Getting in the Christmas mood

December has flown by in a blur of jewelry and displays, but here in the Nikiverse I was able to find time to do some traditional preparations for the holidays.
For the first time i attended the Mayor's Parade in beautiful downtown Hampden.

Well... by attend i mean that i was watching my friends' lovely antique store so that they could attend the parade. But the parade did go by the Parisian Flea so i was able to peek out whenever there weren't customers.







There were all of the necessary parade components: marching bands and drum corps from school and local clubs, dance troops dressed like santas,  drum and fife recreationists, and unbelievable pom outfits.

 I was surprised that there were actually big helium characters, like a sweet reindeer and the Raven.


It was hilarious to watch the handlers try to get them past the street banners.

As with any local parade there were businesses advertising with forced child labor: this construction business had an organ hooked up so that a little girl could play Christmas tunes.

Also there were groups of kids riding in the parade, waving and shouting and throwing candy, but somehow there is always that one kid who manages to be fast asleep in the middle of the mayhem.

There was a horde and a half of Shriners riding all types of various ridiculous vehicles, horses, a Harley club, antique cars and crazy pimped out hydraulic cars, but i was too busy selling jewelry to get pics.
I was barely able to catch a tail-end photo of the ginormous tree float that David (one of the Flea owners) had worked on with the local business owners - they were driving realllllllly fast, but David was able to jump in quick for a photo op.

For some real local flavor there were the winners of the annual toilet races (really) and the Oriole Bird, who got the biggest reaction of anything in the whole parade.

fTM Karen, Cricket and Nancy had me over for our tree trimming party. It is fun every year to see the ornaments again (except that one hideous glass Santa head that creeps me out, but Cricket loves so i have to put it somewhere that he can see it) and find new ways to place them on the tree. Cricket does tree construction and lights, Nancy is in charge of hooks while Karen and I make a bitchin' decorating team. We have the same homogeny/balance sensibility so we can work in tandem to get the job done right. There are no pics of the tree, however, cause i was kidnapped and whisked away to movie quote trivia with my old team. It was a super fun blast from the past and yes, we did win.
As i eluded to in a previous haiku i also made wreaths for the first time this year. My friend Sheri and I were meeting for lunch; she called right beforehand and asked if i knew how to wire wreaths as she was picking up a few greens.
Imagine my surprise when i found the entire backseat of her SUV filled with branches. I figured i'd spend some time helping her out since i knew the theory of wreath-wiring and she had no clue; seven hours later i was finally going home. Here is a quick and dirty tutorial for guerrilla wreath making.
Get some evergreen trimmings from local tree sellers, neighbors and your backyard. Have a friend carry them to your workroom (dining room), taking pictures of her along the way making it look like she is being attacked by foliage.

Sort out the branches by types (we have pine, spruce, cypress, holly and some wiggly stuff that i have never seen before and have no idea where Sheri found it) and lay out clippers, pliers, nippers and wire.

Decide on a shape - Sheri wanted a long swap for over her front door - and take long pieces of a sturdy wood to wire together as a backbone to your piece.

Be sure to check the size and shape for your chosen location.

Try not to laugh too hard as your friend tries to reach the base waaaaaay over her head.

Once you are happy with the base, wire together accent branches of various types, work them into the base and wire 'em in place

Now for the finishing touches: wrap the exposed wiring with ribbon, add a bow, wire in ornament clusters and hang that puppy up.

Sheri also had a square wire frame so i did a wreath for her by wiring layers and layers of branches directly to it, adding a simple bow and attaching it to an old window frame.

She insisted that i needed to make something for myself, but i was pretty tired by this point so i did a quick door swag of flat cypress, wired in some holly, added a plaid bow and a pretty gold bell.
Voila!

All that was left was to clean up the glittery, foresty devastation that was Sheri's dining room table.

Real wreaths smell so good and though it felt like it took forever to make them, I will probably do it again in the future.
I wasn't able to make it to AVAM's Sock Monkey Saturday this year, so i invited my upstairs neighbors down to make some at home. Anaya went with the traditional monkey shape in purple argyle to make Bob, but added a jaunty scarf and bracelet for the holidays.

Naomi decided to do a bear instead of a monkey, using striped holiday socks to create Candycane who is totally decked out from his starry eyes to his custom fur hat and boots.



Anaya and Bob

Naomi and Candycane

Some former co-workers and I tried to volunteer with toy distribution at the Salvation Army, but had the hours wrong so we ate stir-fry and did holiday baking instead.
Viva maple cupcakes with bacon, peppermint bark and the best candied almonds ever!
The last thing i did to really get ready for the holidays was drive to Ohio in a snowstorm - best idea ever!

It took 12 hours to go 440 miles, but i made it.
Mom and i have been busily decorating our new-to-us tree (my sister got a bigger tree this year so she gave us her old one- it is beautiful), finishing wrapping presents and preparing to host Christmas dinner for 10.

 

Hope you are all having a wonderful time surrounded by friends, family and love.

Turkey Hill experience

One of the very best things that happened in 2011 is that fTM Matt and his lovely wife Sara returned to the East Coast.

Yippeeeeeee!

The first thing we did together after they arrived waaaaaaay back in August was visit the newly opened Turkey Hill experience in Lancaster, PA. For those of you not from around these parts, Turkey Hill is a dairy that makes wonderful, wonderful ice cream. They also make fabulous flavored teas and have their own min-marts.

Matt and i tried to visit the dairy a while back, but they didn't have factory tours. ...so sad...

But as soon as i read that they had opened an off-site visitor center, i texted Matt and we made a pact to go once he was in the correct timezone.

Any place that has a giant cow overlooking a giant container of ice cream outside of the front door has got to be good, right?

Let us in!

please show some restraint

Built in an awesome old brick factory, the museum portion of the experience was upstairs. After some history of Turkey Hill and some biology of dairy cows [with Matt and Sara saying we have some of them and some of them and a calf of that... remember, Sara was raised on a dairy farm in PA] we got to the entrance

First up was the tea room where we learned all about brewing tea, different types of tea and why the machinery used in a dairy is well suited to be modified for making and bottling iced tea.
There was a fun interactive to find out what type of tea would be your favorite based on your personality; no lie, it picked the correct tea for all three of us.
Then there was the tea tasting area; you could try every single variety of their iced teas. It was fun to taste flavors that i would never normally buy.

The best place in the tea room, though, was the chill zone. Painted sky blue, there were cloud screens on the ceiling projecting a short film about Turkey Hill tea that you had to lay on your back on squishy beanbags to watch.

Very relaxing. 

Onto the ice cream discovery section we go -

right through a giant ice cream container.

This was an amazing exhibit.

Working in a museum i really pay attention to signage and flow-through and line facilitation and on-floor staff - probably more than your average guest.

I was impressed.
There was a ton of information, but all sorts of interactives as well.

First you have to make sure the milk is safe to process so we learned about microbes, both good and bad,

and then played a game to destroy the bad bacteria while cultivated the good.

After turning the milk to basic ice cream, there was a fabulous interactive on how to mix flavors. At these columns, you could emboss scents onto a card, mixing them in different ways to find ones that you liked.

Then it was time to make your own imaginary ice cream at a bank of computer terminals. Our tickets had an activation code so that once you were happy with your flavor and named it, the computer remembered it for the next station. Matt tried to recreate something like a flavor called Moose Moss that he'd had in Canada, Sara went with a coconut and pretzel mix (i think) called Quirky Lou and i created Nikilicious.

On to mixing, with a giant walk-through Disco Blender and i really hard game about the precision it takes to mix industrial amounts of various flavors. 

Time to create the packaging for our ice cream. Again, you just entered your code and up popped all sorts of designs that you could use. I'd never thought about how big the picture should be on the box or whether to have it in a bowl or on a cone. Very enlightening.



mmmmm... looks delicious
i'd buy it

As we waited in line for the last station - making a commercial for your product - i noticed a monkey sitting way up on a display. Why in the world would there be a monkey in a place all about cows?

A staff member told us that the managers place the monkey in a different place every day and the employees have to find it during the shift; so, basically all museum people are weird, not just me.

Once you were done with your commercial, there was a tasting area. they didn't have all of the flavors that Turkey Hill makes, but they had several that you could try.
There were also some mechanical cows to practice milking that were an engineering feat. Matt and Sara were both impressed that you had to use the correct finger rolling motion; I was just impressed that i managed to get it right.

Finally it was time to go downstairs to the gift shop and creamery for some treats!

All of the things that you did in the exhibit were put on a website and the address was mailed to you, which is how i have all of my Nikilicious stuff. Unfortunately, they only keep it posted for a certain amount of time, so when i went to pull Matt and Sara's things, they were gone.
But, because you've waited so patiently, here is me interviewing a cow - my hat was making me insane throughout the shoot, but you only got one take.

If you ever find yourself with a free afternoon in Lancaster, i highly recommend the Turkey Hill Experience.