Fun times.

Filed under :: Food & Drink :: Holidays
Link · Print · Edit · Comments (0) · Pings (0) · TR/G

It occurs to me that Thanksgiving is passed without (on this blog) an acknowledgment to all the folks to whom I am thankful. Because, for all of my introverted nature, I must fess up to being thankful to others in my life.

To my boss, who both challenges me and feeds me enough kudos to make the demn'd horrid grind worth it.

To my readers and commenters here, who provide the feedback to power the mental mills that grind out this blog (et al.). I might do it otherwise, but the egoboo (and the emotional connections, and intellectual challenge) of you, the folks reading this, make the effort here more than worthwhile.

To the friends in my geographical area, and those beyond. You keep me grounded in humanity in a way that I cannot express.

To my family, blood side and in-law side, who constantly renew my faith in the human race, and in something outside my immediate household.

To my daughter, who (for all she occasionally drives me batty) keeps me on my toes and eternally hopeful for the future.

To my wife, who makes life worth living, to a degree that most mental health professionals would consider pathological, but that I consider the test of what I am as a person. I love you, my dear.

Thanksgiving is traditionally intended to focus on giving thanks to the Deity that makes it all happen. Given the wealth in my life (most of it immaterial), if Someone Upstairs is making it happen, I owe You a beer or fifty. 

Thanks, all.

Filed under :: Family :: Holidays :: Love and Marriage :: Personal :: Religion - Me
Link · Print · Edit · Comments (0) · Pings (0) · TR/G

With Jim & Ginger here, it was inevitable that we would set up Christmas.

And that's a good thing, mind you. We have a vast expanse of Christmas decor, stored in boxes in the basement for the 2-3 month season. Left to our own devices, we might actually not do anything with it until days before our late-January Twelfth Night Party prep.

But with the in-laws here, and an eager daughter, we can do little but bow to the inevitable.

Well, bowing was a bit of a problem, as, in carrying a (very light) box up the stairs from the basement this morning, my mid-left back went sproing and left me hors d'combat for most of the day. 

But Jim, with Ginger and Margie (and, between other play-time bouts, Katherine) filled in, and got the tree up, and decorated, and other its of house-wide accents deployed.

And, suddenly, it's the Christmas season. Nice.

Now ... all we have to do is ....

• Get Christmas cards out.
• Do catalog shopping for Christmas.
• Attend numerous Yuletide parties.
• Head out to Faerie for the Holidays
• Return from Faerie, prep for Twelfth Night Party, execute same.

Piece of (pecan) pie.

Filed under :: Holidays
Link · Print · Edit · Comments (2) · Pings (0) · TR/G

"... it was purchased in blood."

A Wal-Mart worker died early Friday after an "out-of-control" mob of frenzied shoppers smashed through the Long Island store's front doors and trampled him, police said.

The Black Friday stampede plunged the Valley Stream outlet into chaos, knocking several employees to the ground and sending others scurrying atop vending machines to avoid the horde.

When the madness ended, 34-year-old Jdimytai Damour was dead and four shoppers, including a woman eight months pregnant, were injured.

But the shoppers got some great bargains over on Aisle 7!

"He was bum-rushed by 200 people," said Wal-Mart worker Jimmy Overby, 43. "They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me. They took me down, too ... I didn't know if I was going to live through it. I literally had to fight people off my back," Overby said. [...] Even officers who arrived to perform CPR on the trampled worker were stepped on by wild-eyed shoppers streaming inside, a cop at the scene said.

[...] Roughly 2,000 people gathered outside the Wal-Mart's doors in the predawn darkness. Chanting "push the doors in," the crowd pressed against the glass as the clock ticked down to the 5 a.m. opening.

[...] "They were jumping over the barricades and breaking down the door," said Pat Alexander, 53, of Crown Heights, Brooklyn. "Everyone was screaming. You just had to keep walking on your toes to keep from falling over." After the throng toppled Damour, his fellow employees had to fight through the crowd to help him, police said.

Witness Kimberly Cribbs said shoppers acted like "savages." "When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling, 'I've been on line since Friday morning!'" Cribbs said. "They kept shopping."

While some folks are blaming this on Wal-Mart (and I am certainly no Wal-Mart fan myself), I don't see how you could have had enough security to ward off the mob in these photos, and I don't care how low the vacuum cleaners were marked -- nothing save food rioters desperate to feed their families could possibly justify this. Placing the blame on Wal-Mart is like ... well, using the Twinkie Defense. "Their incredibly low prices and the commercial frenzy of all that TV advertising impaired my judgment." 

Disgusting.

Filed under :: Big Business :: Holidays
Link · Print · Edit · Comments (2) · Pings (1) · TR/G

 

Yeah, someone's happy about the snowy weather.

Filed under :: Holidays :: Weather
Link · Print · Edit · Comments (2) · Pings (0) · TR/G

 

Katherine's own tree in her room. She's been waiting for this for, um about a year since she got the tree last Christmas.

Filed under :: Holidays
Link · Print · Edit · Comments (0) · Pings (0) · TR/G

Good Thanksgiving Day, all told. Spent a fair amount of time (after sleeping in) running about and tidying and getting things ready, such that Margie and I were still in our grubbies when folks started arriving around 2. 

Had a good crowd -- Lee/De/Rachel (who arrived first, roasted coffee, and then Lee and De stayed the night at Doyce & Kate's, letting Katherine have a sleep-over with Rachel), Dave/Jen/Ana Sutherland (who it was great to see), Jackie (pumpkin roll!), Doyce/Kate/Kaylee, Angie, and, of course, Jim & Ginger (who did a lot of the work while Margie and I socialized).

Margie made her usual fried onion rings and mushrooms (since we had the oil heated for the turkeys), which she got the batter just right for. 

Dinner was faboo as usual -- fried turkey, stuffing, gravy, two types of mashed potatoes, a sweet potato dish, a pumpkin-squash soup from De (who also sharpened knives), a carrot souffle from Kate ... and for dessert, pecan pie (by me), apple pie (from church), a chocolate torte from Ana and some sort of yummy coffee cake / pastry from Dave, and pumpkin roll (yay!) from Jackie.

And I've probably left something out.

To go with the food was plenty of drink, from the standard beer and sodas (though we really need to stock up the variety in the drink fridge again), to margaritas (with limes brought from California), to some very nice bottles of wine for dinner (if I do say so myself), to yummy coffee courtesy Lee.

Lots of fun chit-chat, a few post-dinner rounds of "Werewolf," and folks were rolling home around 9. We did some basic straightening, Jim & Ginger retired, Margie & I played some CoH, then we went to bed.

And china and crystal fairies came overnight and cleaned everything up. At least that's what it looked like when I got up this morning. :-)

All in all, a very satisfying (in many ways). And for the family and friends here, I was most thankful.

Filed under :: Holidays
Link · Print · Edit · Comments (0) · Pings (0) · TR/G

Fascinating article from Wired on the agronomic evolution of the components of the Thanksgiving meal -- from turkeys ...

Anderson, who has bred the birds for 26 years, said the key technical advance was artificial insemination, which came into widespread use in the 1960s, right around the time that turkey size starts to skyrocket. The reason is that turkeys over 30 pounds are "inefficient" breeders: It's difficult for them to actually perform the natural mating act. With artificial insemination, the largest birds can still be used as sires, even if they have a hard time walking, let alone engaging in sexual reproduction.

"You can spread the one tom around better. It adds a whole new level of efficiency. You can spread him over more hens," Anderson said. "It takes the lid off how big the bird can be. If the size of the bird keeps them from mating, then you're stuck."

This process, compounded over dozens of generations, has yielded turkeys with genes that make them very big. In one study in the journal Poultry Science, turkeys genetically representative of old birds from 1966 and modern turkeys were each fed the exact same old-school diet. The 2003 birds grew to 39 pounds while the legacy birds only made it to 21 pounds. Other researchers have estimated that 90 percent of the changes in turkey size are genetic.

Perhaps the most obvious change in turkey genetics is that, unlike the colorful pictures we all drew in elementary school, modern, factory-farmed birds are all white. The Broad Breasted White turkey became the dominant commercial breed in the middle of the 20th century.

... to corn ...

That original sweet corn was only about 10 percent sugar, but it also was about 25 percent phytoglycogen, lending it a nice, creamy texture. In the next major corn transition — to supersweet corn in the 1970s through a variation in the Shrunken2 gene — that creamy texture was lost, even as the sweetness of the corn skyrocketed.

Among the thirteen genes known to affect corn sweetness, however, industrious agronomists have found an even better gene to work with, called SE, and they made "sugar enhanced corn."

"That's the most popular for fresh market today," Tracy said. "It gives a sugar level of 20 to 25 percent and it turns out to be very tender."

... to potatoes.

Potatoes are now driven by a decidedly nonfestive activity: the making of french fries and potato chips. Almost a mirror of corn genetics, agronomists have ratcheted up the starch in potatoes and turned down the sugar, said Gregory Porter, a potato specialist at the University of Maine.

"High-starch french fries, when they fry, don't get soggy," Porter said. "Low sugars are important because high sugars in potatoes would result in a dark brown discoloration. High-starch potatoes result in a nice golden-colored fry."

Filed under :: Food & Drink :: Holidays :: Science
Link · Print · Edit · Comments (0) · Pings (0) · TR/G

Sarah Palin, doing the traditional gubernatorial "pardon" to a potential Thanksgiving turkey, decided to hold a press conference on various matters ... in front of a guy who was slaughtering other turkeys. Nice!

MSNBC's Countdown lingers over this for a good four minutes, with loving attention to the screen labels describing the goings-on, even as Palin seems natteringly oblivious to what's going on right behind her.

Some screen caps (if you don't want to sit through the video) can be found here.

Filed under :: Holidays :: Politics & Law
Link · Print · Edit · Comments (0) · Pings (0) · TR/G

And so we proceed into the holiday season, which will entail many visits Hither and Thither.

Coming Hither we start with my folks, who arrive in town tomorrow and go home on Tuesday. It's a bit later in the year for them than usual, so we're pondering what sorts of entertainment to provide them with. We have some good places to eat, but that only takes up so many hours of the day ...

Following that, Margie's folks arrive the following Friday (or perhaps Thursday), and stay through one weekend, and then through Thanksgiving weekend. A few small projects are lined up, but nothing particularly earthshattering.

That brings us to December, and a scant few weeks until we go hieing off Thither to California for Christmas and New Years. Somewhere in there we do Christmas Cards and Christmas Shopping and, I'm sure, many, many, many other things. Margie's office has a party (a murder mystery dinner), my office has a party (something cowboy themed), our dojo has a dinner ("See what people look like when not in their gi!"), and probably others besides that -- church Advent party, etc.

Busy times ...

Filed under :: Holidays
Link · Print · Edit · Comments (0) · Pings (0) · TR/G