Category Archives: family

Christmas at Camp Waterloo

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Christmas rolls. From the joy of cooking — a really good recipe, although Bailey ate half of them, and after a few days they were a bit hard.

The Christmas star!

The Christmas Jax! We get these every year, because you can’t buy Jax in Michigan, and they are our favorite cheese doodle.

This is Barefoot Contessa’s Sour Cream Coffee Cake.

This is the strudel for the coffee cake. In my opinion, this strudel could stand to be doubled, to add a more delicious layer to the cake.

This is a lake, by my sister’s fiance’s cottage. There are bikers on the lake….Jon assured me that it’s frozen enough…I wasn’t so sure.

I stopped to take a picture of this farmhouse. It was pretty. I don’t know who lives there, but they probably think I am creepy.

We played a lot of cards.

We had some coffee. With friends. We laughed. We gossiped. Some friends are forever.

How many pizza doughs?

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Tonight we had pizza night at Camp Waterloo. There were many people on our list (I think we counted 51, without our six) and we had many pizzas to make. I said we should make no more than 18 pizzas, and my mother scoffed at this. 25 was the number of pizzas that was settled on.

When I asked how many garlic cloves I should chop, my mother replied, “Four.” She meant heads. Four. heads. Of garlic.

I meant to take pictures. But soon, we had many friends over, and when I got back to the kitchen, it seems as though everyone was leaving. It was lovely to see A, B, K, and N. They are lovely ladies that I never get tired of laughing with. So I only got a few shots, which I will upload and share with you. Mostly of the massive amount of dough in my kitchen.

This is what I come from. This is why Jeff understands me. Because sometimes, when we’re having only two other people over for dinner, Jeff says, “Let’s make three. No, four. Do you think that’s enough?” Sometimes we have twenty people in our apartment, and sometimes we have all our wine glasses dirty. But we keep doing it anyways.

It’s the Italian in us. It’s who we are.

Tonight, we clean up after 50 close friends. Tomorrow we’re making the Feast of the Seven Fishes. We’ll be cooking all day long, making, among other things, ten pounds of shrimp. It’ll be a day of all days.

And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Triathlon Blues

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This is my sister.

This is her climbing a wall in LA. She’s afraid of heights, but when she came to visit, she insisted we go rock climbing, as it is something she wanted to try.

Nikki is having a little Triathlon Blues this week, and who can blame her? Her Tri is less than two weeks away, and she’s sick of getting up early, of only ever working out, and probably sick of writing about it. That’s where I come in.

When my sister and I were younger, we both played soccer. She was better (but I still maintain I was faster.) We played piano: she was better. We both wrote (she was better) and we both took joy out of being mean to each other (she, most definitely, was better.) I had a blog: she wanted one. (Hers is funnier.) Although I am mostly better at bossing people around, and baking, she is better than most things. I’d like to think it’s because she is two years older, so two years wiser, but I suspect it’s because she maintains the attitude of “oh yea? I can’t do whatever I want, just because I am a woman, short, and don’t have much directional sense? Watch me.”

And so, when my sister, who used to share an equal hate with me of running, declared that she loved running and was going to do a triathlon, (the idea of my sister swimming in open water made me laugh and want to call the Coast Guard all at once) I wasn’t that surprised.

She ran, a lot. She had already run 5ks, and a half marathon. With hills. Which had ALREADY surprised me.

She started swimming because the doctor told her she couldn’t run. Tendinitis be damned, this girl was GOING to work out, and you couldn’t stop her. This was nearly a year ago, and she’s now up to swimming a full mile, in OPEN WATER. Do you think I’ll be hoping in the Pacific any time soon to swim a mile? (Nope, not after this year’s special on Great White Sharks, and also, I can’t swim really…)

Then, girl writes on April 1 (so let’s be honest, she could have been joking) that in August she was going to do a Triathlon. SERIOUSLY? Is there nothing my sister won’t do? All I do is yoga, Nikki: you’ve beat me. You can stop now, I swear.

In June, my sister bought a bike.

For those of you who don’t know, my sister and I learned how to ride bikes at the same time. I am pretty sure I was up and off training wheels first. Her coordination is lacking, and although I bike through the streets of LA, I couldn’t foresee my sister EVER wanting to do so in Chicago. But here was the evidence, on her blog, of her, fearless (almost) and biking to the lake.

So let’s go over the timeline, one more time:

October, 2009: My sister gets tendinitis, and is told she can’t run. So she swims.

April 1, 2010: My sister decides that she’s going to do a triathlon.

June 11, 2010: She buys a bike

July 14, 2010: She gets into the open water for her first open water swim.

August 29, 2010: My sister will be doing her first triathlon.

Unfortunately, I won’t be there to cheer her on, and see how awesome she does. But for now, I am basically trying to tell her (and you, so you can tell her, too) that she is going to do fine. Better than fine. Great. Wonderful. She is doing something that I have never even considered. She is doing something that a year ago I would have found crazy. She has trained for almost 5 months for something, devoting most of her free time to it, and Tendinitis, coordination, avid triathletes be damned: she will win, because she will finish. And then, by September, she will be on to a new crazy project: the next one, I hope, will involved yoga, and getting herself to a handstand. Nikki: you will be wonderful. Get get ’em.