
How's everyone's plans for Thanksgiving going? Anastasia made room for our 16 pound Turkey tonight, so I still may be doing the water bath thaw method (frantically) on Wednesday. We are currently having a bit of an issue with the stuffing. I have made my mother's stuffing for the last 25 Thanksgivings. It's (ahem!) a tradition. It's your basic stuffing (bag of stuffing; celery, onion, gizzard, liver, heart finely diced; chicken or turkey broth.) It's delicious. No funky business, no fruit, no meat that didn't come from the turkey. I used to add diced roasted chestnuts, but Anastasia doesn't like them. This year Anastasia wants to make her Mom's stuffing recipe. Let's just point out that Sunday night Anastasia told me that her favorite comfort food that her Mom made was to brown a pound or 2 of ground beef and add it to a jumbo can of Chef Boyardee Spaghetti. Not exactly my Mom's Bracciole. Anyway, Anastasia wants to do the stuffing with pork sausage and use toasted bread instead of store bought stuffing cubes.
As I type this in the early am on Tuesday we still don't have a definitive pick up time for our son. The ex is going to leave him hanging...till the last minute no doubt.
I just heard one of our kids talking about
the wedding to one of their friends tonight on the phone. "My dad is re-marrying. The wedding is in 2011." So if the wedding is not next year, why is he even saying anything now to our daughter? This means she has almost 2 years to ruminate about this. Damn this pisses me off!
Our daughter is making progress at bowling. She's pretty much a newbie at it, but definitely willing to learn. Saturday we met one of her teammates at the bowling alley and she bowled a game with the girl's family. Nice people. I remembered them from the golf banquet.
Our daughter's coach told her she was going to get her a ball last week. I told our daughter that hopefully she meant ball and bag 'because otherwise you'll have to carry the ball loose'. Right away our daughter said, 'oh no, I can't do that because my school would deem it a weapon.' I was
only joking. It was pretty funny though. I found out today a bag was included.
Anastasia played Clark W. Griswold on Saturday. She took the lights off the huge spruce in our front yard and reversed them. (Shhhh! Don't let her know I told you all. She put the lights on last year with the male end of the cord at the top of the tree, therefore, we couldn't light the lights. If you've ever tried to put lights on a 16 foot (or larger, I'm guessing here) tree, it is a real pita.) I picked up one of these babies from Ace Hardware:

It's a telescoping pole that extends 11 feet. Last year her and our son were out there for several hours with a ladder and a lot of swear words. This year she got the job done in under an hour. Well, she didn't
exactly play Clark W. Griswold. She just did the tree, put some lighted garland on the porch and a lighted wreath on the door. We worked with what we have since there's no money in the budget to add on new decorations this year. Still, it will be nice to have that big tree lit this year.
Both Anastasia and I are pretty depressed about the holidays. We worked the numbers last night and it's pretty grim. I did manage to order a gift card using reward points I earned with my debit card. That would be awesome if the card came by Wednesday, but I'm doubtful. I'm keeping my fingers crossed though since Black Friday is usually the best deals and that gift card will go further.
I've taken at peek at the Black Friday ads and there really don't seem to be any 'must haves', so I don't really feel like I'll be missing out on anything. That makes me feel a little but better. Lol!
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