We're Thankful For...

Good food, good wine, good friends, good times.

Good food...

Ally is ready to follow in her grandmother's footsteps, a master chef.

First step: dress the part...which Ally does in style.

Ally is our very own "Sweetish" Chef.

Better even than cooking food is eating it. Ally is partial to the milk foam left over when Opa makes a latte, which he feeds to her with a spoon.

Not surprisingly, this is one of the first "foods" she's learned to use her spoon with.

Got milk?

Nothing goes better with milk than a good cookie.

Our Sweetish Chef has morphed into the Cookie Monster.

All that eating is tiring.

Ally relaxes in her grandmother's arms

Good wine...

We're fortunate to have Arizona's premiere wine appelation in our back yard.

The "Welcome To" sign in the Elgin area features it's greatest asset ... frolicking women stomping grapes. The wines are available for tasting. The women, well, with Cherie along for the ride, who needs to sample anything other than the wine?

November is a good time to go wine tasting, as many of the local vintners roll out their new wines in time to compliment their patrons' turkey dinners.

After Thanksgiving's turkey dinner, it's time for a change of pace, in the form of pasta.

Yours truly made an Italian dinner over the post-Thanksgiving weekend, rolling out some home-made spaghetti, paired with — what else — a nice Italian Chianti.

Our apologies to the local wineries.

Good friends...

We had Thanksgiving dinner at out friend's and neighbor's house, where Ally orchestrated much of the entertainment.

Here Ally teaches her grandfather how to pick his nose at the dinner table. I've gotta say, the turkey tasted much better.

Ally misses the tongue in check pose by a couple of inches to the south. But she does a pretty good imitation of an unwittenly photographed Jeanne, below. Must have been some pretty deep conversation at the table.

Good times...

Yes, but all good times must come to an end.

Ally is ready for bed, but first has to ask Noni where to put her street shoes. She must be looking forward to St. Nicholas Day.

At the end of November, and at the end of the day, the Arizona skies were full of movement. Maybe the Leonid showers were a bust, but the man-made shooting stars were better than meteors, both in how long they lasted and in their frequency.

At right, the Space Station streaks across the southern sky, barely missing the planet Jupiter, or at least it looked that way.

While waiting for the Space Station, and even while watching it, we saw several satellites traversing from south to north across the sky.