Turkey DTs.

Here we are, the first Monday after Thanksgiving. Ugh, I feel sluggish from too much food. Thanksgiving was OK. We were here. I invited over one of my grad students who wasn't going to be able to go home, so it was a pretty low-key day. I did the typical turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green beans, stuffing, cranberry sauce, gruyere brussel sprouts, pumpkin and peach pies. Everything turned out OK. The only glich was that it took forever for the turkey to cook for some unknown reason. It was only 15 lbs, but it took like eight hours to cook. I put it in the oven at 10:00 am and it wasn't ready until about 6:00pm. It was thawed, so I can't figure it out. But it tasted good so it was alright, I suppose. Although, we were measuring doneness by temperature, so the updates were something like, "Only seven more degrees to go." It was a Jennie O turkey. We didn't wait for the pop-up thing, I just started measuring temperature because I started thinking the pop-up thing was broken. As it turns out, it probably wasn't because it took eight hours to reach 180.

Indiana is an interesting state when it comes to holidays that are usually accompanied by outdoor decorations. I have never lived anywhere where the people seem so keen on putting plastic figures and lights all over their yards and houses. Any holiday where they can get away with it, they do it. I mean people have been putting up Christmas decorations around here since Halloween. When I was growing up, we didn't put the tree up until a couple of weeks before Christmas. We probably won't get our tree up until this weekend, which makes us pretty late in these parts. We only started putting up our tree so early because our daughter sees everyone else with their Christmas trees, so she wants ours up. If it weren't for her, we'd probably just wait until a couple of weeks ahead of time. Although, my husband is really into Christmas decorations too. I suppose they're nice, but it takes so much time to put everything up.

Yesterday was the last offical day to sell Girl Scout cookies. We sold a total of 152 boxes. We made one last go at the neighborhood yesterday, but a lot of people were gone. So we chucked it in after a couple of blocks. We only sold nine boxes yesterday. My favorite rejection was from this guy who answers the door in his slippers and a dirty Notre Dame sweatshirt and says, while patting his stomach, he's on a diet and better not buy any. Yeah, he really looked like someone who gave two shits about his appearance. As we walked away from his door my daughter said, "Mom, I should have told him about the reduced fat cookies." Yeah, that would have done it.

My Uncle PG's funeral was Saturday. I haven't had a chance to talk to my father yet and ask how it went, but it makes me sad to think about it. When someone is around for such a long time, it's hard to realize that they're just not there.