Candles in dining room window
Wednesday was just cleaning all day long. I got the hall dusted, polished, the floor washed and rinsed. I got everything in the bathroom dusted, polished, the floor washed and rinsed. There were a lot of rest periods throughout the day as I had started at 5AM.
I rested a while and at 7PM started doing the prep for the stuffing. I finished that and got the stoves ready for the night, the shades pulled, and was in bed by 9:30PM. But I was so tired I couldn’t get to sleep until much later.
I woke at 4AM and waited to see if my brother was up. When he wasn’t up by 4:30AM I got up and woke him up. We got the stuffing made, the bird stuffed and sewed up and into the oven, only 20 minutes late, at 5:20AM. It was an 18.8 lb bird so was supposed to take 7 hours.
The turkey browned nicely and after 1 hour we put a foil tent on it.
I got the kitchen cleaned up and checked e-mail, etc then got started.
I had to take the shelf out of the spare fridge to get the turkey in on Wednesday night. When I went to put it back in, I must have hit the shelf on the door just right as it crashed down and broke 1 jar, all the plastic lids and leaked all the protective juice, all over my freshly cleaned floor. Sigh…
I was able to salvage 1½ jars and had extra juice for the whole jar. Then I got to clean up the mess and wash the floor again.
I got the cranberry sauces and the zucchini bread thawing. My oldest brother called around 8AM and said he and his nephew would be leaving in an hour.
I thought I had to iron the tablecloth but I had forgotten I had ironed it when it was put away, and fixed some hangers with clips to keep fold lines out. It had worked really well!
All of my older brother’s Christmas present had come in so I got it wrapped for him to take back with him, as I didn’t know if he’d be back up this way before Christmas. Then I hopped in the shower.
When they arrived, I had the nephew get the chair out of the attic and we got the leaves in the table. He took the heavy present to the car. I started pulling out the dishes we’d need and the good silver and got the table set.
Next I started getting out the dessert and serving dishes. I’d made a list of everything I thought I’d need and was working off that.
I asked the nephew, being a young man, to see if he could get my Thanksgiving music to play on my old Win98 laptop. It defeated him, so we moved onto the workshop laptop which had Win7 Pro. But alas, he couldn’t get that to work either.
My 2 brothers disappeared up to the barn to get the plow on the truck.
One of my butternuts and 2 batatas
Once they got back they set about peeling and cooking the butternut and batatas. My older brother’s friend arrived after taking a “scenic” tour of the town. She was an enormous help.
I kept working away at the list and we actually hit our target of a 1PM sit down.
I did have Alice’s Restaurant on the old laptop, so we listened to that while we ate. The nephew was talking about the CDs saying, just shows blank. It got me to wondering if I had bought original CDs so I went to look.
But this time I was pretty beyond exhausted and the case I picked up did have an original, so I put it in thinking it was the “Revisited” version. But it wasn’t, so I looked again and there was an original “Revisited” version, so we listened to Arlo 3X.
We had the pumpkin pudding and whipped cream and a mincemeat pie my older brother had brought. My younger brother’s friend had brought fudge too.
My 2 brothers helped with the putting away of food and then disappeared. My older brother’s friend and I ended up cleaning up. She was a wizard at it! I loaded the dishwasher as she cleaned dishes.
Once it was loaded she finished cleaning all the rest, so they are ready to go in the dishwasher.
At 4PM I remembered to turn on all the window candles so they could see them as they were going.
Everyone left by 5:30PM and I was so tired. My son lit the masonry heater and I eventually got the wood stove going. I just picked at leftovers in the evening and went to bed at 8PM after turning off all the candles and pulling shades.
I had survived another Thanksgiving!
On Friday my helper friend comes at 8AM and I have no idea what I will have him doing. I plan to get another load in the dishwasher, maybe put away the good dishes, and get my post up. I might do some local online Christmas shopping if I can find the brain cell to do it. We might get snow later in the day.