Well, Thanksgiving is over, we’ve all eaten WAY too much, the fridge is full of left overs, our wives have shopped till they dropped on Friday (Black Friday???) and Christmas decorations have started being displayed. So, with all this comes the usual messes around the house, wrapping paper needing to be brought down out of the attic, decorations located and maintenance performed on them.

So, this past weekend, starting last Wednesday, has been very busy. We started cooking Wednesday night until about 1:00 AM. We finished it all up about 1:30 PM Thursday afternoon, just in time for the 2:00 arrival of family members. We had an awesome Thanksgiving meal with only 1 dish (Banana Pudding) being a casualty of tiredness and absent mindness and thus un-eatable. As a matter of fact the dish the pudding was made in proved to be pretty resilent to our cleaning efforts also.The menu consisted of the following dishes:

• An 18 pound turkey
• A Honey Baked Ham
• With the purchase of the Ham we also received for free a Honey Baked Turkey
• Sweet Potato Souffle
• Potato Salad
• Squash Casserole
• Cranberry Sauce (Home Made)
• Green Beans
• Deviled Eggs
• Dressing
• Giblet Gravy
• Cream Corn
• Dinner Rolls (The kind you have to let rise)
• 2 Pecan Pies
• 2 Chocolate Fudge Pies
• Chocolate Cake

Most of this was eaten over the course of the day, with some of the kids friends coming over to eat and the family we fed a total of about 12 people. So, it was a very nice Thanksgiving. But back to that banana pudding, we had finished the pudding and made the marang (???) for the top, put it in the oven to brown and forgot about it. This proved pretty disasterous as the marang (???) pretty much exploded and coated the inside of the oven with the sticky stuff. The pudding was unedible and all the Nilla Waffers were cooked to the side of the bowl. But with the presence of all the other desserts no one really missed the banana pudding.

My Wife went shopping the next morning for the early bird blitzes going on and pretty much finished off our Christmas shopping with only a few people left to buy for. She also got all the presents wrapped and placed where the tree will go (I know, we’ll have to move the presents, AGAIN, to put the tree there).

Satuday brought a day of rest, kind-of. We pretty much did nothing, just got the house back clean and watched movies. Sunday, it was off shopping some more with only a couple presents being purchased. Some of the sales were still going on so what we did purchase was on sale.

So, like I said, what a busy 5 days. I was happy to go to work this morning so maybe I can get some rest

Keith