New heat in bathroom & living room, Christmas Candy making derailed

We were up early Friday morning (11/24) as Josh, our handyman, arrived at 8 AM to put a heat source in the bathroom:

I HATE taking showers in the winter….our bathroom is so big that it never gets warm…and I don’t like stepping out of the shower into that freezing cold room. Hopefully this will go a long way towards making the room warmer…I’ll let you know.

After that, he moved on to installing a blower and new switch for our gas logs:

Loree had graciously given us a box of green tomatoes several weeks ago….and suddenly they seemed to ripen faster than we could keep up with eating them, so I spent an hour Friday morning, coring and chopping them all up to make sauce:

And, as Michael was out of yoghurt, I got that started in the crockpot as well (luckily, just after I turned it on...I noticed it wasn't plugged in :~):

By then it was 10 AM and the great Christmas candy making could begin :~). My counters were all cleaned off and I set up all of my supplies and began melting my chocolate. I always like to start with White Trash….I make the most runs of that, and it takes the longest, so I like to get it out of the way first. QUELLE HORREUR…my chocolate would not melt!!!!:

It was a clumpy, bumpy mess!!! It actually looks just like my soap when it seizes! Now, BG bought chocolate at the same time from the same store as I did…she tried to melt it several weeks ago, and hers clumped too. I think she tried it for the first time in the microwave, and so figured that maybe she did something wrong….well guess what….SHE DID NOT!!! I tried to melt this chocolate the same way I have for the last 17 years…and yuck….it didn’t work at all. I could not believe it…I was so excited to (for once) get an early start on my candy making…with Thanksgiving being so early I figured I wouldn’t be stressing to get my boxes of candy in the post so that it could be delivered well before Christmas. Not to mention….what to do with all of the supplies I bought? So…I immediately got on the phone and ordered 20 more pounds of chocolate from the wedding place in Rhode Island that I used to order from 5 – 6 years ago. The most common reason for chocolate not melting well is that it is old…what am I going to do with 13 pounds of white chocolate, that I can’t melt????? I finally sealed up everything I had measured out…and figured I could at least do my sugared pecans to get one thing out of the way…so that’s what I worked on:

Our handyman liked a sample of them so much that he wants to buy some from me!!!

While Michael was bagging up the pecans, Freya was being a good girl in her bed:

Michael and I finished up the last of the cast party food for dinner, then settled in to snuggle Freya and watch TV….I was still a bit disheartened about the chocolate fiasco and I didn’t even knit :~(.

*** This time of year is great because you can shout ‘’DON”T COME IN HERE” and people think you are wrapping presents…when you really just want to drink your wine in peace and not share your chocolates with anyone. ***