Getting ready for T-day

Hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving! A lot of prep goes into holidays and events here at the Becker ranch. Food, which is always a big deal here, plays an even greater role come holiday time. In an ordinary food week, we can barely fit enough chow in the fridge to get us through half the week. Finding room to squeeze in a 22-pound turkey required herculean effort, complex engineering, and the use of a table in the cold garage as a makeshift refrigerator.
Mmmm, butter. I'd say we go through at least four pounds of it in a normal week. Holiday cooking and baking pushes our butter consumption to a level that has a measurable effect on the commodities market. I spent two solid days in the kitchen cooking glorious butter-enhanced foodstuffs, most of which was consumed in a twenty-minute feeding frenzy.
Over the course of a few years' worth of estate sales, garage sales, and thrift shopping, I have amassed a lovely collection of pretty china, serving dishes, and silver plate. Real silver plated flatware and serving trays can be had for next to nothing; they are ubiquitous anywhere second-hand wares are sold, probably because nobody can be bothered to polish it anymore. I kind of like polishing silver, and started dragging it out to work on a little at a time during the week prior to Thanksgiving. The only snag in my plan was that I was still trying to do some school work with my children, and they are apparently very easily distracted by shiny objects. They are also very easily distracted by the sounds and smells of Christmas cookies baking, which is coming up soon!

Getting the full value

So, just how much fun can you squeeze out of one dead squirrel? Besides providing a meal for six people, little Mr. Squirrel has provided countless hours of entertainment for my young sons. Paul insisted on having a go at some home taxidermy, so I ordered him the necessary ingredients to go about tanning his furry friend's hide. Over the course of about three weeks, Paul defrosted the hide, scraped it, salted it, nailed it to a board, and soaked it in buckets of various tanning solutions. Here we are at the end of the process, where Paul is using my hair dryer to speed up the final drying so that he can bring his hide to church to show his friends. Oh yes, we did indeed bring a dead squirrel to church with us in a ziploc baggie! The hide is now nailed to Paul's bedroom wall, looking very squirrelly indeed. He definitely got his money's worth out of that squirrel.
We usually bring our groceries home in some of the free boxes we pick up off the pallets as we shop (because we usually shop in the kind of upscale places that plops out pallets of dry goods and makes you pay extra if you want bags for your groceries.) David sees no reason why he shouldn't get as much enjoyment as possible out of this empty cookie box before we send it out to the dumpster. We had three boxes waiting to be taken out to the trash, and David spent an equal amount of time sitting in each one.
In such a large family, there's no reason why everyone should have their own individual pair of shoes. Naomi, at age nine, now officially wears the same size shoes as me. She still has a lot of growing left to do, so she probably won't be pilfering my shoes for too long before she outgrows them. I do have two more daughters coming right along after her though....

Such is my life

So, I'm trying to learn a new song. It's actually an oldie that I kind of re-wrote the music for, to make it a little more bluegrass-y, and thus much more my style. Since there is no recording of it anywhere, and since I have not the brain capacity to remember the music in between practice sessions, I thought I'd try to record it myself so I'd have something to reference. As you can see, you can't bring out a video camera around here without all the riff raff coming out of the woodwork to get in on it.