We are in the home stretch to Christmas!

We are well into the Christmas season and all the activities that go with the holidays. Last Friday we took our friends Bonnie and Terry Templeman to dinner (Chinese!) in Milton-Freewater, then we went looking at Christmas lights around Walla Walla. We finished with a "picnic" in the car. Let me explain this: Our last stop was at the Colville Patisserie, a desert cafe in Walla Walla, Wa. To say that the various delights available were really, really scrumptious would be a huge understatement! Not cheap by any means, but very, very good torts, tarts, chocolate this and thats, and more. Here is a link to their website where you can see photos of their goodies and get more information: http://www.colvillestreetpatisserie.com/.

After 2 1/2 months of planning, organizing, and work, my responsibility for providing programs for my Pendleton Lions Club for November and December is finally at an end. As I think I have mentioned earlier, this included organizing programs for the noon meetings for which i choose digital photography as a common theme. In addition to the programs I started a photography contest for club members which ended last night at the club's Christmas Party.

For the Christmas Party I brought a holiday punch which turned out to be very good. Here is the recipe. The original source is the BH&G Christmas Cooking From the Heart cookbook.

CRANBERRY-PINEAPPLE PUNCH
1/2 Cup sugar (I used bakers sugar because it dissolves easier)
1/2 Cup water
2 Cups cranberry juice, chilled
1 Cup orange juice, chilled
1 Cup pineapple juice, unsweetened, chilled
3/4 Cup lemon juice
1 2-liter bottle ginger ale, chilled
1 recipe Citrus Cranberry Ice Ring, broken (Optional; I didn't do this, too much work for an out-of-the home occasion. I was going to float some mandarin orange sherbet in the punch but never got around to doing that either!)

Citris Cranberry Ice Ring
Fill ring mold half-full with water. place lemon peel curls, lime peel curls, fresh cranberries, and fresh mint leavesin water. Freeze until solid. Top with more water and freeze.

You can use the water and sugar to make a simple syrup buy mixing them together and boiling until the sugar is dissolved. As I was away from home I used ultra-fine bakers sugar and skipped making simple syrup.

In a large (punch) bowl combine the cranberry, orange, pinapple and lemon juices with the chilled syrup (or water/sugar mix if you didn't make a syrup.) Top with 1 2-liter bottle of chilled ginger ale. Float the ice ring if you made one. Serve immediately.

I got a lot of compliments on this cold punch - and it was 0-degrees outside! That's how good it is!

Gregg Berlie, the photography instructor from Blue Mountain Community College, presented the first two noon programs about digital photography. Absolutely facinating! Gregg is a great teacher, very personable and easy to understand and to ask questions of. Gregg also agreed to judge the entries in the photo contest so Sunday afternoon I went to his home with the entries and watched him as he wowrked his way through about 70 photographs. He explained the process and his thinking as he went, which was a great lesson in photography and composition in itself. I said not a word, to quote a phrase, about which photos were taken by whom. There were name labels on the back, of course, but this did not enter in any way into Gregg's judging. After looking at a large group of photos, Gregg made the comment that evaluating this group of photos was harder than judging the photos for the county fair! I think that was a great compliment to the work of club members.

I am very proud to say that I won several categories, including Best in Show. Here are my winning entries by category.

Category Winner: Sports/Action
Pendleton Skateboard Park

Category Winner: Landscape
Community Park bridge debris in McKay Creek

Category Winner: People
My grandson Solomon James Willis

Category Winner: Open
Winner: Best in Show
Cabbage near Corbett, Oregon

I guess these photographic honors make me a big duck in a small photographic pool, but I really enjoyed doing this, and worked at getting my photos into the best shape I could. Gregg Berlie offers a digital photography class this next spring term and I intend to take it.

We are in a real snow and extreme cold spell right now. We have about 6 inches of accumulated snow on the ground, and last night our back deck thermometer said it was -3 degrees. Brrrrr. Today things are clear and bright, which means that tonight it will get really cold again. But now the deck thermometer says it is up to a warm +2 degrees so I had better rush out there and try to finish some wood working projects.

As I write this, Linda and I are listening on Pandora.com, an Internet radio service, to Andre Rieu's orchestra and chorus perform the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah. I commented that the sopranos were getting all worked up toward the end. Linda asked if I remembered the signal conductor would make to the performers by making a circle with their thumb and a finger, opening and closing the fingers. I have seen the gesture many times but was not aware, as Linda explained to me, that this was the sign for the basses and tenors standing behind the sopranos to pinch them to help them reach the really high notes. All these years of music, and I didn't know that! Amazing, really.

Merry Christmas!

Grandpa T