Dr. Joo and a long-awaited arrival

Joo and I didn't play up the Christmas advent and spirit as much as we did last year, but we put on some antlers, crank the tunes and put up a few lights. We also prepared for our upcoming string of visitors, which I've calculated will put our household size at an average of 4.2 people over the next several months. The first visitors were Alex and Natalie from Philly...

The above picture was quite amazing in that I don't think I had ever seen Alex (a meat, cheese, and potatoes guy) eat a fresh green so I figured I would capture it on camera for future generations. Joo then practiced some Eastern healing techniques on the couple.

After they left, Joo and I continued in our seasonal preparations with a wreath from Mom and some bows from the Stricklers.

In other news, we finally obtained our live kefir culture that we've been searching for over the past five months. Even the wide assortment at Whole Foods had fallen short of carrying the living grains to make kefir. And then one day, as I was making a call to a local creamery to follow another lead, I was transferred to someone who exlaimed, "Daniel Showalter! Oh, I'm so glad I have you on the phone!" Apparently, there had been a miscommunication and my paperwork had been lost so they hand-delivered the kefir grains within a couple hours and even gave me a free T-shirt. The grains looked nothing like what I was expecting, although had I read Wikipedia's description of them being a "gelatinous community of bacteria and yeasts," I might have been more prepared.

We mixed them with milk and were ready to go after 24 hours of curdling and fermentation... I used the first batch for some fruit shakes and Joo made a nice fluffy whole wheat pizza crust with it... yummy! More later as we experiment with it and find out more about it.