Tuesday it was mentioned that I had made chili for the men’s group at church. Well, I was expecting we’d do like we did last year and every table (there are about twenty) would provide their own little mini potluck. Well, it was different in that it was a group-wide potluck in which the entire snack table was cleared off and everybody shared with everybody.

It’s a good thing I made a double batch, because the pot got cleared out very quickly.

In addition to THAT, yesterday I made a gingerbread house and put the pieces in the fridge to cool. Today we went out and bought the stuff I’d expect public school kids to waste their lunch money on when mom isn’t looking…candy. So we now have more candy than is healthy in the house, which is bad bad bad! But nobody’s stealing, so that’s good. So far I’ve assembled the walls and roof and the whole thing is on the verge of collapsing. I think I’ll take the Joy of Cooking’s advice and leave it sit for one to eight hours (eight being preferable). Actually wait. I DID let the walls sit for an hour before I stuck the roof on and that definitely helped. So for now, I’ll let it sit with the roof on for a bit longer than that, put the chimney, doors and shutters in and then start in with the decoration. In either case, we’ll see how it turns out.