I really like Thanksgiving. I love that I get a couple of days off of work to spend at home. I love that I get to spend that time with the people that I love the most. I love the traditions that have grown in my family over the years. And yes, as a foodie, I love the food!
Our Thanksgiving Day traditions:
Breakfast of link sausage, scrambled eggs, blueberry muffins, and orange juice.
A Thanksgiving turkey, of course. This year, I'm going to SMOKE the turkey!
The rest of the Thanksgiving meal will include homemade gravy, homemade rolls of some sort, amazing mashed potatoes with lots of butter butter and cream, and stuffing--we have grown very attached to a sourdough and Cremini mushroom stuffing with fresh thyme and rosemary.
Mints and nuts in little craft turkeys made from miniature flower pots.
Discussing what we're thankful for as we eat our delicious meal.
Even if we have Thanksgiving dinner with someone else, we still cook our own dinner so that we get all of the foods we love and so that we have lots of leftovers.
Putting up Christmas decorations the day after Thanksgiving.
So now the turkey is going to sleep in the brine overnight and tomorrow, I'm going to dry it out in the refrigerator--the extra refrigerator, because now we have two! Then it's going on the smoker for 3 or so hours.
It's going to be seriously delicious! More about the meal tomorrow!
Older Son has applied to BYU and BYU-Idaho, and as part of the application process, needed to discuss his willingness to abide by the Church Educational System Honor Code with his ecclesiastical leaders. It's standard procedure.
Last week, Older Son met with our Stake President. In the course of the interview, he asked Older Son to tell him a little about himself. Older Son mentioned that he plays violin and has done so for about ten years.
That's when Stake President pulled out his planner and mentioned that he was looking for a musical number for the Stake Priesthood Meeting on December 11 and he invited Older Son to provide that musical number. When asked who could accompany him, of course he said, "my Dad can."
Eek! I don't think that's standard procedure!
Looks like I'm going to need to be sitting in front of a piano for a few hours between now and then!
The other night, I was driving to Central Elementary School to pick up Younger Son who was volunteering at the Christa McAuliffe Space Education Center. Something on the radio triggered a memory...
Older Son went to Manila Elementary School for Kindergarten. He and I had worked together on a little Lego Mindstorms robot and he wanted to bring it to school for Show & Tell. I can still picture the configuration of the desks in the classroom as we showed off how this robot could move around the room.
As I sat at a red light having this memory, I had a small panic attack. Older Son is now a Senior in High School. Instead of me helping him build Legos, he's helping me move refrigerators. He is applying for college admissions and scholarships. We're soon going to be worrying about Senior pictures and graduation.
And then he's going to be gone. Next Thanksgiving, he could very well be coming home from college for a visit. The following Thanksgiving, he will likely be serving an LDS mission.
I sat there, waiting for the light to change, fighting back tears, knowing how much I'm going to miss him--the same tears that I'm fighting back as I write this.
I'm not ready.
But he is ready. And ready or not, it's going to happen.
Despite the fact that I'm going to miss him, I'm so excited for the growth that he is going to experience in the next few years of his life. I take comfort in the fact that he and I have a really good relationship and I'm sure that I'll be one that he shares this growth and experience with.
...until it started getting worse. So yesterday, I went in to see a doctor. Turns out that this cold has turned into a pretty nasty sinus infection.
So now I have antibiotic and some really good knock-you-out cough medicine. I've been sleeping better, so I'm hoping that this stupid sickness will soon be a thing of the past.
Sorry if you tried to get to misterme.com (or dutchovenchef.com or laylabean.com or missgiggles.com or ooh-shemo.com) last night. My host had a glitch. I couldn't fix it. First and second level tech support at my host couldn't fix it. Fortunately, the third level knew how to fix the problem.
I was looking for a replacement laptop battery online, and found the following information about one of them:
Use laptop battery needing attention some matters:
Carefulness read narrate book of battery, use commendatory battery.
Research the electric appliance and the laptop batteries contact elements is whether clean, when necessity is clean with the wet cloth mop, after dry loads according to the correct polar direction
New laptop battery pack must be fully charged before use.
Li-ion and NiMH laptop battery can not interchangeable.
Don't make new and old or different model battery put off.
Don't try to make laptop battery rebirth use hot up, charge, or other way.
Don't let battery short circuit.
Don't hot up laptop battery or loss it in water.
Don't strip battery.
Electro-adapter should cut switch after use.
Should take of laptop battery from adapter when battery long time no use .
If you don't use your laptop for a period of time, you must fully discharge then recharge the laptop battery.
Battery should stock in cool place, and dry.
Yes, I believe that there was something lost in translation there.
For some reason, it reminded me of an old Saturday Night Live mock commercial:
As I mentioned earlier, we ended up buying a new refrigerator, a new washing machine, and a new dryer. The refrigerator was supposed to be delivered on Friday, but it actually arrived yesterday. I had to quickly move the old fridge, clean behind it, and get ready for the delivery of the new fridge.
We were planning on moving the old fridge downstairs into the kitchen area in the basement. We thought it would be nice to have a back-up fridge for times like Thanksgiving and Christmas when we have a bunch more food in the house than we usually do.
Tonight, I measured the old refrigerator. Uh-oh. It was too wide to make it through the door to the basement. Oy...
So last night I took the doors off. That wasn't the easiest thing to do. The refrigerator door was easy. The freezer door? Not so easy. The water supply for the ice maker goes in through the bottom of the door and the electrical supply for the ice maker goes in through the top of the door. But before too long, the doors were off.
Then my sons and I muscled it down the stairs. Having the doors off allowed us to slide the fridge through the door without making contact. After we got it through the door, gravity did most of the work. We mostly had to guide it carefully down the stairs, keeping it away from the walls. For the last few steps, gravity tried to do the job faster than I wanted it to.
But now the fridge is in the basement, the doors are back on, it's plugged in and working just fine.
And of course, this just reminded me how much I hate moving. Good thing it was only a fridge!
I had the opening night dream again last night. Maybe it's because I'm no longer scoutmaster and I have even a slight possibility of being in a play again. Anyone that's been on stage might have had the dream.
It's similar to the dreams I still have once in a while about college. I dream that it's the end of the semester and I still have tons of assignments to complete and then I show up for the final exam and I don't recognize anything on the test.
In the opening night dream, I'm backstage, going through my script one last time before I go on stage, and then I realize that I'm not anywhere even close to memorized and that I've missed all of the blocking rehearsals. I go on completely unprepared, hoping beyond hope that the other people on stage will be able to help out and fill in. It's a horrible, horrible feeling. Usually the dream ends a few lines into the play, because usually I wake up in a cold sweat, happy that it's only a dream.