Weekly Round Up: Thanksgiving and A Second Chance

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  In this edition we'll talk about Thanksgiving and leftover management (nailed it!), dish on early retirement life, I'll grouse about how illness is messing with my workouts and sleep, and in reading I'll tell you about the DNF that I gave a second chance to with astounding results.

Thanksgiving Recap

We had Thanksgiving at our house this year, and the guest list was our in-town relatives, who are SIL#3 and SIL#4 and their families.  Including us, that was three families of four hoomans and one dog each for a total of 12 people and 3 dogs.  Do I mind hosting Thanksgiving?  Not one bit!  It's easier to be at home, we clean our house anyways so it's not really any extra work.

At this point we're pros at dividing and conquering the menu.  The host house makes the turkey, and just for the benefit of anyone who is new, I cannot stand turkey so Hubs is our House Turkey Chef.  I just provide minor assistance with getting it in the oven.

Hubs - turkey

Me - gravy (this is a small batch recipe which I 4x for a big meal like this)

SIL#3 - mashed potatoes and stuffing

SIL#4 - her world famous green bean casserole, veggies, and dinner rolls

Me - desserts and a couple of bottles of wine

The only thing that went wrong is that I bought the turkey on Monday instead of over the weekend since retired people do not grocery shop on weekends, and it wasn't still a bit too frozen, so we had a thawing delay.  We were planning to start the turkey at 1:00 to be ready at 6:00 and we didn't get it in the oven until 2:00.

Dessert wise, in past years I normally make an apple pie and a chocolate chip cookie cake.  I've noticed that single serving desserts tend to move better than big servings (i.e. if I make cupcakes they all get eaten and if I make a cake just a few slices get taken), so I decided to make apple pie bars and chocolate chip cookies.  They were good, but I got the feeling that for a special meal like Thanksgiving people like the presentation of the pie, so I'll go back to that next year.

I made Jo Cooks Apple Crisp Bars without the caramel sauce since that sounded messy and served them with vanilla ice cream.  Pro tip: the leftovers make a dope breakfast.

At the end of the night I bartered leftover turkey for the leftover green bean casserole, which is my favorite TG menu item.  That left us with a manageable amount of turkey.  I took a squint at Two Peas and Their Pod Chicken Pot Pie and used that as inspo to repackage the turkey and gravy into a turkey pot pie.

Mind you, that was for Hubs and the boys, because as mentioned I just can't do turkey.  I got a couple of dinners out of the leftover green bean casserole with a chicken sausage on the side to make it into more of a meal.

I froze the rest of the turkey and will bring it back in another pot pie for the other members of the house soon.

Workouts

Stepson #1 got a nasty virus that he gave to me which I gave to Hubs.  It's just a cold, but it's one that takes forever to fully go away.  I'm almost back to normal, but the key word is almost.

Side effects are that I pulled a muscle in my chest from coughing so I can't do any kind of upper body exercise right now, and for some reason both Hubs and I have had terrible sleep, so my workout mojo is nonexistent.  My main form of fitness has been dog walking, and that's just fine until my body figures out how to get back to normal.

Our most exciting dog walk of the week was on Black Friday.  Where I live we had a little bit of snow, but just a few miles north of us they got hammered.

I'd taken Doggo to a park in the "few miles north of us" zone during the week (pix in last week's post), and wanted to show it to Hubs.  We were not expecting the six inches of snow that the park had gotten, and no one was out so we could barely see the trail.  Those conditions made a simple one mile dog walk into quite the workout.  As you know, dogs love snow and Doggo is no exception.  At one point she started doing the worm in the snow drifts, but stopped as soon as I thought to get my camera out.  Sigh.

After the walk Hubs saw that the park welcome center had a fire going in their fire place, and started to walk in.  I said, "hey, we can't take Doggo in there", but the park manager had already seen us and said, "no come in, we love dogs here".  So we got to warm up by the fire and we had a great conversation with her about rescue dogs.

Speaking of dogs, I have to tell you about the best dog toy that I got recently.  Doggo loves broccoli, and it was time to refresh her chew bones, so I couldn't resist the broccoli Nyla bone.

Watching

I've been plowing through the Alfred Hitchcock movies, but since I'm being very strict about watching them in reverse order I had to take a break to wait for a library hold to come in.  

I was very taken by this WSJ write up on work movies, and I found myself lining up a handful of 80s work movies.  Over the weekend Hubs and I watched Wall Street, which I had never seen, and very much enjoyed.

Reading

I finished This American Woman: A One in a Billion Memoir by Zarna Garg and I would like to suggest that you run and do not walk to get your hands on it.  This is one where I really think audio is the way to go, because her voice is so good.

The next thing to tell you is that I am Team DNF.  If a book isn't working for me, I'm comfortable making the call sooner rather than later so that I can swap it out for a book that does work.

As I reported a few weeks ago, I picked up The Correspondent because everyone else on the planet is reading it and found it to be a slog.  I just couldn't figure out who was writing which letter or get any sense of a plot, so I ditched it at the 30% mark.

But...this was the rare case where I felt that it might be me and not the book, so I gave it another go, but on audio this time.  I usually don't listen to fiction on audio because my mind drifts a lot and I always figured that I would lose the plot.

Guess what?  The format made all the difference.  I LOVE THIS BOOK.  For whatever reason I wasn't picking up the connections in the written format - that Sybil wrecked her car because she is losing her vision, or the reason she got upset about being gifted a 23 and Me style DNA test is because she was adopted.  I get it now and I'm on board with the hype!  I'm very sad that I only have five more hours in the audio book.

I think that I will end up listening to more audio books now in retirement (more hiking and more travel time =. more listening time), so I can see adding more fiction into the mix.

Before We Go - Two Investing Articles That I Thought Were Interesting

I only have a WSJ subscription because I got a special deal that's $4 a month, but man they really killed it this week.  Here are two similar but not the same articles about investing that I thought were fun.  Go kids go! [though maybe skew things more toward index funds instead of individual stocks]

Meet the Teens Investing in Stocks for Their Future Home and Retirement
How Five Gen Z-ers Are Playing This Year’s Volatile Market

Peace Out!  I'm headed out of town on a quick trip for the rest of the week - see you on the other side!