The VOGT family had a low-key lead-in to Christmas, and a low-key Christmas Day to match.  Lynn and I hosted a holiday dinner party for three couples and ourselves on the Tuesday before Christmas; we cut beef tenderloins up into filet mignons and grilled them out on the deck, served baked potatoes and a few vegetables with some nice wine and a festive dessert.  The filets were the only extravagance; everything else was simple and common.  The purpose was to get together with friends and catch up with each other and enjoy a peaceful evening before the days got too hectic.  Lynn and I also used the enforced deadline of the dinner party to make sure we finished decorating the house BEFORE Christmas!  As the winter evenings roll around, we both have a bad habit of putting off finishing the tree or setting up the miniature village or getting the window lights placed and functioning in favor of relaxing with a book or watching TV, and the house holiday decorations never quite get finished.  This way we were motivated to finish BEFORE the party!

The season was so low-key for us that we both had all our wrapping done in advance of Christmas Eve (no more assembling stuff at 2AM) and were able to enjoy dinner out with Megan’s in-laws at a local Chinese restaurant.  It was, in fact, non-trivial to FIND a restaurant that was open and taking reservations on Christmas Eve.

Christmas Day itself was reserved and calm as well.  Megan and Dan and Audrey and her boyfriend Todd arrived by 9AM to open stockings, and then we prepared and devoured a breakfast of Eggs Benedict before attacking the presents under the tree.  After that the girls and their S.O.s departed for other households, while Lynn and I cleaned up and headed to my sister’s house down the street for her annual Christmas open-house; she with the flock of kids and a bevy of grand-children.

The day after Christmas Lynn and I headed north to the Ballot Box for the week, where I’ll soon have a Ballot Box Blog entry reporting on our activities for the stay.

May the new year bring you peace and prosperity, health and fulfillment, and may all your wishes be granted.

We have the lights up on the bushes out front, we set up the winter village on the ledge over the front door, the Christmas Tree is parked in the garage in a bucket of water, there’s a 30-inch balsam wreath waiting to be hung on the front of the house over the door and a 24-inch balsam wreath waiting to be hung over the hearth in the living room.  The snowman and the German sled are on the high ledge in the living room, and the candles are shining in all the windows on the upper floor.  I’ve got the Christmas letter written, but I still have to print it and massage the Christmas Card database to print out proper address labels.  We’re almost ready!

I still have to reshuffle the clutter in the garage so we can get at least one car under cover for the winter, and I need to make sure the snow-blowing beast is primed and ready.  I have a feeling, with all this early winter mild weather, that the rest of the season is going to be a bit of a terror.  The Olde Farmer’s Almanac takes that view for this winter.  Time will tell!

For the people to the west of the hurricane track (CT, western MA, VT, etc.), the volume of water that fell (10-20 inches in a 12-hour period) caused – and is still causing – unimaginable hardships.  Rivers cresting up to 20 feet above flood-stage, cars swept away, houses and businesses destroyed, and worse.  For them, Irene was not over-hyped at all.  It could have very easily been us.

The VOGTs dodged two bullets with that storm.   All my pre-hurricane prep at the FamilyTreeHouse must’ve kept calamities from striking – Saturday I fired up the generator to test it out, ran an extension cord from the generator in the garage out to the sump pump outside the below-grade back door to keep the sump pump running and keep the finished basement from flooding, dug out the candles and flashlights, pulled the chairs and the plants in from the deck, and laid the deck umbrella down on its side.  We never lost power, and nothing blew off the deck.

We got probably 4-5 inches of rain (enough to flood the basement if the sump pump wasn’t working, but we’ve seen worse), and 40-50 mph wind gusts at times (I’m guessing).  No tree damage on our property.  Half a tree was lost across the street from us, but the city workers showed up about 45 minutes after it fell to cut up and cart away that part that was blocking the street.  The recently-applied new waterproofing on the deck held up admirably.  All in all we survived unscathed; the ground-fault outlet on the deck didn’t even trip!  I got a look at the roof the morning after to see if we lost any shingles, and we didn’t.

Photos and videos from the FamilyTreeHouse during the hurricane…

Lynn stayed up at the Ballot Box in Newcastle Maine for the storm, and it was almost as uneventful there.  She lost power about 5 pm but it was back within a few hours.  I have the cable modem and the router on a UPS so she was able to stay online even though the house power was out.  A lot of rain and a fair amount of wind, but no damage, and even the hummingbirds were coming to the one feeder she left out (anchored tightly to the hook) during the height of the storm!

Power-Wash Results

So, I mowed the weeds, hedge-clipped all the shrubs, and power-washed the mildew off the north side of the house this weekend.  Power-washing was my favorite task for a couple of reasons; 1) power-washing provides instantaneous gratification because you get to see the results of your efforts immediately, and 2) on a hot summer day, working in close proximity to a cool-water mist bouncing off the house siding keeps you damp and cool as you work!

No trip to Maine this weekend.  All those weekend trips to the Ballot Box is what caused the Family TreeHouse to look so neglected.  Weekends in Maine means no weekend yard work in Woburn.

I made sure to make room for my cherished deck-time this weekend, though. Both Saturday morning and Sunday morning; music on the deck with my Kindle, breakfast and coffee, Sunday with the Sunday paper too.  Bliss!

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A blog title like that could apply to a lot of topics; I’ve got some Bondo™ work to do on my 14-year-old minivan this spring to try to stem the tide of body-rot that’s appearing along the edge of the frame under the passenger-side slider, the lawn is coming in splotchier than usual after the heavy snow and collateral damage to the grass done by the abundance of snow-melting chemicals (I don’t think they use rock salt on the roads anymore), the deck is in dire need of a power-washing (to get all the spent sunflower seed shells out from between the decking boards) and a re-sealing with waterproof deck stain.  But this time  around, the target of my words are the gable vents on either end of the garage, up by the roof peak on both the front and the back.  Both vents fatigued and failed the same winter.  One faces mostly south, the other faces mostly north; it didn’t matter.  They both looked like they were attached to an old abandoned haunted house somewhere (see photo).

I had seen the deterioration starting mid-winter, and watched it getting worse week-by-week. I knew I would have to replace both of them come spring, so I started hunting for a pre-fabricated replacement.  The original ones (installed when the garage was built 26+ years ago) had all the earmarks of being a pre-fab drop-in item (assembled with staples instead of nails, a box-like structure, etc.) so I was hoping that they were still being made and I could buy drop-in replacements.  The more I searched, though, the more I came to the conclusion that I would have to custom-make the replacements.  I had no doubt that I could do it, I just would’ve preferred a drop-in replacement rather than spending all my time going up and down the ladder with pieces, building each one by hand from the top of the ladder.

So yesterday the process started.  Up the ladder I went and dis-assembled the remaining  pieces of the south-side vent on the driveway side facing the street.  I had to disassemble and remove the basketball backboard first as it was in the way of the ladder and prevented me from getting easy access to the vent, so my vent demolition was delayed until later in the morning than expected.  The backboard had to be removed in segments (first the rim, then the fiberglass backboard, then the mounting bracket) because the upper toggle bolts were unreachable from a ladder on either side.

Once the backboard was out o the way, I pulled the remnants of the vent out, then headed off to grab some lunch and stop at a local building supply/lumber yard to get some new bolts to re-attach the rim to the backboard (I had found a taker for the backboard assembly through a local “freecycle” email mailing list).  Once at the lumber yard, I tried one more time to find a drop-in replacement for the vents.

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SHAZAMM! They had two in stock!  And it looks like it’s the same manufacturer because they were assembled exactly like the old ones, and they’re a glove-fit!  They cost less than I would’ve had to pay for the wood itself, never mind the time I’d spend building them! I was ecstatic!  So I boarded up the now-open vent hole to keep the birds out of the garage and commenced painting the pre-assembled vents (primer and two coats of almond-colored exterior paint) so I could pop them in all assembled and painted the next free weekend! I was so happy I could’ve danced a jig!

EPILOGUE

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After last weekend spent up at the Ballot Box (no work done at the southern house) I finally got one gable vent installed

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 this weekend (14 May).  It looks great, and the computer-color-match paint system at Lowe’s was able to match the vinyl siding color pretty darn well!

EPILOGUE 2

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Finally got a weekend (July 9 & 10) at the southern house with decent weather (lots of rainy weekends recently) so I could finish the gable vent replacement.  The north side is now back to normal, rather than looking like a haunted house (see the very first picture at the beginning of this post)!  I had to move some of the pallets I’ve been “saving” to be able to place the ladder, and the vent itself needed some free-hand table-saw “modifications” to get it to fit in the existing cut-out from the old vent, but nothing too elaborate or risky.  Now the garage is back to normal!

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But the tease is but a set trap, and the trap inevitably gets sprung, with a rapid and all-too-soon shift back to arctic blasts that feel all the colder and cutting after a few 50 degree days. The squishy mud that formed hardens back into concrete, the joggers and cyclists disappear again, the weatherman resurrects the dreaded wind-chill readings, and the weaker of our Brethren start mumbling to themselves about Florida or Arizona and how they hate winter.

We’re in the throes of the first thaw of the season at the TreeHouse, having been skipped over for the usual January tease. The electric spot-light and serpentine cord that illuminates the house wreath during the holiday season has re-emerged from under the snowbanks along the front walk (if I could pull the mounting spike out of the perma-frost I would pack it away until next fall, but that will have to wait for a deeper thaw), and the landscaping walls that demarcate the raised beds out back have reappeared from under the blanket of snow. Most everyone else is reveling in the warmth and diminishing snowbanks (I can see around the corner at the end of my street again for the first time since December!), but I know better. It’s only March – EARLY March at that – so we’re bound to have a return to winter sooner or later, and it will push the weaker ones over the edge. I remember the April Fool’s Day Blizzard of 1997, and the big surprise snowstorm on May 9th of one year (I forget which) that destroyed thousands of fully-leafed-out trees and bushes.

Sump Pump
In a fit of prescience brought on by the warming-trend and a weather forecast that included somewhat copious amounts of rain, I finally got around to doing what I had been planning to do for 15 years; I installed an electrical outlet by the back door for the outdoor sump-pump.

We have had water problems at the basement door since we bought the house 20+ years ago, which has gotten worse as time advanced and neighborhood construction altered the water-table. We live in a split-level-style house, and the lower (basement) level is finished off, so any basement flooding would have disastrous and expensive consequences. The back door is slightly below-grade, so water entry was always a problem when torrential rains descended upon us, especially in the spring or fall. At those times (once every 3-4 years at first, a few times a year now) I would stay up all night, manually operating a bilge pump just outside the door to keep the water from flowing under the door and into the finished basement.

Because of the enormous hassle and threat of serious destruction that a basement flood would cause,  I dug out the area outside the basement door and built a dry-well of sorts, using landscaping timbers to build a walled-in area by the door.  I then dug out and filled in the area with a good depth of pea-stone. That helped get the water back into the ground quickly before coming in under the door, and gave me visual warning of impending doom when the water was coming down faster than the ground could carry it away, as I could see the ground-water rise up through the pea-stone and that acted as an early warning (an hour or so in a good rainstorm) that it was time to drag out the sump-pump and start pumping. This arrangement was better than before, but not great, as I still needed to stay up all night and run the pump intermittently so as not to burn the pump out running it dry (it pumped water quicker than it seeped in, so it couldn’t be left to run continuously).

A few years after that I got smart and dug out a section of the dry-well-like landing and planted a sump-basin in the ground that allowed me to use a water-height-activated pump. By setting the pump in the basin just outside the basement door, the pump would cycle itself on and off as water collected in the basin and I could leave the pump plugged in and go to bed (as long as we didn’t lose power in the night – I have a generator for that contingency). Of course, the logical final step would have been to mount an electrical outlet outside the basement door so the sump-pump could be left plugged in and do its work as-required, but I never got around to that last step and have spent the past 15 years manually running the cord inside the house under the door whenever there was a flooding threat.

I’ve had all the parts waiting to be installed for five years or more now, but I finally took last Saturday to spend the time to finish the job. So much nicer!  As fate – and luck – would have it, the new arrangement was put to the test less than 24 hours after installation as a warm Nor-Easter came through, dumping 2-3 inches of rain onto still frozen ground (nowhere for the water to go) and threatening once again to flood the basement.  But the pump cycled faithfully all night long and kept the headwaters of our “crick” from slipping under the door!  I declare victory!

Baseball
To plagiarize Alfred, Lord Tennyson (and probably make him spin in his grave), In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of… BASEBALL! Spring training is in full swing, and the Red Sox have re-loaded with new and exciting all-stars to join the returning formerly-wounded to make up a team which, on paper, looks downright invincible. But I’m still a long-time Red Sox fan (with a long memory – ’67, ’75, ’78, ’86, ’03), so I cringe at the expectations and predictions coming out of Fort Myers these days. But mixed in with that dread is a little bit of excitement at the sheer potential the ’11 team possesses. I’ve managed to acquire tickets to two games this year (2nd home game of the season, on April 9th, against the hated Yankees, and a night game on May 19th against Detroit) and am looking forward to watching the healthy and re-loaded Red Sox in action!  Go Sox!!

Computer Repair
My powerhouse workstation (A PowerSpec E360, with Intel Q6600 Core 2 Quad Processor, 4 GB memory, and 3 TB of internal hard drive space [including two 500 GB drives in a RAID0 configuration creating a high-speed 1 TB boot drive]) has had a habit of burning up CPU fans lately. The CPU fan comes attached to a heat-sink that gets mounted (with thermal grease and four long screws) right on top of the CPU. The first fan died after a little over a year (so it was out of warranty), resulting in a thermal-triggered shutdown to keep the CPU from being damaged. The replacement fan/heat-sink failed in the same way after about 6 months (on a 90-day warranty, alas). So I’ve replaced it again and am back in business. There may have been a defect in the 2nd fan, as it was always noisy, and the second replacement is as quiet as a mouse. The fan/heat-sink assembly is not expensive (under $10) so I bought a spare one to have on-hand, in case the pattern is repeated.  No indication so far.

While I had it disconnected and pulled apart, I tried installing a PCIe eSATA board so I could attach my external SATA drive docking station via an eSATA cable instead of USB 2.0 (in addition to the 3 TB of internal disk space, I have another 4.5 TB of disk space on swappable drives for for music, image, and video archive and system backups). Alas, the eSATA board recognized the dock and drives, but never gave me access to the drives via the operating system, so I reverted to the USB 2.0 connection scheme – much slower, but at least it works!

Digitizing VHS tapes
I’ve been digitizing a dozen or so VHS tapes for my sister, since her VHS player died and it’s getting harder and harder to replace VHS equipment these days (the only VHS player/recorder I could find at Best Buy was a dual VHS/DVD device for $300!). I bumped into a small problem after I agreed to do the conversion for her and she had sent me the tapes; the device I previously used to capture analog audio/video to digitize it (a Pinnacle Dazzle Digital Video Converter [DVC] 150 USB device) does not have 64-bit drivers for use with Windows 7 or Vista (only 32-bit drivers), and I switched over to 64-bit Windows 7 over a year ago (gives you an idea as to how often I do this!). So, I reverted to the S-Video & Audio inputs for my Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1600 internal HDTV card (which does have 64-bit Windows 7 drivers and has been working as a broadband cable TV capture board just fine). I had to buy an in-line composite-to-S-Video converter for $3 (the Hauppauge board only has S-Video inputs), but it works like a champ. Once the video/audio stream is digitized, I use Pinnacle Studio v14 to process, produce, and burn to DVD. Some of the tapes take more time and effort than others (video processing, audio scrubbing or replacement, etc.), but the process itself is straightforward and is fun from a creative aspect, so I’m enjoying it.

Its been an interesting season so far.  The piles of snow at the end of the driveway are taller than I am, and the piles at the ends of the streets are sometimes 10-12 feet high! It creates an interesting challenge trying to ease the nose of a car out into a street when you can’t see a blooming thing.

The big record-breaking year was deceptive because we actually had three complete winters that year.  The snow started in November, and by a week after Thanksgiving we had five-foot piles at the end of the driveway.  Then we had a thaw and it was gone in a week.  Then it started snowing again and by New Year’s we had another pair of five-foot piles at the end of the driveway.  Then we got our predictable “January Thaw” and the grass was showing in places by February.  then it started snowing again and the five-foot piles were back by the first of March.  We haven’t had any thaw yet this year, so it just keeps piling up and up!

Cabin fever is rampant among the psuedo-New-Englanders.  They started whining about the snow in mid-January! True New Englanders don’t complain about snow until at least March!

I lost the use of my beloved snow blower for a short period of time recently.  Someone delivered a big thick phone book – in a white plastic bag – at the end of the driveway, BEFORE it started snowing before one of the recent storms, so the camoflaged phonebook was able to sneak through the rotating augers with shear pins and became embedded in the impeller in the snow blower.  I spent an hour trying to get the book out and all I succeeded in doing was to split two knuckles.  The shop where I bought the beast picked it up and cleaned it out for me.  Needless to say, I was sputtering fire and brimstone that night.  Luckily I had the driveway and walkway to the stairs cleared of the six inches of slush, but I didn’t get to the front walk or the sidewalk until after it was returned.

Snow banks in front of house

NOW its winter!  We finally had a seriously serious snow storm, dumping 19-22 inches of snow at the Family TreeHouse. We got 12-15 inches a day or two after Christmas, enough for me to break out the Man-Toy (the 11.5-HP-28-inches-wide Ariens snow throwing beast that sleeps in the garage) for the first time, but it melted away and looked like the 4-6 inches of snow a season we used to get in Stuttgart – wimpy!  But yesterday was a storm!  It started snowing about 1:00 am (I was up so I saw it start) Wednesday morning.  At 6:00 am we had 8-10 inches on the ground, and it just kept coming.  I was able to tele-commute and work from home, so the van never left the garage, even though I had new front all-weather tires and new brakes installed last Thursday.

The Orange Monster at Work

By 3:30 pm it was finally letting up, so I donned my snow-boots, hooded nylon parka, ski goggles and fur-lined gloves and headed out to do battle.  The orange monster fired right up and took it all in stride.  I was able to clear the 3-car-wide, 3-car-deep driveway in less than an hour.  The plow-ridge at the end of the driveway was up higher than the snow blower opening, but the “drift-cutter” attachments did their job and I was able to cut through even the dense-pack plow ridge with relative ease.

The Next Morning

After the driveway I cleared the path from the driveway to the front stairs, and Audrey shoveled the stairs while I tackled the plow ridge along the sidewalk across the entire front of the house (~80 feet), which continued into a pull-in clearing in front of the mailbox for the mail man.  Last up with the beast was to clear out the hydrant on the edge of the woods across the street from the house.

Time Exposure Out Back

The last job wasn’t for the orange beast; it was to shovel out the gas grill and dig paths to the bird feeders out on the deck.  While out there I put the pocket camera on a tripod and took some time-exposure photos of the snow out on the “back forty” and beyond.

Clinging For Dear Life

It looks and sounds like winter as I remember it as a kid now… five-foot snow piles at the ends of the driveways that make backing out a challenge, wind-swept shelves of snow leaning way off the roofs, dozens of cardinals and titmice and chickadees and LBBs (Little Brown Birds) clutching for dear life to the snow-swept feeders, the rumbling scrape of the giant city plow pushing the ridges back late at night. This is the way New England should be!

For many years (when we weren’t living in Germany) we’d head to Seasons Four Garden Center in Lexington for our trees and wreaths. The prices were quite good, the selection was excellent, and they had a Santa and a small petting zoo for the kids, and hot chocolate, mulled cider, and cookies for adults and kids. They also had a gift shoppe area with lots of ornaments and decorations for sale. When the kids were young and the fingers and toes got cold, Lynn would take them inside to warm up while I stalked the perfect tree for the living room.

With time and age, the extra-curricular activities had less of a draw on the kids, and the crowds that formed at Seasons Four were often daunting, to the point where parking was a problem, so last year Lynn and I decided to break the mold and check out somewhere else. We headed off to McCue’s Garden Center in Woburn, just down the street from us in Four Corners. The selection was equally as good as Seasons Four, they were much closer, the prices seemed a bit lower, and they were incredibly helpful! I never had to touch a tree or a wreath – we just pointed to the tree we wanted, they took it, gave it a fresh cut, wrapped it in netting, put it on the roof of our van and tied it down for us! Same with the wreaths. The only thing I touched was my credit card!

This year Audrey and I headed straight to McCue’s.

The trees this year continue the trend that we’ve seen over the years – they’re getting fuller and denser, with almost no inside room to hang ornaments. I have an overly meticulous method of stringing lights on the tree, where I wrap each branch from the trunk outwards. It takes a long time, and it uses thousands of lights, but it looks so much better when it’s done. This year, I’m not sure I’ll be able to fight my way into the tree to reach the trunk!

We got the tree into a bucket of water in the garage, and the wreaths on a table in the garage, ready for deployment and hanging over this weekend. Soon phase two of the holiday decorating will commence (phase one being the outdoor lights and window candles two weeks ago just after Thanksgiving), followed by phase three (“…the stockings were hung by the chimney with care…”) on Christmas Eve.

Now if we can just arrange for a little snow by Christmas Eve…

After 36+ years of marriage and two kids, Lynn and I have finally figured out how to host events like this with minimal stress.  The secret for us is an old adage from the past; “Many Hands Make Light Work!“  We enlisted the aid of our live-in daughter for around-the-house preparations, and we delegated a lot of the food preparations to the invited guests, with us taking care of the turkey, the gravy, and the mashed potatoes!  We had lots to do for sure, but it was manageable and we started early.  I’m always in charge of the turkey from start to finish, stuffing and all, which I prepared Tuesday night this year, rather than staying up until 2am making the stuffing the night before.

At least in my view, the single biggest chore for Thanksgiving in our family has always been making the traditional family-recipe stuffing (a meal in itself), which can be a 3 to 4 hour project.  The “old” way I used to do it, which was how my father used to do it, was to toast 3-4 long loaves of cheap white bread, dice the toast into cubes, mix the dry seasonings into the dry toast, then put that aside and chop two packages of celery (stalks AND leaves) and 2 medium onions, then sauté the celery and onions in a pound of melted butter for maybe ten minutes, then put that aside and scramble-fry 3 or 4 packages/tubes of Jimmy Dean REGULAR pork sausage, then dump everything into the bread crumbs and stir it with 2-3 cups of turkey broth liquid until thoroughly mixed (which takes longer than you might think).  When making enough stuffing for a large turkey (24 pounds this year), this concoction requires a LARGE pot because the dry diced bread takes up a large volume until the liquids get mixed in.  This year I used a giant stainless-steel lobster pot for the final mixing container.

In recent years I’ve taken to saving time by buying the Pepperidge Farm dry diced bread for stuffing in a bag (I often use as many as 3-4 bags for a Thanksgiving batch), and eliminating having to toast and dice the bread.  This year, though, we apparently waited too long to buy the diced bread, as there was none to be found in the two grocery stores Lynn visited, so she reverted to the “old” way, bought 4 long loaves of junky white bread, and proceeded to toast all the bread for me before I got home from work Tuesday.  All that was left was to dice the toast, collect it in the lobster pot, and cook the celery/onions and sausage.

Of course, stuffing the bird is a chore, but cooking the bird is a crap-shoot! How long do you cook a 24 lb stuffed turkey?  The guide that came with the turkey said 5-7 hours for a 24 lb bird, but two hours is a big window of uncertainty to try to plan a meal around!  Do I plan for five hours?  Seven hours? Something else?  I initially decided on the seven hour estimate, because a stuffed bird should take longer to cook than an unstuffed bird, but I wasn’t sure if the times were based on stuffed or not!  We were planning on sitting down to eat at 3 pm, which meant I needed to take the bird out by 2 pm to give it time to sit before carving, and to free up the oven for any other dishes that needed to be cooked or heated. Based on that estimate I planned on popping the bird in the oven for a 7-hour sauna at 325° so it would need to be put in the oven at 7 am.  At the last minute, though, when I re-read the instructions, I noticed that the 5-7 hour cooking estimate was for a 24+ lb turkey, the PLUS sign indicating 24 pounds or more! So I re-estimated on-the-fly and decided on a 6-hour sauna.  I targeted taking the turkey out of the oven at 2pm, and damned if I didn’t pull it out exactly at 2pm!  That NEVER happens!

Hors d’oeuvres consisted of stuffed celery, shrimp and cocktail sauce, stuffed mushrooms, and olives and pickles. We were playing big-band music over the internet radio connected to the stereo all day.  There were 12 guests for dinner, so that morning Audrey and I set our folding banquet table up against the end of the formal dining room table, extending the table out into the living room.  We were able to seat everyone around a single (albeit makeshift) table, banquet-style.  We sat down to eat at about 3 pm, and a fine time was had by all.  The fresh local turkey was delicious, as were all the side dishes (mashed potatoes, stuffing, baked squash, broccoli and cauliflower in melted cheese).  Our dessert table held pumpkin tiramisu, apple, pumpkin, and pecan pie, a chocolate cheesecake, and Italian pizzelle.