I visited my parents in December for Winterfamilytime. Pleasantly, the weather was really nice in Charlotte—it hardly felt much like winter some days (not that I minded).

Among the photos I’ve posted, I used the same lighting setup that I had used last year—I used one flash with a Lumiquest LTp Softbox that I attached to the second-floor walkway railing and I used my other flash with a Lumiquest Softbox that I attached to the mantle.

Cross-light often accommodates a fair degree of flexibility when photographing an environment, though for reasons that elude me, it seemed to work a little better for my shots last year than it did this year. (With a cross-light setup, two lights face each other on a diagonal axis to the subject that’s in-between them.) Although it’s somewhat a hunch, what may have happened this time is that I may have had too wide an arc between the subjects and my lights.

On one hand, it’s hard to say where people are going to sit, and on the other hand, there’re only so many places from which one can hang flashes. So as I daydream around how I might set things up next year, I’m pondering the idea of maybe getting a third flash to offer some fill-in light along the axis that may be getting the short end of the stick lighting-wise. (You could think of the lighting setup I’ve been using as similar to a “/” shape and the one I’m considering might look a bit like a lowercase lambda, “λ”.)

There’re not a lot of fancy ingredients here, but what I especially like about this recipe is that it calls for a thin layer of herb-cheese spread on the bread before one adds the tomato mixture. That rather effectively keeps the bread from becoming soggy, which is great if you may be setting out the bruschetta as hors d’oeuvres that need to last through a cocktail party or the like.

Ingredients:

• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar [Among supermarket brands, I quite like Lucini Gran Riserva Balsamico.]
• 3 tablespoons chopped fresh basil
• 2 cloves garlic, minced [Apparently a Microplane can work well for this, if you have one.]
• 7 roma (plum) tomatoes, chopped
• salt and ground black pepper to taste
• 1 sourdough baguette, cut into ½" thick slices [I like to cut the bread on a bias to create a larger surface area for each slice. Plus it looks nice too.]
• 1 (4 oz) package semi-soft cheese with garlic and herbs (such as Alouette)
• (optional) Shredded deli Parmesan, to taste [This is often sold in a small circular tub of about 2" high and around 4" across.]

Directions:

1. Mince the garlic, chop the basil, and then whisk those together with the olive oil and balsamic vinegar in a bowl.

2. Chop the tomatoes and stir those into the mixture with the whisk. Season to taste with salt and pepper. (You’ll need to add salt and pepper, stir, and repeat the process a couple times—it may take three sets to get the mixture properly seasoned.)

3. Cover with plastic wrap and place it in the refrigerator to marinate for at least 20 minutes. (The plastic wrap should be right on top of the tomato mixture to prevent it from drying out.)

4. Preheat oven to 350° F (175° C). Spread the bread slices in a single layer on a large baking pan.

5. Bake in the oven until golden, about 10 minutes. Remove to cool on a wire rack.

6. When the bread is cool, spread the semi-soft cheese evenly over each slice. Using a slotted spoon, spoon some of the tomato mixture over each slice. (You may as well leave the bread on the baking trays for this step; that way, if any of the tomato mixture topples over the sides, it’s not a big deal.)

7. Optional: If desired, sprinkle some shredded deli Parmesan over each slice and, on the broiler setting, slide the bread trays back into the oven, taking them out once the cheese becomes melty.

8. Depending how hot they are, you may need a spatula to transfer the bruschetta to a serving tray. (Sometimes a wooden cutting board can work nicely for this.) They’re ready to eat immediately.

If desired, the tomato mixture can be made a day ahead of time. In fact, a little extra marinating of the ingredients can make the final product all the more scrumptious. Just be sure to cover the bowl with plastic wrap before placing it in the fridge.

I visited my family in Charlotte, North Carolina over Thanksgiving. Pleasantly, my brother Adrian was able to come too— in the past few years, Adrian had been living in Cape Town and hadn’t been able to make it to Thanksgiving.

I really debated which lens to shoot, whether my 50mm f/1.4 or my 17–55 f/2.8 IS. Theoretically, the 50mm could let in heaps more light (and potentially allow for sharper shots), but on the other hand, the image stabilization of my 17‐55 does quite well toward reducing camera shake too.

In the end, I went with my 50mm, although I’m not sure that was my best option. Sure, the 50mm f/1.4 could theoretically let in four times as much light (2 stops) as the 17–55mm f/2.8, but as I was processing the photos later, I came to realize that IS often provided more than two stops of stabilization. So, for example, shooting at f/1.4 at 1/30sec on my 50mm often resulted in blurry shots, but if one takes the equivalent exposure of f/2.8 at 1/6sec, I know my image stabilization would be able to handle at least some of those.

At this point, you might be thinking, “f/1.4 at 1/30sec? That sounds like a ton of light.” And with a more modern camera it probably would be. But with my 4-year-old Canon 40D, I can’t really go above about ISO 400 without running into serious noise issues. So while you 5D Mark II shooters probably don’t give a second thought to shooting at ISO 800 or even ISO 1600, those options are pretty much out of bounds for me.

All told, I did enjoy the freedom—as it were—of not having to worry about zooming my lens to compose a shot (since one can’t with that lens) and the 50mm is also considerably lighter as well. So perhaps I might lean toward my 17–55mm the next time I shoot that type of scene.

Camera fiddly bits aside, I believe we had fourteen people for Thanksgiving (including my family), which is a pretty good number, but not altogether as many people as we had last year. Because some of our relatives were driving in from out of town and we weren’t quite sure if they might run into traffic along the way, we asked guests to come over around 4:30/5:00.

As we’ve done in past years, we cooked our turkey on the grill over the course of several hours—like usual, my dad put the bird on around 2:30 or 3:00. On some of our previous Thanksgivings, we asked guests to come over nearabouts that time, which allowed for a couple hours of chatting and nomming hors d’oeuvres while the bird cooked. With guests coming over a bit later this year, we had slightly less gabbing time before the turkey was ready.

What I came to realize later is that the hour or two of pre-turkey chit-chat is when I would ordinarily take most of the day’s photos. And with this year’s shortened carousing time, maybe I should have been quicker on the draw to get a few more photos in. But mentally I was still on the timeline of previous years and so I kinda dropped the ball on some of my picture taking.

Picture stuff aside, I still had a great Thanksgiving—everyone was super nice, we were all in good spirits, and hardly anyone talked about politics. (Thanksgiving sans political banter? Mon Dieu!) Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday, but this was one of the best I’ve had in a long time.

Thinking ahead—as he does—Chris also shared the floor plan of his apartment to help narrow down an appropriate size set for the room. As it would happen, there are formulas for calculating an appropriate television size based off the dimensions of a room (or vice versa).

The short version is that one can roughly take the diagonal size of the screen and multiply it by 1.5 to get an approximate maximum distance that one would want to sit from the screen in order to be able to fully appreciate 1080p. (At distances past that, one loses starts to lose the ability to discern the finer details within a 1920×1080 image.)

So, I decided to run the numbers on Chris’ living room. The room is 15'9" × 17', although embarrassingly I couldn’t quite remember next to which wall he had wanted to place his television. No matter—once one divides those numbers in two (assuming that a couch may be placed halfway back within the room), that means that Chris’ couch would be approximately 8–9' back from whichever wall would be nearest the television.

I converted those distances to inches (96–110) just so that our final measurements, once we got there, would be appropriate for a television screen. From there, I divided each of those by 1.5 to get an optimum screen size of approximately 64–73 inches.

And here is where the compromises begin. Chris didn’t give me a specific budget, but I’m guessing he has some type of upper limit. And 65" televisions aren't cheap. As well, they can be rather heavy devices and I wasn’t sure whether that may be a factor.

Having said all that, I figured I’d go over a couple ideas, starting first with the cream of the crop and then offering a couple options that may be a bit more budget-friendly.

(But first, a quick caveat: Television manufacturers have ridiculous model-naming schemes. Rather than take an approach of assigning a single name to a series of models and appending a size, they tend to assign unique model numbers to each and every sub-model in their inventory. So, for the televisions below, I list both the specific model number of the television along with a wildcard mask (##) to convey the other sets in that series).

Top Pick: Panasonic’s TC-P65VT30 65" set. (TC-P##VT30 series)

This set isn’t cheap, but it’s a scorcher. C|Net praised the plasma as having the “deepest plasma black levels of the year” and crowned this “the best-performing TV we’ve tested in 2011.” As well, ConsumerSearch—a site that aggregates reviews— placed the 55" version of this set in their “Best 55-inch plasma TV” bucket.

• $3,000 at B&H
• 139 lbs (168 lbs shipping weight)

Runner Up: Panasonic’s TC-P55VT30 55" set. (TC-P##VT30 series)

This one is basically the slightly-smaller sibling of 65" TC-P65VT30. With the same components going into this set (albeit with a skosh smaller screen), it’s sure to have fantastic picture quality like its bigger sibling.

• $2,200 at B&H
• 98 lbs (117 lbs shipping weight)

Runner Up: Samsung’s PN51D8000 51" set. (PN##D8000 series)

Though this set may not have quite the black levels of Panasonic's finest, C|Net lauded this set for offering “the most accurate color of any TV we’ve ever reviewed.” ConsumerSearch chimed in as well, saying “[in] terms of color performance, there is no quibbling—it’s outstanding.”

• $1,700 at B&H
• 55 lbs (69 lbs shipping weight)

Closing Remarks

I think the sets here offer some good options, but even if you don’t go with one of these, I’d probably go with a plasma over an LCD-based set as they tend to offer better black levels.

As well, I happened to offer some links to B&H since I've received excellent service there, but I suppose you could order your television from anywhere. From whomever you buy it, though, I’d recommend opting for not just home delivery but also in-home setup or the like. Even if they don’t hook it up for you, just the act of unpacking it and placing it where you want it within the room could be handy (unless you really want to lift those 100-some pounds on your own).

I’ve known and been friends with Christine for almost as long as I’ve lived here in Dallas. She moved to San Diego a few years ago and that’s where she met Steve. And they decided to get married in Maui.

I hadn’t been to Maui before, but it was a trip I had been looking forward to for months. And even though I was only able to go for a Saturday-through-Tuesday trip, I had an awesome time. Hawaii is basically picturesque everywhere, all the time. You can glance in nearly any direction and you’ll see a beautiful lush landscape.

The wedding was on the back lawn of the Wailea Golf Club on the Sunday around 5 p.m. It wasn’t an overpopulated wedding—I believe I counted twenty chairs—but that seemed just right for the setting. Christine and Steve were both beaming with happiness and they said their vows just as the sun was falling into the horizon. It was pretty special.

I currently have an insanely complicated home theater setup that takes up half my closet, connected by a rat’s nest of cables that I dare not touch lest I inexplicably lose the left audio channel on my Blu-ray player. It’s ridiculous, it’s completely overkill for my needs, and did I mention it takes up half my closet? My tiny, Manhattan-sized closet?

[…]

My home theater receiver is huge. Massive. It’s 10” tall, 20” deep, weighs 800 lbs, and probably draws more power than our air conditioner. Despite its long list of capabilities, it has but two jobs that are of any use to me: 1) switch between my various components, and 2) make things loud.

[…]

And so, I find myself looking for a replacement. Something small. Something elegant. Something that does what I need, and nothing more. […]

As I rather enjoy home theater stuff, I thought I’d try to come up with a few options for him.

What I soon discovered is that there aren’t many products in this category. Granted, you’d have several options if all you had needed was 2-channel (stereo) amplification. (I suppose they’re catering to systems that one might place on a bookshelf or the like.) On the other hand, when catering to a home theater, a receiver needs a separate amplifier for each of (at least) five channels; those extra amplifiers alone take up more space. In addition, it seems that there isn’t much demand for “bookshelf” home theaters and so multi-channel receivers typically use amplifiers that are beefy enough to fill medium-to-large rooms. (And beefier amplifiers take up yet more room.)

Nonetheless, I did find a handful of options that I thought might work for Dan. I didn’t come across a single perfect product—for instance, some were small, but had a lot of buttons, while others were relatively larger but had few buttons— but I think there’re some promising options here.

I decided to use the Outlaw Audio 1050 in my bedroom (a 70 Wpc receiver) as a baseline for comparison. It’s served me well for many years, but more importantly for this discussion, its size and weight seemed to be fairly representative of an average receiver:

• Width: 17 3/16"
• Height: 6 1/8"
• Depth: 14 5/16"
• Weight: 36.3 lbs

Sherwood R-904N NetBoxx

• Width: 17" (1% narrower than baseline)
• Height: 2 7/8" (53% shorter)
• Depth: 12" (16% shallower)
• Weight: 10.3 lbs (72% lighter)
• Power: 100 Wpc × 7 channels
• Price: About $440

This receiver is clearly the leader in size (or lack thereof). While not the narrowest or the lightest of the bunch—those honors would fall to the Yamaha—this one is the shortest (height) and shallowest (depth). Unfortunately, though, this receiver has some design drawbacks that might be deal breakers for some:

The first complaint that I must mention is a styling issue related to the front display of the NetBoxx. The front of the unit is covered with very bright blue LEDs. During the day these LEDs are fairly innocuous; however placed in a dark room, they become extremely distracting. I don’t understand why Sherwood would put a dimmer option on the unit that only dims some of the LEDs. Because of this I would recommend placing the NetBoxx in a location out of sight, which is a shame as it’s otherwise an attractive unit. […]

Yamaha neoHD YMC-500

• Width: 11 3/4" (32% narrower than baseline)
• Height: 3 5/8" (41% shorter)
• Depth: 12 3/8" (13% shallower)
• Weight: 7.9 lbs (78% lighter)
• Power: 35~50? Wpc × 5 channels (I had a hard time confirming the power output.)
• Price: About $180

This is a pretty darn small receiver. It’s the narrowest (width) and lightest (weight) of the bunch, and even though the Sherwood beats it on height and depth, the Yamaha is only 3/4" taller and 3/8" deeper. This receiver also has the fewest front-panel buttons: 2 (volume knob & power button).

Oddly enough, I had some trouble confirming this receiver’s power output; the specifications I was able to find weren’t all that explicit in this regard, but the unit appears to either have 35 or 50 Wpc as best as I can figure.

If this type of minimalism were of interest, the YMC-500’s bigger brother, the YMC-700, might also be worth considering. Both models allow you to play music from your home network, but the YMC-700 (which goes for about $500) has built-in WiFi (rather than just an Ethernet port). Plus, Yamaha also offers an iPhone app that can control one’s YMC-700. (The app communicates over WiFi and so it works with the YMC-700 but not the YMC-500.)

Marantz NR1501

• Width: 17 3/8" (1% wider than baseline)
• Height: 4 3/16" (31% shorter)
• Depth: 14 1/2" (1% deeper)
• Weight: 19 lbs (48% lighter)
• Power: 50 Wpc × 7 channels
• Price: About $400

The Marantz may be the most traditional of the receivers here. While its dimensions might not be as low as the other receivers here, its height is only 9/16" taller than the next-shorest model (the Yamaha) and 1 5/6" taller than the shortest (the Sherwood). Even then, it’s still about 1/3 shorter than a standard receiver and about half the weight.

Even if the Marantz might not seem as impressive as the others when it comes to size, it does have a few things going for it. For one thing, its back panel includes 2 optical inputs (and 2 coax digital inputs). Granted, Dan mentioned only needing a single optical input (which the Sherwood and Yamaha have), although I can’t help but wonder if that second input might potentially come in handy if Dan were to ever get another device such as an X-Box or a TiVo.

Another potential advantage of the Marantz is its pedigree. Marantz is owned by D&M Holdings, a company that also owns Denon, McIntosh, and a few other brands. I’m not saying that Yamaha is a slouch—although I have my suspicions about Sherwood—but Marantz is a brand that’s known for its attention to detail and build quality. I would expect any of their equipment to last for many years.

Additional Thoughts

There may not be a clear winner here, but there may be a receiver that’s best for you depending on the features that you value most.

I would only consider the Sherwood if sheer size is your utmost concern. It’s not the lightest of the bunch, but it’s definitely the shortest. On the other hand, I’m a bit skeeved out by its build quality—if they’re already screwed up the blue LEDs across the front, how much else might be sub-par?

For most people, I think it comes down to the Yamaha and the Marantz. On one hand, the Yamaha is the cheaper of the two ($180 vs. $400), but on the other hand, the YMC-700 (which goes for $500) seems like a justifiable step-up considering that model’s WiFi streaming (née Ethernet) and iPhone app support. So, depending on which Yamaha model you’d be putting up against the Marantz, it could be a toss-up between those two brands on price.

What I think it comes down to is size & minimalism vs. capability & pedigree. The Yamaha is certainly the smaller overall and its front facia—with just two buttons—is also sparser. Still, the Marantz has a few more inputs (which may come in handy if you get more devices) and it also has a clear 50 Wpc × 7 channels. (The Yamaha’s specifications were somewhat unclear, but it appears to have either 35 or 50 Wpc. Even so, that’s across 5 channels rather than the Marantz’ 7.)

If I were in Dan’s shoes, I might lean toward the Marantz. All the same, the Yamaha would not be a bad choice either.

On the other hand, I do enjoy language and puns, and if you’re holding an Oscar party this evening, you’re welcome to use any of these. (I’ve grouped them by nomination category, although not every category is represented.)

I’ve listed only the names of each dish (with links to recipes), but if you hover your mouse over an item, you’ll see a tooltip revealing the nominee from which the dish was inspired.

(Some of them are more obvious than others, but if you need a hint, here’s the official list of this year’s nominees.)

Best Picture

• True Grits (I can’t take credit for this one; a friend came up with this.)
• Winter’s Boneless Wings
• The King’s Peach Cobbler
• These Hors D’œuvres Are All Rye (Mini Reubens)

Art Direction

• Anise in Wonderland (Anise Icebox Cookies)

Foreign Language Film

• Outside the Slaw (Blue Cheese Cole Slaw)

Makeup

• The Caraway Snack (Caraway Cheese Ball)

Music (Original Song)

• If I Cheese Fries (Bacon Cheese Fries)
• Reece’s Peanut Butter Cups

Short Film (Animated)

• Black & White Cookies

Sound Mixing

• Salt Water Taffy

Visual Effects

• Iron Mango Sorbet

Andy went on to create a more colorblind-safe version of the chart, but what I found even more interesting is that he closed his post with an anecdote relating his interactions with the Snopes folks. (Snopes, if you’re not familiar with it, is a popular site that fact-checks various urban legends.) As it would happen, Snopes’ category pages—in which they summarize the “True” / “Not True” status of each item in that category—was making use of shades of red (“false”) and green (“true”) spheres that weren't all that accessible. In fact, for someone with red-green colorblindness (which affects around 5–8% of all men), the colors were virtually indistinguishable.

(Even if you may not be colorblind, this kind of thing can be easily tested with freely available software such as Color Oracle. If you install that, you can see this for yourself by loading any of Snopes’ index pages and selecting “Deuteranopia” from Color Oracle’s menu.)

Andy went so far as to create some accessible versions of those color spheres (keeping them red and green, but mostly changing them to a different shade) and he offered them to the Snopes people with the hope that they might put those to use. The change would have made their site much more usable to persons with colorblindness while maintaining the site’s overall aesthetic. Oddly enough, they refused and decided, instead, to write a FAQ entry on the subject:

We chose our red-yellow-green coding system because its “traffic light” pattern can be understood by most of our readers with little or no explanation. While we understand that about 8% of our readership experiences some form of color blindness and therefore cannot distinguish the different colors of bullets, other alternatives we have tried have proved confusing to many of our non-color blind readers. Therefore, we have chosen to stick with a system that works very well for 92% of our readers.

If we take a closer look at the numbers relating to colorblindness, that 5–8% means that between 1 in 20 and 1 in 12 men will have difficulty using Snopes.com. By way of analogy, around 1.6 million Americans use wheelchairs. While that may be ½% of the US population, the public has every expectation that businesses will help accommodate persons with wheelchairs through the use of wheelchair ramps and the like. And rightly so. (It’s also the law.) Whether one’s eyes, limbs, or other parts of one’s body, disabilities can affect all of us. That’s why I was so astounded when I learned that the people behind Snopes had no interest in the assistance that was offered to them.

After giving it some thought, I decided to see if I could help fix this. So, after first checking with Andy to ask whether I could make use of the revised images that he had created, I wrote up a Userstyle for Stylish to automagically replace Snopes’ inaccessible images with Andy’s improved versions.

If you’re not familiar with the Stylish, you can think of it along the lines of Greasemonkey but for CSS. Put another way, Stylish can automagically insert CSS into a page whenever you visit a particular site. It’s available for both Firefox and Chrome.

Installing the Userstyle for Firefox or Chrome

First, you’ll need to install Stylish (and then restart your browser):

• Stylish for Firefox. (If you’re using the Firefox 4 betas, you’ll need to scroll down the page to the “Beta Channel” heading to load the beta version of Stylish.)
• Stylish for Chrome.

Once you have Stylish installed, the only remaining step is to visit the page for the Snopes Colorblindness Accessibility userstyle and click the “Install with Stylish” button.

Installing the Userstyle for Safari

If you’re using Safari, you’re not entirely out of luck. Though there isn’t an official port of Stylish for Safari, there is another extension that can be used in its place:

1. First, you’ll need to install the User CSS extension (which is basically a clone of Stylish).

2. Then, once you’ve restarted your browser, you should see a toolbar button with an “A” near your forward/back buttons—click that; that’ll load the editing screen for User CSS.

3. At this point, you should see a “New User CSS” screen:

   • Enabled — Check this.
   • Name — “Snopes.com - Fix Colorblindness Accessibility”
   • Domains — http://www.snopes.com/*
   • Styles — Load this special version of the userstyle in a new tab and copy-n-paste all of that into the “Styles” field.
4. Lastly, click “Save” and that should be it.

One Last Thing

Though I was disappointed by Snopes’ nonchalance toward accessibility, I feel I should mention that I continue to trust their fact-checking. They’re pretty good at that.

I visited my parents and brother in Charlotte last month, and even though it had only been a few weeks since I had seen my parents for Thanksgiving, it was great to see everyone again (especially my brother, who I hadn’t seen in about a year). It happened to be a bit on the chilly side in Charlotte—the highs most days were in the lower 40s, if memory serves—but it wasn’t anything a little bundling-up couldn't solve.

I decided to try out some new lighting gear since I knew we’d be spending a good chunk of Saturday in the living room. As a key light, I hung a Canon 430EX with a Lumiquest Softbox to one corner of the mantle with a Gorillapod. (The Lumiquest Softbox was the smaller of the light modifiers I had on hand so I thought that would be a good fit for that spot.)

Then, as a back light (or fill light, depending on how people were facing), I attached a 430EX II with a Lumiquest Softbox LTp to the railings of the second-story walkway above the living room using a Gorillapod SLR. (The LTp is a 10×14 softbox—Lumiquest’s largest model—and I was really impressed by how much soft light it put out.) So, in all, I had two lights set up in the living room and I’m generally pleased with how things turned out; I’ll probably try a setup like that again sometime.

We happened to get a little snow while I was there (perhaps on Saturday?), and while Charlotte doesn’t typically get much snow, it was enough to cover the ground and trees. I didn’t exactly have the proper footwear for trudging around in the snow, but my one regret for the trip is that I wish I had managed to get some shots of the treetops (and other portions of the landscape) covered in snow; it was a pretty sight. Oh, well—there’s always next year.

I visited my family in Charlotte for Thanksgiving, and in addition to my mom and dad, we had something like seventeen other guests join us for the meal. There were cousins, aunts, uncles, family friends, neighbors—it was a full house, but good fun to see everyone.

On the other hand, my brother has been living in Cape Town for the past two (?) years, so he wasn’t able to join us. (It would have been too short of a stay to make the trip there and back, understandably.) He’s a cracking good chum, though, and I’m looking forward to seeing him over Winterfamilytime later this month.

Photography wise, I tried out a couple new lighting setups for some of my shots. For the exterior grill shots, I used my Gorillapod SLR to attach my Canon 430 EX II to one of the gutters (with a LumiQuest Softbox attached to it). That actually worked out better than I thought it would. (For instance, I think that helped fill in some shadows on shots such as this one of my dad checking on the turkey’s thermometer.)

Indoors, I used my second 430 EX (albeit not an “EX II”) to set it upon various spots on the countertop in out kitchen (with a Gorillapod functioning simply as a tripod). Partially through process of elimination—as I only have so many light modifiers—I used my LumiQuest Quik Bounce atop the flash in the kitchen. The idea with the Quik Bounce is that you can bounce some of the light upward while allowing the rest to project forward, creating—in theory—a balance of soft reflected light off the ceiling along with a dash of more focused light.

I have no qualms with the Quik Bounce as a product and I’m sure it often works quite nicely. In my case, though, I think the 9-ft ceilings in my parents’ kitchen probably weren’t ideal for bouncing one’s flash. Come to think of it, the ceiling in their kitchen might even be painted a soft creme color rather than plain white (which may affect the color of any light bounced off it). It’s a pretty great kitchen, but I may have to try a few more ideas in case there may be a lighting arrangement that works even better.

I think nineteen people may be a record for a Bischoff-family Thanksgiving and it worked out pretty well. The turkey was tender and I enjoyed many a conversation with family and friends. Thanksgiving has always been my favorite yearly holiday and this one didn’t disappoint.