Thanksgiving Thursday

It was a successful day of cooking and overeating. I roasted the turkey with wild rice stuffing and I got a lot of help from Unky Herb, in fact all of the guests joined in to get the food on the table at about 2:10 pm. Barb and Emmy brought cranberry bread, Gino made a pie and the gravy, and Ying brought two Chinese delicacies - an egg plant dish and a corn and pine nut creation. Very tasty.  The buns (rye, I think) came curtesy of Sharon, the Girl from the North Country (GFTNC). The folk at the feast table with me are pictured below, and we were joined a bit later for pie and coffee by the GFTNC. It was a lot of good natured conversation and as promised, everyone was on their best behavior.

What the table looked like before the feasting began.

I wasn't able to send home anywhere near all the leftovers either. As is expected for Thanksgiving, we all over produced vittles, but I was able to send off only a bit of some of the choicer tidbits. I'll be having turkey sandwiches for a couple of weeks or until I sicken of them and toss out the remains or use them in soup. And I have some stuffing and gravy leftover, too. An almost unheard of situation in past festivities.  Cleanup is done and I'm starting to hanker for a turkey sandwich.

Photos of the bird can be found elsewhere on the inner tubes.

We missed having the Daughter of Norway (aka Prairie Princess) here to participate in the cooking and subsequent tomfoolery, but she seems to be well and contented, but a little turkey deprived somewhere south of Oslo.

Thin Ice

We are on the cusp of having ice on the lakes 24/7. The weather creatures are prognosticating most of a week wherein the temperature will remain below the freezing point of water. We'll have ice houses on the lakes in a couple of weeks at that rate. My daily walk to get enough full spectrum light on my retinas took me by the lake at La Parc de Comeau again today. It was about 37 degrees in the heat of the afternoon. The migrating waterfowl were in the lake, either swimming or strolling about on the thin ice. All of the rest of the lake was flat and iced over, except for the pool that the fowl were using. I'm not sure that I can identify all the species in the photo, but there are, for sure, geese and Mallard ducks among them. Wildlife on ice. My walk covered at least three miles, maybe more, and the geese were all over the parc, fouling the paths and the grass. They are fowl most foul. Vermin.



There was tennis again at Wooddale. The feat now is to avoid taking home the turkey trophy for winning the fewest number of games. The trophy was brought into the mix a few weeks back by Bill and so far, except for one exceptionally bad day, I've been able to go home without "big bird." My scores tonight were 3-6, 6-4; mediocre in the grand scheme of things, but good enough to stay turkey free. Poetically, Bill has been in possession of his own trophy most of the time.

The turkey leftovers from Thanksgiving are still haunting the fridge. I had some more of the mixture of turkey, stuffing, potatoes, and wild rice again tonight. I made it palatable by adding teriyaki sauce, olives and salsa. Yum. I'm discarding the rest of the leftovers soon, before the threat of ptomaine gets too unmanageable.

Only four more days in November. Then I'll be able to take a rest day from this blogging albatross.

Large Refrigeration Unit

It's curling night and the Miller Rink will be only three strong tonight as one of the team members is traveling. It's the night before Thanksgiving, which in the past meant that the Bonnies took the night off and we curled at 7:00 pm. As it turns out, we''ll be curling at our normal time. We will be competing in what could be considered a very large refrigerator. The club makes use of that fact by storing its beer along the edge of sheet one. The kegs in the photo are full and destined to filter through the members at a later date.


We had real snow flurries today and it felt like winter is ready to make an impact on the citizens. I walked up to the Cook's store on Grand and Victoria to see what sort of skewers or sewing apparatus was available for keeping the stuffing inside a roasting turkey. They had several solutions, but I may go with some heavy twine that I have in-house. Or duct tape. ( :-) The turkey is starting to soften up on its path to being thawed out, but I may have to use the running water trick to finish the job. I am likely to photgraph the bird in its golden glory for tomorrow's blog. By that time it will be food.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Tuesday in November

It was cloudy most of the day and seasonably chilly. I walked around the neighborhood, looking for something pretty to photograph. Pretty things need good light before they get really pretty and the sun stayed mainly behind a formidable bank of clouds. Late in the afternoon - late is about 3:30 pm this month - the sun peeked out for a while and I took this picture of the sky with the roof line of my house in the foreground to ensure contrast.


The sky didn't stay sunny for long. I trekked to Como to get an open area for more sky shots, but the sky reverted to gray. I walked around the lake - 1.6 miles - and looked for pretty things. I, at least, had some exercise on this Tuesday before Thanksgiving.

I wish I would have taken a photo of the "Pie Sale" sign by the Greek Church on Lexington, because the sign was tied down with a rope to keep it from being stolen (I presume), but I was driving by in the Matrix and thought I would get a better photo by the lake. Do you think that someone would actually steal a "Pie Sale" sign? What use would it be to the thief? He'd have to make some pies and have a pie sale. I don't think that thieves often have that sort of entrepreneurial impulse. Or maybe he could drag the sign to a pawn shop and pawn it. I think not. I wish I would have taken that photo. Nope. I took a pass. Now I just have this photo of the sky.

I'm going to roast a turkey on Thursday. I think it'll be fun. I bought it yesterday at Rainbow and it's in my "fridge" thawing out. Maybe tomorrow I'll write a poem about it and give it to the long pretty girl instead of the poem about Albion that she was expecting.