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Well really it's not a rant against Thanksgiving. I love major holidays and cooking for them. This year, as in previous years, Thanksgiving was at my Mom's. My Grandmother is now 94 and does not travel. She has some issues with not remembering names when she wants to but is in good health overall. And she just doesn't like to travel anymore. If you get to 94 you can say no to things like this. So turkey day at Mom's.

My Mom is a very good cook. She taught me the basics and I went from there. However, she does not make a great turkey. It tends to be overcooked. And her gravy has become blah bland. I will give her the very acceptable excuse that chemo can screw with your sense of taste. We'll cope. I am thankful that my Mom and Grandmother are still here. Dinner was good. Having family around is good.

Oh, and my Mom does not make mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving. To her triple starch is too much (stuffing and sweet potatoes being the primary starches). Blinkensopps likes his mashers with good turkey gravy so potatoes we always have.

So Saturday will be our turkey day. There will be a lovely moist perfectly cooked turkey. I went to the farmer's market and got the turkey this morning. Brining it tonight using Alton Brown's recipe. They had extra turkey necks so I got 2 to make stock for the gravy adding to the neck and giblets I normally cook.

The rest of the menu is apple walnut stuffing, Brussels spouts with bacon and hazel nuts, cranberry orange relish (we are cranberry fans), port shallot gravy, and maybe sweet potato praline casserole.

Friends we haven't had a good meal with in a while will be over, so this makes it even better.
If you want to stop by there will be plenty. Call or email so I know to set an extra place.

I hope everyone has wonderful holidays.

We went to the pool this evening after picking up Dane from camp. We needed a cool off and some play time.

There is a family who goes to our pool with a daughter in her 20's who has what I suspect is cerebral palsy. She has a typical jerky gait and I wonder how she manages flip flops so well without tripping. She does not speak but I think uses sign language with her family.

Dane and I were playing catch near her, working our way from shallow to deep and back and forth. The ball landed near her and she threw it back to Dane. It looks like a considerable effort for her to throw with her spastic and constant movement. A long wind up with considerable concentration, but she did. And Dane waited for her to throw to him and he threw back to her. Her smile and laugh at receiving a response was wonderful. And my wonderful son continued the game with her. He included some dives and dunks to make her laugh more. She imitated some of his dunks and dives. He went off to do a few laps on his own while I continued to play catch with her then he came back to join in again. He discovered that splashing me got a real laugh from her so we had a splash fight for a while with a happy laughing audience of one.

I will note that there was a group of kids, ages in the 4-10 category, with some adults nearby and playing through who gave the sideways glance or two but none joined in.

Her father was laughing while he watched us play. Her parents thanked me when they left. It made me sad to think that you feel you need to thank someone for playing catch with your child. Is it that people think it is polite to ignore those who are differently abled/disabled? I guess it may not be often that disabled children, especially adult children, receive positive attention.

I told Dane how proud I am of him that he played with someone who is different who no one else was playing with. He told me, "I know," but not in that iknoweverything kind of way. He told me he had fun and of a fellow student in another class at his school who is also "different." His moment of maturity and compassion makes me teary.

I hope this experience sticks with him. And I hope we see the smiling woman again.

We've lived in this house for almost 15 years without ac. Most people think we've nuts to live without it. After working in restaurants in 120 degree kitchens, seeing home care patients in the city in houses with the windows nailed shut and no ventilation and living at Pennsic for 2 weeks with no ac, it's never been a big deal for me. I've never wanted to be dependent on ac and have no tolerance for summer weather.

We finally had enough of being hot in a hot house that will not cool down at night because the evening temps are not dropping down far enough to cool the house down with fans. Out house is small and we have never really had an issue with summer heat. Close the house up in the am and draw the curtains. Open up when we get home from work, put the fans in the windows and cool house in about 1-2 hours. This summer has kicked our butts. Enough is enough. No one, animal or human, was sleeping well. No sleep makes for crankiness.

We purchased ac window units on Saturday and put in the smaller ones that we could until our handyman could come over to help Blinkensopps do the installation of the bigger units. Cos you just can't pop and air conditioner into a window anymore.

So it's now lovely in the house. Not sure what this will do to our electric bill.

The Phillies game Saturday was brutal. We went with the agreement that if anyone started to feel yucky at any time we would go regardless of what inning. We lasted until the 5th. Didn't get to see the Ibanez homer but the 2nd inning was amazing. Dane got a Charlie Manuel edition Louisville Slugger that he is very happy with. It's a bit heavy for him right now but he managed to hit a tennis ball a significant distance and height at my step mother's house today.

Visited the moms and the GG (what Dane calls my grandmother). She is 93 and doing relatively well. She is looking more stooped than the last time I saw her and her memory is failing but, to me, in a normal 93yo kind of way. Dane read Go Dog Go to her today and I videoed it. Very sweet.

Hit the farm near my mom's and got tomatoes, blueberries, corn, cabbage, cubanelle peppers (wonderful on the grill) and peaches. I want tomatoes and fresh mozzarella with a nice loaf of crusty bread and olive oil and blueberry pancakes. But not together. I will start putting some corn in the freezer. I cut the corn off the ear and blanch it in the microwave. Cool and ziplock and put it in the freezer. I did this last year and it was a hit to have fresh corn in December.

Pulled from my response to another's LJ post. I wanted to share this bit of vacation memory silliness.

When I was 4 or 5 we took the family vacation to Miami, driving from NJ to FL in the family cruise wagon. Beige and large. I confirmed all of the below with my mother who was quiet surprised that I remember so much and laughed at me. Blinkensops thinks I have ultra memory powers for this.

1) Getting tar on my foot on the beach in Miami. It burned.

2) Purchasing white rubber bathing caps for the hotel pool. Bathing caps were required. Dating myself on this one.

3)going to the Miami Seaquarium and seeing the set of Flipper (more dating)

4)making plastic injection mold toys in a machine at the Seaquarium

5) South of the Border when it was respectable.

6) Getting the shit scared out of me at the planetarium show at the Seaquarium when they did the thunderstorm.

7) Getting the shit scared out of me by bones on the ground at some archeological dig we went to

8) Drinking water from the fountain of youth in paper dixie cups at some tacky conquistador exhibit

9) eating pink cottage cheese, flavored with maraschino cherries and totally digging it. I think I bugged my mom for months about pink cottage cheese.

10) only wanting to eat spaghetti

11)eating spaghetti way too spicy. I remember the waitress telling us about the multiple people who seasoned the sauce and the adults laughing about it.

12)Driving in the family cruise

13)Playing car bingo and some other bingo games. We had playing boards with little slides to mark the spot

14)Falling asleep in the wayback of the family cruise

Not sure how we all survived that trip in a car with no air conditioning. And no parental death threats so my brother and I must have been pretty will behaved.

2 nights ago, and many times last summer, I was woken up by the sound high shrill barking. Lots of it for a long time. I never could figure out what it was, it always got the dogs riled up, so I figured it might have been a highly distressed possum.

Finally got around to check on who makes that sound. Red fox it would be. It woke Dane up and scared him a little, I think. I'm looking forward to making a game of it for him to figure out what the animal is. The National Geographic kids' site has great sound files. He already has fear of the dark issues and I don't want him to be afraid of the animals outside in the dark also.

Well, between the fox and all of the hawks around here that would explain why there are so few rabbits.

So there are some sound files on the NG site that you can download as ringtones. Elephant is kind of cool. Humpback whale is cool but not available. Not suprised that aardvark does not have a sound file at all. Thankful that dromedary is not available as a ring tone. Their groan, moan, sigh, grunt, whatever you want to call it sounds like flatulence.

There, just so you don't have to go hunting for it...

http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/dromedary-camel/

I ordered galvanized steel hinged stacking corners to reconstruct the original raised bed and construct a new one. The original bed's sides are decomposing and the screws are rusted in. The steel can be recycled and the wood can go to compost. The new bed will be built over the old apple tree stump.

I want a second bed 'cos I'm tired of the tomatoes taking over Tokyo. I love growing heirlooms like Brandywine and they can and will grow to 5-6 feet tall and attempt to take over the universe. So I figured I can keep the tall growing viney things like the cukes and tomatoes in one bed and the low growing things like lettuce and green beans in another bed. You can laugh at my attempts at being orderly later.

I trellis my cukes (only certain varieties will do this) and have gotten great results in the past. You don't get a pale stripe on the bottom of the cuke and they are easier to find. It also makes inspection for vine borer beetles easier. Had a problem with the evil creatures only once. The adults were snipped apart with kitchen sheers being way to big to squish by hand. And no, no chemical were used, none will affect the bastards, and nasturtiums did not keep them away.

I don't like flower gardening that much. I am pleased that the lillies and iris I got from my mom last year are growing well. The iris have buds. One of the pereniels I put in last year is up again and there is lemon balm everywhere in that bed. Anyone want some lemon balm? And I have horseradish and hosta for any takers.

Dane and I stopped to get gas on the way home from dinner tonight. He pulled out his new library book and started to read on the way to the gas station. The book is about cobras, snakes being his latest fascination. So my 6 year old kindergarten-er was reading aloud to me. He needed help with words like Philippines and Asia and did really well with trying to figure out the harder words on his own. It was music to my ears.

Moments like this I wouldn't trade for anything in the world. It's up there with the day he saw his first rainbow. We raced from daycare to the train station parking, one of the larger area in our neighborhood with sky not obstructed by trees, to see it. He pointed and smiled and giggled. It was wonderful.

So my book loving guy is reading on his own and enjoying it. And he doesn't cop out for the easy books. His teacher told us at conference last week that he is ahead of the reading program and is at the level expected for end of year.

I'm a very proud Mom.

Blinkensopps asked for chicken and dumplings for dinner tomorrow night. So I did a search for recipes. I have my own recipe but was looking for something different. Oh boy, is this one different. I'm not sure which is the biggest turn off, the pictures, the instruction to use that quantity of "cheap biscuits" or the entire concept. My suggestion is to beat some sense into the author/cook with their wooden spoon.

http://mywoodenspoon.com/almost-homemade-chicken-and-dumplings/

I worked from home Wednesday and Thursday thinking it would be a good thing. Wrong. On so many levels wrong. The log in from home was slower than the proverbial molasses in January and would dump you out at the drop of a hat. I am now deepest depths of hell behind in my work, have double the cases I normally would and this is considered a bad thing by my superiors.

One positive is that I will get comp time for working which covers the day off for Prez day Monday and then some.

So I'll have a nice 3 day weekend.

I got up early this morning and Dane was up before me. For once no extraction of child from bed. That allowed for much productiveness before heading in to work at 10. Had the pleasure of cleaning out the fridge, doing those and breakfast dishes, changing beds, doing 3 loads of laundry, making my lunch, cooking eggs for lunches the rest of the week, feeding said child and getting him to school, clipping coupons and starting a shopping list (shopping will get done Friday before I go to work at 11), ushering Wendell out several times for potty, and finally making an eggy cheesy samich for breakfast (yum).

Now off to 8 hours of being the problem solver.