Spring Tea

Last week I hosted a spring tea for Peggy’s birthday. Our weather has been so cold and rainy so it was a bummer that we couldn’t sit on the back deck but we made do inside. I bought this vintage tablecloth on eBay and it arrived just in time to be washed and ready to go!

I used the blue dishes Karen gave me for my birthday and added these strawberry & butterfly dishes that Peggy gave me. The butterfly glasses were also a gift from a book club member who moved away.

Karen, Susan, and I made the food. We ate ham salad and cucumber tea sandwiches, Helen Corbitt’s chicken salad, fruit salad, and scones with whipped cream and strawberry jam. I made May Day cocktails—I’ll share the recipe soon! They are so perfect for spring!

For dessert, we had petit fours from the Forest Park Bakery. They were such a fun treat and made a pretty addition to the table.

It’s so nice to be hosting again and I always love using my vintage treasures. Hopefully more tiny parties can continue through the spring and summer. I’ve missed them.

Our Pleasant Homes Book Club Turns 20

February was our book club’s 20th anniversary. Because of Covid numbers, we waited to celebrate together in March with a 1920s party. (You can read more about why we chose a 1920’s theme on this post that talks more about the history of the group.) Sadly we were missing Virginia, who is only one of two original members still with the group, but we had a great time and really landed the theme!

Susan decorated the table with many old copies of books we’ve read. It was so fun to reminisce about each book–it’s also amazing how many we forget reading! We ate tea sandwiches, Waldorf salad, stuffed celery, relishes, deviled eggs, pineapple upside down cake, chocolate phosphates, and Southside cocktails.

We read Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground, which was written in between his novels Native Son and Black Boy in the 1940s, but not printed until last year. It was a really good, but really tough book.

I’m so thankful for this group and for a chance to talk about old books.

Hasegawa Tiki Night

We’ve been laying low this month since Covid numbers are up and several close calls have been had. To entertain ourselves last weekend, we had a little tiki night for two. You may remember our Fondue Fun Fest and our Hasegawa Supper Club from 2020–this was like that but so much easier since we took some help from take-out this time!

We re-used decorations and our playlist from a past tiki party. It was pretty low-effort, I admit, but it really did give us something to look forward to. I love party planning and trying new cocktails, which is something I’ve really missed during the whole pandemic.

I got some craft orgeat for Christmas so I’ve been trying to use it up in cocktails I don’t get to make often. (I have made my own orgeat before, but I always end up with lots of leftover ingredients that go to waste.) So, we started out with Mai Tais before we realized that we didn’t have enough rum to make a second round of rum cocktails. (We hardly ever drink rum…we’ve had the same bottles for almost 10 years! Very excited to try something new soon!) I turned to the internet for some other ideas and found this recipe for Inside the Suns. It was as if the internet took a look at the back of my liquor cabinet and threw together some neglected bottles into a very tasty drink.

For our dinner, we made Pioneer Woman’s cashew chicken and we got fried rice and crab rangoon from a local Chinese restaurant. Now, I know what you’re thinking…”Isn’t this just Chinese food with tiki drinks?” I’ll leave you with this fascinating story that explains the connection.

Happy Birthday, Naoto!

Happy birthday to this guy, who keeps us all together and fed and laughing and loved every day. In true Naoto fashion, he is working all day, but hopefully we can make up for it with a fancy sushi dinner tomorrow. ❤️

Forest Park Public Library’s Grand Re-Opening

For the past several months, our library has been under construction and finally, last month, it was officially re-opened. There was a huge celebration with food and activities and Shelly the Library Turtle. The library, in its current form, had been around since 1995 so some changes were due. They moved offices downstairs and opened the main floor up so the patrons could enjoy the light and they built study rooms for patrons who need a quiet space to work and community rooms for programming. They also gave the carpeting and furniture a face lift. We were clearly there to see Shelly the Library Turtle. Oh, and the cupcakes.

Almost 600 people came to the library re-opening party, which is pretty amazing in a town of 15,000. I’m super excited that regular programming is back at the library. I’ve gone to small business planning workshops, cooking demos, a yogurt making workshop, screen and block printing workshops, letter writing meet-ups, and so many other great programs there.

Does your library have great programming? I always love to hear what other libraries are doing. If you don’t go to events at your library, goooo! It’s a fun, free way to get out into the community and to support your local library so they can continue providing great services and events. And really, how many things are free these days? (I know, I know…we pay for it with our taxes, which is all the more reason to use the library!)

P.S. I still have quite a few Japan posts in the works so we’ll return to those soon!

Nengajō Day

When we decided to go to Japan over the new year, I was so excited to send nengajo! On January 2nd, Naoto took me to the post office at Tokyo Station so I could write my postcards and send them with new year stamps. I bought these cards at Loft on New Year’s Day. It’s the year of the rat, so I ran with the mouse theme. The Japan Post issued these cute stamps for 2020. There’s some kind of lottery involved with them, but since I sent them overseas, I’m not sure what a winner would do if their number was drawn. I wrote all of my postcards in the letter room at the Kitte mall while Naoto entertained himself at the station master’s desk. Something new since the last time we visited is this &Post mobile letter writing truck. We didn’t get to see the truck in action but I’m following it on Instagram to see what happens. They also had this book, Letters by Noriko Kudo. I love the colored pencil drawings and the collaged pages with handwritten letters. (I’ve been on the hunt for a copy of my own since we got home…I want to add it to my library of mail books. I wrote the last of my nengajo on the Narita Express on the way to the airport. I also stocked up on some postcards for next new year because there were so many good ones! (Of course those don’t have mice or the year 2020 on them!)

P.S. There is a special mailbox for the nengajo.

Valentine’s Mail

I’m very behind on my mail this year…these went out the day before Valentine’s Day and it’s just the tip of the iceberg of what I have to return. But hey, who doesn’t want some good red and pink mail all month long? I think the next time I go to a stamp show, I need to look into some more pink and red and love stamps…

I’m hoping to work on some mail today. I feel weird mail guilt about not participating in Letter Month like I usually do. But more than that, I miss sending mail and I have all this Japanese stationery to use up!

Are you participating in a letter writing challenge this month?

P.S. I’m back-dating some posts from December that I wanted to include for my own memories, but I don’t want to have Christmas content on the blog in February. I’ll try to link them on a current post as I finish them. If you follow the blog, sorry for the out of order content in your inbox!

Book Club Christmas Tea 2019

Last weekend was our annual book club Christmas tea and it was delightful, as usual. We had four kinds of sandwiches (egg salad, shrimp salad, roast beef with provolone, and cilantro chicken salad,) two kinds of scones (cranberry-orange and bacon cheddar,) Christmas cake, grape salad, and Christmas punch. I love a good tea sandwich so I ate way too many and also floated away from all the tea. Stasia brought corsages for everyone so it felt especially fancy. I think corsages are under-utilized and I’m going to demand one for every birthday from now on. We read PG Wodehouse which was enjoyable, but I read it all in a couple days so I was sort of Wodehoused out by the end. The writing is really charming though so hopefully I’ll be ready to tackle a short story here and there in the future. We always have party poppers with crowns, mustaches, and jokes. Reading the jokes and guessing the riddles is always my favorite part of the day. Three cheers for good book discussions in 2019!

Thanksgiving 2019

Thanksgiving seems like a really long time ago…I feel like I’ve already been swept into Christmas without a minute to catch up. I feel like with Thanksgiving being so late this year, the rush to start Christmas mode was really strong. We always get our tree right after Thanksgiving, so that didn’t really change, it just felt more hurried.We had a craft show on Small Business Saturday, so that sucked up some time, but I have to say, this is the first year in eleven years that I didn’t work on Black Friday and it was heaven! My parents stayed for part of Friday and we all went to Ikea together and it was just nice to relax with them and not be “on” at a store. (For many reasons, being “on” at a craft show is so much less exhausting.)

Anyway, Thanksgiving was small and lovely like always. This year, Naoto cooked a turkey breast in the crock pot and he really liked that. He felt less stressed, and we had fewer leftovers, which is great. I know Thanksgiving leftovers are a thing but I personally hate eating the same kind of thing over and over again and we’re really trying to lower our food waste, so fewer leftovers are a good thing around here.

I set the table kind of the same way as I have been, with vintage plates and books and a few little thrifted things. I didn’t even make place cards this year! I enjoy setting the table and making place cards but also, I enjoy doing other things, so I’m trying to put less pressure on myself to do all the things when it’s not always necessary. Sometimes work and craft show prep takes over. It was my mom’s first visit to Ikea and I think she enjoyed it, even though she didn’t find any curtains for her living room. I was a little bit worried about going out on Black Friday, but Ikea was pretty tame…a good day for trying out all the chairs and couches! Now, onto Christmas…

We are hosting a little party tonight after Forest Park’s Holiday Walk so after work, I have to finish cleaning for that…as busy as it feels today, I’m glad we are hosting something because it forced me not to drag out the decorating. (I never really finished decorating for Halloween because there was no deadline. I didn’t want that to happen with Christmas.) It’s just a low-key affair with some local friends and Trader Joe’s snacks and maybe a fancy punch…I can’t wait.

Have a good weekend!

James & Presley’s Avocado Birthday Bash

This weekend we hosted a little joint birthday party for Presley and our friend James. They share a birthday week. I found an avocado dress on Amazon and avocados were “on trend” this summer at Paper Source, so we decided that was a perfect theme. Presley took to wearing the dress pretty well, but we didn’t leave it on her more than fifteen minutes, as I think dressing her up is cute but I also don’t believe in torture. Naoto made an avocado corn salad and Korean beef tacos. Karen made bruschetta and a key lime pie. I made yuzu sidecars. I borrowed the giant hanging avocado decorations from the Paper Source window and used a kit to make little avocado place cards.Naoto’s was my favorite…Presley’s too…Presley ate rotisserie chicken for her birthday meal since she’s not a fan of tacos and corn salad.She is, however, a fan of her new avocado catnip toy from James. I keep finding it in different places when I wake up in the morning.

It was a fun night. We haven’t really been hosting very much this year, and I kind of missed it. Maybe we’ll have a few more opportunities to have people over this fall.