is Facebook official, and invited all of the people we had met and liked here. Then we decided to invite Richard's crew, and the other guys who have to work Thanksgiving with him. Now we have at least 20 people coming over! Most of them are here unaccompanied (without their spouses and/or children) or don't have anyone else to spend the day with. Which, I guess, is kind of all of us over here! It feels good to be surrounded by others in the same position as us. These people become our family when our real ones are unable to join us.

I will most definitely be taking pictures and posting another post either tomorrow or Friday. It might just be pictures, as I'm hoping there are no huge disasters that happen that would require me to actually write!

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I hope that if you are reading this and you are military, you know that you have a family in all of us.

I hope that if you are reading this and you have the pleasure to spend Thanksgiving day with your family, surrounded by those who love you, you will think of and pray for all of us small families overseas, all of those military members deployed, and all of those spouses back home wishing they had their loved ones.

So What if I'm Supposed to be Cleaning...

I may be cleaning at the moment... I may be sitting at my computer... typing... Or maybe I have a really long extra arm and I'm doing both!

Yeah. Who am I kidding. I'm so not cleaning right now...

Instead I keep walking around, picking things up, sweeping a small area, then wandering back to my computer to change a song I don't like on Pandora, or thinking about what I want to blog about, or checking my Facebook (why is Facebook so distracting!) I then wander into my daughters room to see what she's up to, which currently consists of pulling all the clothes out of the drawers in her closet and then putting them back in a rather more unorganized state than they were previously at... yeah. I just organized that dang closet two days ago!!

We have our shipment of household goods (HHG) coming in tomorrow (can I get a WHOOT WHOOT!), hence the reason I should be cleaning. I even put on some fun radio to try and spur on the 'cleaning momma' mood. Not working. Not working at all.

So since my body, my mind, or my whatever you want to call it has decided it wants me to write I'm going to share a happy memory that makes me miss my friends and family back home.

If you are friends with me on Facebook you may have noticed my status about my last job in America before I moved to England.

I worked at this fantastic little shop called Tribal Grounds Coffee from the time I was 16 years old until I left the country at 19 to begin my journey into military life, overseas living, and adventure! To say I loved this job would be an understatement. I ADORED my job. I loved immersing myself into coffee culture. And we are talking real coffee. Not that crap Starbucks calls a latte. Leon, my boss extraordinaire, was one of the best bosses I have ever had. Not only was he incredibly knowledgeable, passionate, and fair, he was also willing to learn from his employees. His passion stemmed into everything he did with the shop. It was here I learned all about latte art, customer service, the origins of coffee, and how to properly steam milk by sound and touch. I perfected skills that I still remember today! One of the few constants in my life was Tribal Grounds and the people there. When I was moved out of my house senior year of high school, when I left for college, when I was trying to get my Visa to England, Tribal Grounds and Leon were always there for me! I get serious cases of nostalgia when I think back to the amazing cups of coffee I would make for the locals and tourists. It was a great experience to have someone who was an avid Starbucks (or other non-independent coffee shop) goer tell you how the latte I had just made them changed their entire opinion of how coffee should be served.

I used to hang out at the shop on my days off with my friends, we would go to open mic night, I would flirt with my boyfriend, I made friends, and lost one whose presence I will always feel when going to that building. My job as a Barista is my best memory of the time of my transition from moody teenager to adulthood.

Leon has moved onto a new business in the bustling city of Durham called Cocoa Cinnamon, and I get so envious of the barista's who get a chance to work in such an amazing place! Leon and Areli (pretty much the best people ever) are creating a magical place that I hope to one day visit! If you get the chance to stop by, please do, and let me know how simply amazing it was (I doubt it will be nothing short of fantasmical).

And that is it for today... Thanks for joining me on my brain craziness of the afternoon!

These are two pictures taken during my first forays into latte art... I don't have any of my later designs or some of my best stuff unfortunately... That's probably because I was working.....

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