Thanksgiving Preparations

 

Well Mommy's famous (and quite fabulous!) turkey head is waiting for a pineapple. In the meantime, the handbag that Bob fashioned for me from a log will do nicely! I think my sister Cathy said she's providing the pineapple... (*1)

So here are a couple of helpful suggestions to make your holiday entertaining that much easier. First off, don't clean the house too early. Like I'm talking wait until the last minute if possible.

Case in point: this floor was clean... maybe yesterday? But we're heavy traffic: bringing in autumn leaves and general dirt on our boots type people so I learned the hard way to clean at the last minute or have to do it all over. Hell! I've got more important things to do with my time! (Like play outside and track in more dirt!) (*2)

And here's another tip: no matter what they tell you on the packaging or the Internet, your frozen turkey will still be frozen after many days of refrigerator thawing!

Here's Bob attempting to wrestle guts from our 13 pound friend. What do you do when you get one of those 20 pound behemoths?!?! Anyway, I'm certain that tragedy will be averted, the bird will thaw and a lovely golden brown turkey will grace the table tomorrow.  But now I have to go clean!!

(*1) I sorta forgot to buy one, along with dish soap. Yes, several trips to various stores and I forgot. I guess we'll have to dine on dirty platters and grubby, reused stemware! The horrors!

(*2) Similar to the time I bought and wrapped a birthday present for a friend. Several months passed before seeing this friend, in which time the wrapping paper was a crumpled, dirty mess and I had to re-wrap it. 

Dog and Pony Update

I haven't featured our fluffy barnyard friends recently so I decided this was as good a time as ever. Let's check in with Maggie the Mexican Pony and Jules the (Perfect) Dog.
This is what greeted me in the field today:

Maggie spent a good part of the night shellacing herself in mud. Do we remember that Maggie is a BLACK horse? Here's a detail of her back end:

She looks like a brown and black zebra! After thirty minutes of currying and brushing, she looked marginally better but wherever you touched her, puffs of dust arose. In addition, she has thoughtfully whacked her foot on a frozen chunk of mud (I am conjecturing...) and took a big piece of her hind hoof off. Ouch. No pictures of the damaged foot- it's too pathetic!- but here's her other side. It's a bit more presentable:

At this stage of the winter, with all the fuzzy coat, it's almost impossible to clean them. Maggie resembles and old sofa in a basement rec room.
And Jules? Yes, the Perfect Dog continues his winning ways.

There he is, contemplating his very favorite activity. (Hint: it has something to do with chasing small round things.) Maybe he's waiting for snow. He does like snow, unlike the rest of us. But in the meantime, Jules has made himself super useful by providing logs for the wood stoves. Most mornings, he selects a log or stick from our walk and carries it back home. Our neighbors find this highly entertaining, especially when he chooses an especially long branch and he looks over his shoulder, expecting me to pick up the other end and help him carry it home. We then proceed up the road like a yoke of oxen. How perverse is it that he makes me work on our walks?

But there's a new twist. Jules is pretty smart and he figured out how to correctly train me. Several times recently, he picked out a log that was a bit too wide around to fit comfortably in his mouth. He struggled with lifting it and I'd try and help but I found myself carrying his log, with Jules glancing approvingly at me. I have become a log valet for the dog!