Showing posts with label Indiana. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Indiana. Show all posts

Thursday, December 28, 2023

In Which the Key to Happiness is Raclette (and Twinkle Lights!)

There were a couple of new-to-me festive holiday activities that I wanted to try this year, because after all, what is Christmas without a glut of too many holiday activities? The Christmas tree farm and five Nutcracker performances and White Christmas Family Movie Night and one or two Krampus street festivals clearly aren't enough to sustain one. If one is truly serious about thoroughly exhausting oneself re: Christmas, one must ALSO drive over an hour each way to visit a Christmas market and walk the grounds of the art museum to see its light display!

I didn't really know beforehand what one does during a Christmas market, but happily we all arrived at Christkindlmarkt hungry, because to the best of my knowledge now, post-visit, what I *think* one does is stand around in the lines for various food stalls, then stand around and eat the food you bought, then walk past displays of nutcrackers and ornaments and those German wooden cut-out things for sale, then buy some more food and eat it.

The lines for all the food were super long, so we divided and conquered, with my partner and one kid standing in line for these weird spiral-cut deep-fried potatoes on a stick things, and me and the other kid standing in line for raclette sandwiches.

As the kid and I were standing at the end of the long line, she said something approximating, "Ugh, I'll be glad when we get closer to the raclette stand so we can get away from whatever this disgusting smell is."

I said, "Uhhhhh...."

If you don't like to smell gross things, I'm afraid that I have terrible news for you regarding raclette.

But look how festive it is!


This was my first raclette experience, as well, and checking out the view of the hyper-efficient raclette assembly was quite a lot of the fun:



But was it worth the wait (and the lingering scent of raclette)?

Friends, I only hope that I smile at my partner sometimes the way that I am smiling about this raclette sandwich:

And when the weird spiral fried potato on a stick envoy returned with weird spiral fried potatoes on a stick to eat along with my raclette sandwich?


Y'all, this may have been my most favorite culinary experience EVER. My previous most favorite culinary experience ever was the yogurt with Nutella and sour cherry spoon sweets that I ate for breakfast every morning on our 2017 Greece trip, but raclette sandwich and weird spiral potato on a stick now reigns supreme.

Who knows what even more delicious food the world might offer?


So... yeah. You stand in line to get stuff to eat, stand around and eat it, walk around to looky-loo at the pretty decorations and Christmas stuff for sale--




--and then stand in line to get something else to eat. To even out the sublime raclette experience, this Belgian hot chocolate was DISGUSTING. It tasted very... buttery? I'm terribly upset by the idea of drinking butter, and it turned out that so is everyone else, as it took the four of us splitting it to finish it off.


And no, don't ask why we didn't just toss it if none of us liked it. That requires far more common sense than any of us have. 

Fortunately, this crepe was delicious!


I had just about pushed through as many crowds as I felt like pushing through by the time we left to get to the Newfield's Winterlights. Every year the Newfield art museum puts up this light show on their grounds, and I'd finally reached a critical mass of Facebook friends posting about it to make my FOMO severe enough that I was willing to shell out genuine cash money for the purpose of looking at twinkle lights.


They WERE very pretty! 

My favorite was the landscape below, which was set up to twinkle along to music. When we walked up, it was just starting the Waltz of the Sugar Plum Fairy, and y'all KNOW how I feel about Nutcracker stuff this time of year!


I should have brought my DSLR, but my brain was in Quality Family Time mode instead of Cool Photography mode and I didn't think of it, dang it. So just imagine how awesome these shots *could* have been if I'd taken them with a proper camera instead of my at least five-models-outdated phone:





My other favorite spot at Winterlights was this pathway with the motion lights:


I am a sucker for motion lights! 

Christmas is VERY important to me, and every now and then, as the kids grow up, it hits me hard when I realize that they've outgrown one of our Christmas traditions. No more public library story times with Santa, no more Children's Museum winter exhibit (with yet another visit with Santa, ahem), no more doing a little Christmas activity or craft every single day in December. I don't even take the kids shopping anymore to pick out gifts, because they've got driver's licences and Amazon accounts!

One of the things that I had not anticipated, though, is how fun it actually is to try out new family activities as the kids grow. My little kids would not have had the patience to stand in a bunch of lines at Christkindlmarkt and eat a bunch of food and walk around and window shop, but my big kids love that kind of stuff... other than the overwhelming raclette miasma, of course. They would have enjoyed Winterlights even as little kids, but my partner and I would have spent all our own attention wrangling them and making sure they didn't wander off into the dark art museum grounds and didn't trip over extension cords or fall off decorative pedestrian bridges into tiny canals filled with twinkle lights, etc. Or maybe one kid would have been pitching a fit instead of just sulking quietly like a teenager. 

So I dunno. I'm still trying to find my way with these grown-up beings who used to be so small, but I think this was a pretty fair approximation of a holiday win. 

I do think that I can kind of still smell raclette, though...

P.S. Want to follow along with my unfinished craft projects, books I'm reading, cute photos of the cats, high school chemistry labs, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Wednesday, September 27, 2023

I'm Too Old for Junior Rangers, So Now I Collect Passport Stamps

Disclaimer: you're actually never too old for Junior Rangers; I'm pretty sure every national park will let you complete the workbook, take the oath, and pin the badge onto your T-shirt at any age!

HOWEVER, for my teenager's nineteenth birthday, I wanted to give her something that might recreate, for her, that enthusiasm that she always seemed to feel as a child for earning Junior Ranger badges. She has a huge collection of them, and I think took a lot of pleasure in earning new ones. Exploring new national park sites was something we've always loved doing together, and we have taken MANY a detour or special trip just to hit a new park so she could earn a new Junior Ranger badge.

So what might incorporate the same kind of fun?

The National Park Passport Book, I hope!

To that end, these were a couple of her summer birthday gifts from me:

And, because sending this kid away to college has made me realize how precious (and how ever more preciously few) are the activities that she and I love to do together... I bought myself the National Park Passport Book, too. Now we can collect passport stamps for every single national park site TOGETHER!!!

First up: a day trip to the Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial, sneaked in just a couple of weeks before she went back to college for the semester.

It's been several years since our last trip to the Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial, so I was able to tell Matt and the teenager all the same Lincoln gossip that I'd told them the last time, and they were able to pretend like I haven't also been telling this same gossip continually even when we're not visiting the memorial.


Fun fact: this area used to be a major breeding ground for the passenger pigeon. Sigh...


My favorite thing here, though, is always the living history farm!



The teenager was HORRIFIED to see me pull a couple of weeds in this garden. But hello, I would love it if some stranger would wander by *my* garden and pull a few weeds!




Here's the well where the family drew their water, now at the very edge of the national park site and bordering a residential street:


It was SO muggy when we hiked this trail that all we talked about was how on earth people managed without air conditioning back then. Did you know that until his dying day, William Faulkner refused to have air conditioning in his Mississippi home? Putting a window air conditioning unit in their bedroom was just about the first thing his widow did after his funeral...


Because I bought us the bougiest passport books, they also have spaces for national park stickers, which is apparently also a thing. Every year they publish a new set of ten stickers, each featuring a different national park site from a different region. Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial had several sticker sets in their gift shop, including the 2009 set that includes a sticker for the Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial, so I bought us both that one and then spent part of the car ride home busily sticking my new stickers in their correct spots.

I dunno if I'm sold on the stickers, though... They'd be objectively awesome if the images were good, but they weren't always. If I had to guess, I'd say that every national park site has to submit its own photo, and the small sites with limited staff maybe don't always have someone on staff to take a beautiful photo? 

Stay tuned to see if I end up buying more of the stickers, and DEFINITELY stay tuned for the teenager's next big college break, when she and I are going to knock some passport stamps off our to-do list!

Wednesday, September 28, 2022

A Maiden and a Rogue Walk into a Medieval Fair

You know you've homeschooled correctly when your teenager brings up the term "medievalism" all by herself, AND when she gripes about the term "Ren Faire" because everybody is cosplaying the Medieval period there, NOT the Renaissance.

It's been a whopping four years since we last went to this nearby Medieval Fair, a length of time that I can hardly believe since we had so much fun last time! This time, though, I think we had even more fun, especially because this time I wasn't the lone cosplayer. In fact, I actually gave my costume to Will, so while she looked awesome as a maiden and Syd looked awesome as a rogue (wearing the Halloween costume she sewed for herself also four years ago), Matt and I were the boring, modern-day tourists.

There was jousting-- 




--combat--



--and mounted archery--


--and in between the shows we wandered the vendor tents (I bought a book with a hidden compartment in it from Peddler's Chest, but Syd did not find the corset of her dreams--I think I'm going to have to sew one, ugh)--


--did the Scavenger Hunt--


--ate turkey legs and pulled pork, and sat in the sunshine and enjoyed ourselves:


Guess who's the most delighted person at the entire Medieval Fair?

Alas, for I did not use my time wisely, so in the afternoon I had to choose between the final show of the sword swallower and the final show of the fire breather, dang it.

I chose FIRE!!!




When it's not hosting a Medieval Fair, Clayshire Castle is a bed and breakfast and event space. It's fun to walk around inside it and pretend that you're a noble family with the festival going on outside your castle walls:





I LOVE the castle's own collection of cosplay garments!



At the ticket booth, the kids had to choose sides in order to receive their Girl Scout fun patch (they also had to give the Girl Scout Promise to the ticket agent, which was apparently horrifying, but they both did it!), and they both chose the just cause of the House of York. Here is their queen, standing next to the Lancaster queen:


I think my maiden dress must be cursed, because Will also got an awful sunburn while wearing it, oops. Or it's the fault of that tricky autumn weather--so hard to remember to reapply sunscreen when the temperature is so lovely and cool!

So after one last walk past the axe-throwing arena and the drinking horn vendors (so tempting!) and the chain-mail artisan, we headed home to put cold, wet washcloths on our red faces and eat Hostess Scarycakes (because yes, I DO have to buy every holiday-themed food that exists) for dinner while watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Because obviously your post-Medieval Fair chill-out movie can ONLY be Monty Python or A Knight's Tale. Do not even try me with any subpar non-Medieval alternatives, because I will not have it!