There are no bad owners, only bad dogs

2005-11-28

Yay! It's eggnog season FINALLY.

Sweet Mother of Mystery! It has been so long, Dear Diary, since last we talked... I don't even know where to begin.

Let's see... Categories... How about food-related disasters and/or successes? Our local grocery chain had this Thanksgiving special that gave you a free turkey (8 - 12 pound, frozen) if you bought a spiral-sliced ham (I almost wrote "spiral-bound ham," which would be a fantastic school supply), so naturally, we had a decision to make re: menu. Eventually we settled on the turkey, TIVO'd an episode of Good Eats that made me adore Alton Brown even more than usual, and set to work. Of course, since the recipes were on the TIVO (also on the InterWeb, but my printer is out of ink and I'm too stupid to remember to buy more, plus I believe that buying a new printer is usually cheaper than buying a new ink cartridge due to the fact that the ink in the cartridges is made from the tears of deflowered virgins or saffron or something else very rare) there was lots of running into the living room and rewinding. The recipe called for soaking the bird overnight in salty briney broth, giving my monkey the perfect excuse to avoid cleaning the bathtub. By which I mean we put a bucket containing the soaking turkey into the bathtub for ease of handling, not that we actually soaked the turkey in broth in a dirty bathtub, which I'm not ruling out in the future. The next morning I was prepping the bird and the pan and pulling necks and beaks and crap out of the turkey's butt and briefly lost a) my mind and b)track of the bucket of briney broth, and it took me a minute or two to realize that one of the Bumphus hounds was standing next to me, slurping bacteria soup out of the bucket. I had purchased two pans for that turkey, one disposable, one posable, but neither of them fit into my white trash oven-let that I use because my real oven stopped working a year and a half ago. The old stove/oven is a Sears gas model from the 1950s -- very cool, very vintage, not so good for baking since the oven doesn't work. It has an electric oven on the side with a rotisserie, so I figured I would use the electric part and stuck the bird in there. A few minutes later, I was KitchenAiding something, and fzzt. The electricity stops flowing to the mixer. I flipped the circuit breaker and went back to the mixing. Fzzt. Flip. Mix. Fzzt. Swear. Curse. Realize that the electric oven is causing the whole kitchen circuit to overload. Fuck. Yay! It's Thanksgiving and I don't have an oven big enough to fit the pan for the damn bird! Plan B: Make the disposable pan fit into the little oven by shoving really hard and bending the pan. Yay! It worked. However, that means that while the turkey cooks, nothing else can cook. No stuffing, no sweet taters, nothing. So when the turkey finished, rather early due to the smallness of the oven, everything else had to go in at once.

The turkey was fabulous -- moist and juicy. As the greggers was carving, he found yet another bag of guts and feet shoved into the cavity -- it had missed my rigorous vaginal examination of the turkey and just gotten baked.

On the days leading up to the festive holiday, the greggers decided to just stay drunk the whole time in order not to waste time getting drunk. Wednesday morning I stayed home from work, but had to participate in that ever-popular conference call that makes modern life worth living. So I was outside Wednesday morning with the dogs and decided to pick up some of the 4 billion pecans that are in my yard. I was walking around, staring at the ground, looking for pecans, when I realized that the dogs were right there with me, giving me the stink eye. I could read their minds: "Hey! These are OUR snacks and treats! Get your own, fatty." They kept a suspicious watch on me while I filled up a bowl with pecans. Then I went and got a hammer to start cracking them open. As I was cracking, I noticed that both dogs were casually walking over to the bowl of nuts and taking pecans out, then strolling into the grass to eat them. Then I realized that Katy was not just taking them out of the bowl to eat them, she was repopulating the yard with them. She was putting the pecans back into the yard, one by one.

Then I had to do that conference call thing, and while I was talking and the greggers was stumbling around, the dogs ran over to a neighbor's yard and were very extremely bad.

So that's Thanksgiving.

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