Thanksgiving Weekend 2008 -- better late than never

Thanksgiving plans for this year were originally slated to be me and Linda taking care of my brother's dogs, while Bro, V & Brady would be in AZ with V's family, and my mom and dad would be up north, visiting my grandmother.  Mama's passing obviously changed my parents' plans, and V's family was having travel issues, so we all ended up together at my parents' house.  OK, not ALL of us.  V's family stayed at their own home.  Unfortunately, Auntie Milda couldn't make the drive down either, so we missed her.  Linda and I had figured on just having tons of food left over from whatever we were cooking, but the more the merrier!

As noted in my NKOTB post, I came home from the concert and baked one of the desserts, which is one of the easiest cake recipes in the world, and yummiful.  I woke up early on Thanksgiving morning and went to Ralphs to buy condensed milk and came home to quickly bake the pie before Linda arrived.  Yeah, I could have just gone to buy a pre-made one, but that would be cheating!  

Of course, by the time Linda arrived, I still wasn't ready to go, but luckily for me, she's patient.  We drove on down to my parents' house and we saw some guy digging in the dirt on some empty land a couple of blocks away from the house.  Our imaginations ran wild, and we decided that we should check that place out later in case he had been burying somebody.  We got to my parents' house and Linda and my mom prepared the turkey while I cooked the green beans.  I somehow got confused while reading the recipe, added water when I wasn't supposed to, and therefore diluted the onion flavor instead of carmelizing them.  Duh.  Well, the dish still turned out OK, but my goal is to cook them the correct way next time, to see if I should use the recipe again.  (Mom later ended up using those leftovers and added shrimp, which was yummy).

 

Brady helped my dad hang ornaments and play with the train, and didn't actually want to eat dinner because he was so busy playing around.  We enjoyed our dinner, though.  Linda had added persimmons (as you would apples) to the stuffing and it came out way yummy.   My mom was just impressed that Linda knew how to cook.  I guess it's because she's one of my friends, and my mom assumes that we all go out to eat so much because we can't cook for ourselves.  My pie came out very spicy, but still edible, but the cake was the winner in the dessert department.  It is a pineapple angel food cake, and I added sliced strawberries on top, and allow the guests to use as much cool whip on top as they want.  It's light and tasty.  With ZERO fat!

While we were winding down from dinner, Bro and I tried to polish off our bottles of wine.  He drank some Chinese wine that apparently is used in the Philippines to assist with labor pains, and I attempted to finish off the Cranberry Honey Wine that I had bought in Sacramento.  We each had about half a bottle to drink by ourselves, since our dinner companions had only drank a little bit.  During all of our laughter, an episode of "Friends" came on the TV.  In this episode, Ross tries to write down all 50 states of the USA, which the others, especially Chandler, said would be impossible to do, because apparently one always forgets at least one.  So I decided that we should try it.  Especially because I had been drinking and I thought it would be more amusing that way.  Only V took on my challenge, and we individually wrote down the states.  We are both independent thinkers, so we refused any actual help.  I did try to sing the Animaniacs song "Wakko's America," but that didn't help.  All it did was get the music from "Turkey in the Straw" in my head.  After about an hour or so, I had 5 states left to remember, and V had 3.  She had drawn a map for herself.  I started to go through all of the state abbreviations, and I finally finished!  I couldn't believe, and neither could my brother, that I missed one of the states that we had actually traveled to together, because every time I hear that state mentioned, I tell people that they drive backwards there.  Can you believe it?  And that's WITH alcohol.  Oh, and I did finish my bottle of wine before Bro did.  V still had 3 left.  She agonized and finally gave up.  My next challenge was to do the state capitals, so we all worked on that together.  We looked it up later, and found that we didn't really do very well.  I didn't care, though.  I was better than Ross.

The next day, Bro and I took the dogs for a walk, and I insisted that we go check out what the heck the guy had been digging.  It turns out that he was making dirt ramps for bikes to jump off.  Or at least he made it seem that way.  At one point, Cadence went all nutso and sniffed all over the place, which freaked us out a little bit, but it was nothing.  We tired out the dogs sufficiently, and then the whole family went to Tom's Farms.  I finally got to take my picture beside the huge chicken, and Brady did not want to leave the duck pond and its fake duck. 

We bought lots of candy and goodies at the candy store, and also bought some ornaments for our trees as well as gifts for some people.  One of the items we bought was an activity book cover,  which had little pockets for pencils and pens and such, made out of cloth.  The lady had originally made them for coloring books, with about 10 pockets for individual crayons.  I hope she does well, because it's a really cute idea.  My activity book holder is very girly, and very Sherry.  The girls still felt like being out, so we went searching for Boba.  We ended up at a Vietnamese restaurant and we were drawn to the menu items, but decided to try it another day because we had plenty of leftovers at home.  The boba menu was quite sparse (only 5 flavors), but we were craving it, so we bought some anyway.  

This is what we found in the garage when we got home.

Later on, we ended up going back up the freeway to shop at the outlet mall so that V could check out the Disney Character Warehouse.  She didn't buy anything, and I ended up with a bag full of stuff.  Dad treated us to dinner at Red Lobster, and I actually ate my whole Admiral's Feast, probably due to the fact that it took me so long to work on my snow crab legs that I made myself really hungry by the time I got to eat.  Thanks for dinner, Dad!

On Saturday, we just hung out a little bit before Linda and I drove back to my house so that I could sing in church.  We bought Them Chew Balls at Aloha Boba so that V could have one that she actually wanted, and drove back to Wildomar.  Rudy came over for a brief visit, and he, Linda, and I went to Arby's for a quick dinner before he needed to get back home.  Linda and I had been planning to go to the casino this weekend, but Mom didn't want to join us because she knew that Linda wasn't a big gambler and that we therefore wouldn't stay very long.  So the two of us went to Pechanga.  Rudy called as we were trying to find a parking space, and he wanted to join us, so we left to pick him up at his house, which wasn't very far away.  We returned to Pechanga with Rudy, got Players cards for Linda & Rudy, and looked for places to play.  It took forever for my favorite game to open up, and actually Linda & Rudy were both done with their free play, so they just gabbed away in the food court while I played my cow game.  I didn't win, but I had fun.

The next morning, V treated us all to donuts.  They don't have any good donuts near their apartment, so their Sunday morning tradition has been thwarted as of late.  The glazed twists were in the shape of alligators, and apparently they even had eyes on them, but Brady had eaten all of the eyes before I came downstairs.  While my dad was outside, he saw that their neighbor had come back from a morning run, so Bro and I went out to meet her.  She and her family are all drum corps fans.  Their daughter was in last year's SCV, which made us happy.  Unfortunately, that daughter wasn't awake yet, so we didn't get to meet her.  We did yell for her, though, at Finals, even though we didn't know her yet.  We talked lots of drum corps talk, and Bro was very happy to be speaking of all things SCV.

We said our goodbyes to Bro, V and Brady.  Brady said, "Bye, Tita Sherry Baby!" and I missed them already as soon as they drove away.

Linda and I said our goodbyes to my parents and headed over to Disneyland.  We eventually met up with Cindy & Glenn and their friend, and hung out with them for awhile.  I saw my friends, the Blyn family, in line for the castle walk-through, so that was a pleasant surprise. 

 Main Street City Hall at Twilight

Linda and I ended up leaving for dinner and ate at Mami King, because we wanted some soup, and we were happily sated.

Thanksgiving weekend was great, and I'm glad that Linda was able to spend time with us.  She feels that she's part of the family now that my mom felt comfortable enough to criticize her for not gambling enough.

I thank God for my wonderful family and friends, and will cherish many memories from this weekend.

Oh!  I forgot!  If you are diligent in reading my blog, and can recall the NKOTB post, you might be wondering what happened to Liz and the whole pie ordeal.  She ended up buying 5 pies.

Here's her experience when she arrived at her sister-in-law's house.

Sister-in-law: "Where's the cake?"

Liz: What cake? Joe said to bring pie."

Mother-in-law: "I told Joe to bring two pies. One of them apple."

Sister-in-law: "But I made two pies."

Liz: "Okay the message relayed to me was to bring an apple pie, a chocolate silk pie, a pumpkin pie and a sweet potato pie. I ruled out the pumpkin pie"

Mother-in-law: "That is not what I said. Joe just wanted pie."

Joe: "You said pie"

Sister-in-law: "So there's no cake?"

Jordan: "Which pie is mine?"

My mother -in-law had no idea that her son sent me on that dangerous mission the night before Thanksgiving.  I believe we each went home with a pie  :)

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Ah, family.  Ya gotta love 'em, 'cuz sometimes you're all they've got.