Falling asleep early every night finally caught up to me. I woke up at 4 and was not sleepy. Ray was breathing loudly right next to me, but I don't think that's what kept me awake. I know my snoring has bothered him many times.

The day before Thanksgiving and lots of people are not going to work today--kids are traveling home from college. Of course, not in Mexico or Switzerland, where my daughters are. I don't really mind working today, no guests at our house. We will be joining Janna for dinner on Thursday and need to bring rolls and sweet potatoes, but we don't have to be there until 4 and I am not working tomorrow.

I still have a stuffy nose. It's very warm in here again from Ray building up the fire at bedtime.

Yesterday we had a staff meeting. We have started getting requests for tickets for the Harvest fundraiser and I have not had any direction from the board about selling them. I finally got Mary G. to bring me some raffle tickets. Both admission and raffle can be bought online. I will be notified by Paypal and need to keep track so we know who to admit. They can also be bought at the door. There is no such thing as sold out. She also wanted access to my Quickbooks to make sure the categories were there for keeping the money separate--raffle, admission, sponsorship. It was. She reminded me of a few things I knew--it's preferable to write checks directly to vendors, rather than reimbursing for purchases. I asked her about a mysterious Quickbooks problem I was having (some money to be deposited that is negative). She finally printed it out and took it to her office to study.

I made a bank deposit and picked Ray up about 2. We came home and had a walk. It was overcast and cool, but pretty nice. We pretended to look for possible Christmas trees. There are not very many evergreens. They are cedars (junipers) that do not have the traditional triangle shape, and pines, that have fewer branches than is usual for a Christmas tree. Supposedly, my grandmother was known to wire on extra branches to get the desired look. I think a neighbor took 3 small pine trees and lashed them together to get a nice full tree. We may have to resort to one of these methods.

Vanessa had driven herself to the dentist while the Captain was taking a bath. He had been out digging up the garden and bringing firewood to the house, so was really tired. We had an early drink and snack that ran into an early supper, so I could go to Arabic at 6.

We started writing sentences. The verb comes first. If a noun is the subject, it has an apostrophe over it, which changes the sound. It it is an object, it has a dash under it, which changes the sound. Although I like the challenge of learning the language (and thinking about how I would teach differently), I love when Zuhair tells us about his life. In this case, he was worrying about Thanksgiving dinner. He said last year his wife was watching the cooking channel and added a bunch of spices to the turkey. He didn't like it at all, but had to pretend it was delicious. Meanwhile, apparently neither his wife nor his daughter will eat leftovers, but he hates to throw food away. So he was stuck eating this turkey for about 10 days. Another student, Scott, talked about the schnitzel he was having (pork chops with mushroom gravy--sounded delicious). He said he was in the first Gulf War and for some reason the Army served turkey for about 6 months. He says he can't eat it any more.

Home again, Ray washed and cut up strawberries for us to have with vanilla ice cream and TV. Yup, I fell asleep on the couch before 10.