Kitty Deschanel | Food, Wine, and Travel Adventures in an Airstream Basecamp

My Thanksgiving  blog post ended up being one of the most popular on my site this year (thank you!), so here's a quick Christmas Eve update, filled with photos.  Christmas hasn't looked like it has in previous years... My younger self (with  braces !) was excited to wear that purple flower pin, which had been recently purchased at a consignment shop. My old lady self questions my previous sense of fashion while simultaneously wondering whatever happened to that purple flower pin. Though, to be fair, our Christmas celebrations often seem a bit untraditional. There's certainly no snow for Santa's sleigh when your family lives in Arizona. I'd had a light jacket, but it was so sunny and warm in Scottsdale the year we visited Frank Lloyd Wright's  Taliesin West. It would just be SN and I for the holidays this year. No homemade lasagna, no tamale brunch, and no Christmas cookies. Imagine my surprise when I received a card from my aunt saying to enjoy the package she...

Let me start this post by stating, for the record, that I stay at Marriott hotels all the time. I'm in it for the breakfast and when a hotel doesn't include this, I stay elsewhere. I am a hotel waffle-making pro . Then again, making your own waffle is easy peasy, right? Behold, the tower of waffle batter goodness. How many gallons does it contain? We would soon find out. I always look forward to creating a decadent hotel waffle. The fateful Monday morning after the Summit County Parade of Homes was no exception and I was pleased to discover that no one was using the waffle iron, despite the crowd in the hotel breakfast room. It's no secret that I'm a social-anxiety mess, even with something as basic as navigating a shared waffle iron, so this was a relief and a great start to my day. I picked up my little plastic batter cup. I pressed down on the dispenser nozzle, as I've done 100 times. And then... The nozzle broke off. It just snapped right off...

Making Friends As An Adult  Popular, you're gonna be popular. I'll teach you the proper poise when you talk to boys. Little ways to flirt and flounce, ooh! I'll show you what shoes to wear, how to fix your hair. Everything that really counts... I was very popular today. Popular, I'll help you be popular. You'll hang with the right cohorts, you'll be good at sports. Know the slang you've got to know... I stopped at the grocery store and instantly regretted it once I saw the crowd, realizing too late it was too close to the holiday weekend for a quick stop. I grabbed one of those little carts with an upper and lower basket and squeezed my way in, planning to grab just a few things and get the heck out of there. I hate crowds. I suppose everyone hates crowds, at least at the grocery store. Popular, I know about popular. And with an assist from me to be who you'll be... While walking toward the watermelon, I noticed two shopping carts full of wine with...

SN has been restoring a '73 Corvette, which spent decades outside in rusty pieces prior to coming into our possession. I'm not a fan, as this car has been "almost done" for 2 years. It is affectionately (not-so-affectionately, if you ask me) known as 'Money Pit'.  Our neighbors may have spotted us stranded near The Triangle grocery store recently. Despite my pleas to take our Chevy Volt instead (think of the gas savings, SN!), we took the Corvette to brunch at Greenside Cafe. I'm sure everyone who was enjoying a quiet Sunday morning stroll through our mountain community just loooved hearing the roar of the engine.  We dined on huevos rancheros chicken-fried steak and something called a 'hen grenade,' which involves freshly prepared hollandaise sauce ( photos of our meal here - so good), then returned to the Corvette to discover we were locked out.  The keys that had worked to get there no longer worked. Money Pit is a real jerk. It was especially...