November's Massive Mutti Missive

Dear family –

November was the month I finally got my website launched. As you all know by now, having suffered through my various iterations, it is LindaHoffmanKimball.com and highlights my (cough, cough) professional life as a writer and illustrator. Given that I first planned to create a website when Chase was about 14 and he made me a first version, this goal has been a long time a-comin’. Sometime I’ll create one for my photography and, when I ever get back to making any, to my “fine art.” Let’s hope it doesn’t take another ten years. In fact, given that the skills I learned making my current website are still relatively fresh, I should probably get onto that before I have to re-learn everything.

Speaking of websites, here’s a shout-out to Britta for creating the blog Life and Times of LH Kimball on blogspot: http://lhkimball.blogspot.com/. I just checked it out an presumably I was supposed to post the October update there but life has been too much of a whirl. I will, though. It’ll be a double whammy. This one and last month’s…unless BCKI wants to beat me to it.

Wanting to reap the most bounteous harvest of Christmas greetings this year, I turned to creating our Christmas family letter and had it ready to send right after Thanksgiving. This involved signing up for a free trial period of Adobe Illustrator to make use of their “writing text in a spiral” feature. That was fun, a lot like using Photoshop which I long to do more of. Happily, once Dad sussed out exactly how to do that and I learned how, this card was one of the least labor intensive I’ve made.

On November 17^th I drove out to Wauconda, IL (north of my stomping grounds of Barrington, IL) to hold forth at a friend’s (LDS)book group who had read The Marketing of Sister B that month. The woman who invited me and suggested the book to her friends is a friend I’ve met from working at the temple on Friday mornings. When she asked me a month in advance I was tickled to be asked and, since I wrote the book, figured I could refresh my memory at the last moment by a quick scan the night before. When November 16^th rolled around, I looked for Sister B and couldn’t find her anywhere in our Evanston townhouse. I was feeling pretty panicky since by then I realized I could no longer remember many of the main characters’ names and the order of the plot points. Finally, I remembered that I’d given a copy to Susan when it came out and, after some arduous hunting on the part of the Strohs, I had a copy at last!

The event was very friendly and chatty and after the discussion the lady whose house we were at served us a fabulous autumnal meal of beef stew and artisan breads and cheeses with an amazing apple pie for dessert. Good time had by all.

On the 18^th I had an appointment with a dermatologist for some help with a very stubborn wart on my finger and other boring skin issues. I found her name on the database for the BCBS of IL. Her name which over the phone I heard as Lady Di (like Princess Diana) is unforgettable. It’s really Lady Dy and is I think she’s from Vietnam. If I have any other skin issues I will definitely return to her. She blew blasts of CO2 (?) on my pointer to freeze the annoying bump away. Now, her ministrations having worked, three weeks later I am wartless.

The Sunday before Thanksgiving Susan arranged an extended family get-together with some of the Hoffman clan to see a production at Northwestern of The Secret Garden. Our cousin Tom (the Judge) Hoffman and his wife Margarita (also a judge) and their three children joined us at the theater: Christopher, 16; Leja, 12; and Vincent, 9. I was very impressed with the kids. They were kind and friendly and not silent and sulky like some kids/teens can be around older people they don’t know. The production was fabulous, although the play itself is a little morbid but appropriate to the style of early 20^th century literature. Gorgeous music, though, and with Northwestern’s phenomenal musical theater program, some of the actors will probably be professional as soon as they finish their studies.

Back at Susan’s afterward we feasted on pizza and decadent treats from a local bakery. Christopher showed me some of the features of his cell phone which I was a little envious of. Texting is next to impossible on my current phone which requires that you tap on numbers until the corresponding correct letter shows up. My efforts always end up looking like strangled cries for help: “aaarghphhh!” when I meant “Meet you at the car.” I don’t know that texting is another technological skill I should add to my growing repertoire, but I don’t want to be left behind while the world gallops past me.

Also joining us for a little while at Susan’s was our “cousins” Jim  and Joan Ward who live on the same block we live on now on Prairie. We share a common great-great-grandmother, Dora Schlichting Wolf. We descend from her daughter Wilhelmina (Minnie) and Jim descends from her daughter Hattie (Henrietta) who were born in Neenah, Wisconsin. Our common relative, Al Krieger, has done a lot of family history on my dad’s side, and he made us aware of each other. Jim shared fun family stories we knew nothing about. Susan remembers something about Lake Dora (Cora?) in Michigan where that branch of the family used to vacation, but I hadn’t known about it. One thing I thought was interesting was that during WWII, there were German prisoners of war working on the farms in the area near there. Apparently some of them would have much rather stayed there than get sent back to Germany after the war.

It seems odd that our country was letting German POWs have the low-stress experience of farming in Michigan when they were also putting Japanese Americans in camps in California and other places around the country. When I was in DC at the beginning of November I saw an exhibit of the Art of the Japanese Camps at one of the Smithsonian museums. They made beautiful art out of what scraps of wood or paper they could find. Generally their conditions were miserable but they produced amazing drawings, functional items, sculptures and even jewelry. Talk about art therapy!

Thanksgiving was a delightfully low key day of Christmas card prep followed by a cheerful, delicious feast at Susan’s. It was just 6 of us – Susan and Steve, Ben and Tim, and Dad and me. Then home for a nap. Heavenly!

Dad and I decided a couple months ago that our mattress had developed such deep gulleys (especially on my side) that we really should replace it. We really like the mattresses we have on the Aspenhof beds so we asked Kara Webster (our Aspenhof design consultant) how we could order one for our Evanston home. She set things in motion and the Serta Queen Hospitality Mattress and Box Springs were scheduled to arrive in the nick of time, Nov. 29^th– just a week before we were scheduled to leave for Utah for the winter. On the night of Sunday, Nov. 28, Dad and I successfully performed the gymnastic stunt of hauling our mattress up and over the balcony of our bedroom where it landed on the deck without hurting anything. Then we hauled the heavy honker out to the alley. We had two single box springs under that mattress which were quite light and they joined the mattress for the bulk trash pickup on Monday morning.

UPS tol us they would be delivering the set on the 29th, but couldn’t give us a time of day of course. Happily I was only tied to the house until 12:30 when the big brown truck arrived. The driver told me that when he checked on the box spring, he could tell it was badly damaged and wobbly. He wasn’t even going to take it off the truck. But the mattress was fine. Dad and I got that up to our room, but without a support for it (since the bulk trash was gone) we couldn’t use it yet. I suppose we could have forced space for it on the floor and slept on it there, but neither Dad nor I are game for sleeping that low to the ground if we can avoid it. So the mattress remains upright in our bedroom. You’d think any old box spring from Sam’s Club would do, but apparently there are special springs in the “hospitality” box spring which contribute to the comfort of the mattress so we are advised to accept no substitutes unless we want a static and very firm sleeping surface. Meanwhile I will figure out how to get an undamaged box spring to us for our return in March.

That covers the month of November. We’re now into December and excited to be able to see everyone this month! Dad and I arrived as Aspenhof last night. We stopped at the Kamas Food Town grocery store to get food and supplies. When I walked out of the store (around 4:30) twilight was just beginning and the majesty of the sky was exquisite and breathtaking. How many times do you have awe-inspiring encounters with Nature when you’re toting your eggs and milk to the car?

See you soon, dear ones!

Love, love, love you all –

M/L