I don't wanna......

Mr. Grinch, could you please come to my house & do this????

Another Christmas come and gone.  This one wasn't particularly memorable, just your usual day off with a lot of cooking.  More about cooking later on....  When I lost my job, Romeo and I declared a ban on gifts for this year (although he was perfectly OK with it no matter what the reason).  I have to admit that the 9 year old that still resides within (and is remarkably prominent sometimes) was very unhappy, not only to not receive anything, but unable to give anything either.  No matter how much Romeo says that "he doesn't want anything" ~ which he says every year ~ I enjoy going out and finding something he might not buy for himself & sticking it under the tree from Santa.  But, we all stuck to our guns, so the space under our tree was conspicuously empty.  Romeo was unhappy when I didn't reply to his hearty "Merry Christmas!" that morning.  He went back to bed for awhile.  I knew I was being unreasonable, but my 9 year old self didn't care, so I moped around for an hour or so, then got busy with stating our Christmas dinner.  

#2 son received a turkey from his workplace before Thanksgiving, but I already had a turkey, so we stuck the monstrosity in the chest freezer & figured we'd have it for Christmas (the frugal part of me figured why buy a ham when there's a perfectly good turkey....even though none of us was particularly enthused about turkey even once a month).  The damned thing was huge ~ 22 lbs.  I have roasted one larger than that before, and apparently forgot that I never wanted to do that again.  I put it in the oven (unstuffed of course, I hate dressing in the turkey, it's all gooey and gross) around 9:30am.  Figuring it would be done by 1:00pm, according to the roasting guidelines.  Nope.  Not done.  Romeo began to carve it, and we noticed it is most definately not done.  Back in the oven for another 40 min, nope still not done.  Back again, another 40 min., and I declared that it would be consumed no matter what.  So we ended up eating at around 3:20pm....we were all starving by then.  It's hard to resist the urge to snack on stuff knowing theres a big meal soon.  If #2 son gets another gift like that next year, we will donate it to the food bank, or something.  No more turkey's over 15 lbs.  Ever.  In fact, it's still such a recent memory, the very thought of turkey makes me want to plan on some other type of animal protein for next year.  Ugh.

Very sad news: Buck Pennington is no longer with us.  He is currently residing in the sunshine, on a beach, with a his favorite happy hour beverage.  Being waited on by girls in bikini's.  We will miss you Buck.  For more, go here or straight to Buck's blog.  I spent 20 minutes reading over some of his posts, which made me laugh.  He will be missed.

Love, 365