First Thanksgiving

I hosted Thanksgiving for the first time ever this year. Despite all the stress we'll pulled it off and, everyone had a wonderful time.

Since we were out of town the weekend before Thanksgiving, all of our prep got condensed to the day before and the day of. It definitely contributed to my stress. Thankfully, Boyfriend had managed to delegate a lot of the food to our guests, so I didn't have a ton of cooking to do. But getting the house clean was no small feat. I was definitely driving Boyfriend bonkers by the fifth time I asked him to vacuum the stairs and was refusing to let him put dishes in the dishwasher. Ultimately, I managed to get the house up to company standards in time.

Boyfriend was in charge of the turkey and I was on stuffing duty. Since we were cooking the turkey on the grill, we opted not to stuff it, which gave me a lot more time. And that's definitely a good thing. I was chopping ingredients for over an hour, which just goes to show that I'd never make it on Top Chef. It didn't help that when Boyfriend saw how much I'd chopped, he asked me to double the recipe because he didn't think we'd have enough. we ended up having more than twice as much as we needed, but that meant I got to eat stuffing for breakfast all weekend.

Boyfriend told me that people would be arriving around 2. In my family, that means that people show up at 2. In his, it apparently means that people start trickling in around 3. On the plus side, I was good to go an hour before everyone arrived and actually had some time to relax a little - and listen to Alice's Restaurant Massacree.

Dinner was a wild success. Everything was delicious. Everything except the cranberry sauce made it to the table on time, and I remembered to grab that shortly after I sat down. The eight of us went through 14 bottles of wine while we ate and talked and generally had a great time. It's a good thing I didn't have to drive anyway afterwards.

Setback

It turns out that in Blogger, Ctrl +z does not mean undo. For some incomprehensible reason, it means delete my entire post. The fact that Blogger auto-saves every thirty seconds makes this "feature" fairly disastrous.

Also, the mobile app I downloaded is refusing to sync with the site, so I can no longer use it to edit posts.

Stupid Blogger.

It's The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Where did November go? I just turned around and realized I haven't updated this thing in two weeks. I've been too bust flying across the country, seeing old friends, hosting my first Thanksgiving, and getting ready for the holidays.

This time of year always seems to flash by much faster than I expect. Maybe it's because the days are shorter. Maybe they're just fuller with the holidays coming. At any rate, I've had almost no time to blog. So now I'm really far behind on life stuff and book reviews and all that. But it is coming. If slightly out of order.

In the meantime, here is our totally awesome Christmas tree.

Christmas tree!

We got it on Saturday morning and decorated it on Sunday. This right here is my favorite part:

Curse your sudden, but inevitable betrayal!

The only sad thing is that it's in an otherwise empty room. The only place I can sit and admire it is the dining room table, and that's not so comfortable. One day we'll move one of the couches back upstairs. Hopefully.

With the tree set up, I am ready to embrace the holiday season and all the ridiculousness that comes with it. Though I do wish that it felt a bit more wintery. The temperature has yet to dip below freezing, and today it was warm enough for me to wear a sleeveless blouse. Winter, where are you?

Sometimes I Fail Being a Woman

A friend of mine is getting married in a few weeks. This has posed an interesting challenge for me that most people probably don't face when it comes to weddings. See, I don't wear make-up. I don't own it. I don't really know how to put it on. I can do stage makeup really well, thanks to years of performing, but that's a bit much for people seeing you from closer than 20 feet.

One of the other bridesmaids can do most of my makeup for me, I just need to bring foundation. Which means I need to buy foundation. Which is far more complicated than I ever thought possible. Which is probably why I don't wear makeup.

I was at Target today grabbing a few things when I remembered that I needed foundation. I ventured down the beauty aisle to pick some up. Thankfully I watch enough TV to know what the basic brands are, so that part wasn't overwhelming. Everything else was.

There was an entire wall of vaguely skin-shade makeup. Some was in bottles, some in tubes, some in powders. Some of it might have been blush or eye shadow. Nothing actually said foundation. It did say SPF 15 or SPF 30. It said it made pores vanish. It said perfect fit or age-defying or acne-fighting. It said for oily skin or for dry skin. I'm guessing I should probably have some sense of whether my skin is particularly oily or dry. The fact that I don't makes me think I might be in the normal category. I'm not sure that category exists, though.

I quickly decided I needed help, so I paid for my purchases at Target and drove to the Ulta across the street. I also awarded myself 5 points for knowing that Ulta sold makeup (I went there once to get makeovers for a friend's 13th birthday.)

I walked in and was immediately greeted by a girl who seemed willing to help. I told her I needed foundation and she started asking me questions that didn't make sense. So I backed up to inform her that I don't wear makeup and don't know much about it, but my friend is getting married and I need some for the wedding.

She seemed okay with that and grabbed a bottle of foundation and a brush. She put some on my face and decided it was too dark for my skin. Of course it was the lightest shade that brand offered, so she switched brands and tried a new one. She painted half my face and declared it a success. Great!

Then she told me it was $40 a bottle.

$40 for something I'm going to wear once? I actually asked her this and she looked a bit ashamed of herself. I had told her this was a one-time deal. I was expecting something closer to $5.

She directed me to the other side of the store with the cheaper brands. The brands I recognized. But she warned me that it's harder to match skin tone since they don't have testers. She suggested I buy one and, if after a few days I didn't like it, to return it. I didn't bother explaining, again, that this wasn't for daily wear.

At Ulta, the cheap brand section was about three times as big as at Target. I gave up and left.

The new plan is to go to the CVS on the way to work on Monday and buy the lightest shade of the cheapest brand. If it ends up being too dark, I'll just have to go without foundation. I'm sure the photographer can remove my pores in post-production if necessary. They have that technology now, right?

Leveling up

I'm actually starting to enjoy going to the gym. I think it's because I finally have some sense of how to lift weights, and weight lifting can actually be pretty fun. It used to be that when I went to the gym I would ride a bike or run on the elliptical for half an hour. Frankly, that's pretty boring. Even with the TVs all over the place. My eyes aren't good enough to read the closed-captioning on Jeopardy, and not knowing the answers makes that game a lot less fun.

But then I had a session with a personal trainer and he gave me all these weight lifting exercises to do. He also gave me a table that recorded the sets, reps, and weights for each exercise. There were extra columns so I could update the weights as I built my muscles. This is key to me enjoying the gym because I can watch myself level up!

For example, I started out a few weeks ago doing 40 lbs on the leg press. And now I can do 60 lbs. That means I gained two levels! We'll just ignore the fact that in high school I could do 130 lbs on the leg press because I was dancing ballet then and had ridiculously awesome legs.

I've leveled up on almost every exercise, except for the squats and chest press. Chest press is like bench press, except with hand weights instead of a bar. So if you drop the weights, they don't pin you to the bench. It still scares me a bit. When the trainer was there to spot me, he had me start with 10 lbs in each hand. But once I started doing it by myself, I immediately dropped down to 5 lbs. I've since worked my way back up to 10 lbs, so perhaps I'll level up soon.

Squats leave me deathly afraid. I'm only using a 12 lb bar at the moment and I have no desire to try anything heavier. The one and only time I attempted to do squats in high school, the bar was too heavy and I ended up dropping it and tipping over backwards. It was really painful and I don't want to repeat the experience ever again. So I won't be leveling up until I'm absolutely sure I can handle it, which is more of a psychological thing than a strength thing.

My running has also greatly improved, though I'm not sure how to measure levels for this. I'm supposed to warm up before lifting weights with a 5 minute walk then a 5 minute jog. Then I reverse the order to cool down at the end of exercising. At first, that 5 minute jog was brutal. It was all I could do to keep breathing (thank god for treadmills; I was able to focus exclusively on breathing, rather than terrain or changing course). Thirty seconds in I was watching the clock, wondering if I could make it all the way through.

It's a lot easier now. I don't start to lose my breath until the end of the jog. And when I say "lose my breath" I don't mean start to breathe hard; that still happens for the entirety of the jog. I mean I physically lose the ability to inflate my lungs. But now it's only the last 30 seconds that I have to focus all of my attention on the "in through the nose out through the mouth" mantra.

More importantly, the other day I actually felt like I had found a rhythm of sorts. There's this scene in A Separate Peace that my mind immediately flashed to:

After making two circuits of the walk every trace of energy was as usual completely used up, and as I drove myself on all my scattered aches found their usual way to a profound seat of pain in my side.  My lungs as usual were fed up with all this work, and from now on would only go rackingly through the motions.  My knees were boneless again, ready any minute to let my lower legs telescope up into the thighs.  My head felt as though different sections of the cranium were grinding into each other.

Then, for no reason at all, I felt magnificent.  It was as though my body until that instant had simply been lazy, as though the aches and exhaustion were all imagined, created from nothing in order to keep me from truly exerting myself.  Now my body seemed at last to say, "Well, if you must have it, here!" and an accession of strength came flooding through me.  Buoyed up, I forgot my usual feeling of routine self-pity when working out, I lost myself, oppressed mind along with aching body; all entanglements were shed, I broke into the clear.

I'm still not really a runner. You'd definitely want me around if you ever got attacked by a bear (though I certainly wouldn't want to be there). But for a glorious moment I got to experience this. I just wish I had a way to quantify my running progress so I could actually see my improvements.

Murder Tastes Good

In college every year our dorm threw a huge BBQ the Saturday before Halloween that was dubbed Halloweiner. We ordered all sorts of exotic meat, from ostrich to shark to alligator, and had a lot of fun throwing things on the grill and tasting new things. We'd advertise and raise funds with t-shirts and beer mugs using the tagline "Meat is murder. Murder tastes good."

Last year, with everyone in town for the Rally to Restore Sanity, we had a perfect excuse to start the tradition back up. This year we have a whole house to accommodate a bunch of guests, so we had to throw it again. And despite the snow it was a huge success!

We put a tarp up to protect the grills from the snow.

My best friend made some delicious appetizers in the form of pumpkin seeds, guacamole, and corn dogs while we waited for the local guests to arrive. It was all delicious

vegetarian appetizers

These appetizers had all the important food groups: meat, cheese, bread, and black sesame seeds

She also decided to roast the rabbit. In past years we've grilled the rabbit, which results in some fairly uneven cooking. The outside gets cooked while the inside stays raw, so we always end up picking at the outer bits while we wait for the inside to finish cooking. It's not the greatest situation. But this year, the rabbit turned out great.

Raw bunny, with a belly full of stuffing

Bunny's all tied up and ready to roast. 

In the above picture you can see the bunny's guts. We didn't eat them, but I believe we identified them as the heart, kidneys, and liver.

Basting the bunny

Delicious roasted rabbit

Stuffing

Bunny's aren't very big, so there wasn't a whole lot of stuffing. But it was delicious.

Cooked bunny

Most of the bunny meat is on the legs. It didn't last very long.

We cooked the rest of the meat on the grill under the tarps. We started with a whole bunch of burgers. We had buffalo burgers

Buffalo burgers

Wild boar burgers

Wild boar

Venison burgers

Venison burgers

And kangaroo burgers!

Kangaroo burgers!

We threw them all on the grill at the same time, but Boyfriend was able to keep them separate and remember which was which

Grilling the burgers

They were all delicious. In my opinion the kangaroo was the best. It was surprisingly tender with just a hint of a gamey aftertaste. The venison was the chewiest and ultimately my least favorite. The buffalo was pretty standard (but still delicious). And I decided that the boar burgers tasted like "Winter is coming". That was partially because it was snowing and partially because one of our friends was in the middle of A Game of Thrones. He was drinking any time anyone said "Winter is coming".

Mmmmm, venison

After the burgers came some wild boar loin and kangaroo loin

Boar (left) and kangaroo (right)

The boar had a distinct pork taste; it was super pig! And, again, the kangaroo was surprisingly yummy. That's fortunate, since we bought a bunch of kangaroo and still have two loins in the fridge. So much kangaroo.

We chopped the loins up into easy-to-share bite-sized pieces.

Super pig!

Delicious kangaroo

Next we moved on to some slightly more exotic meat: elk and alligator. Well, elk is a little less exotic, at least for someone with relatives who hunt it. But it's certainly not an everyday thing, which is what this party is all about!

Elk medallions (left) and alligator (right)

I can't remember eating the elk, so I don't know how it came out. The alligator was better than I was expecting. It's usually like a chewy fish, but this was closer to chicken in both taste and texture. Not to say it tasted just like chicken, because that's a cliche. But it was certainly tastier than I had expected.

Finally we cooked a rattlesnake

Rattlesnake!

This was probably the biggest letdown of the evening. We were full of anticipation because none of us had ever eaten snake before. But it turns out snakes are almost entirely skin and bones. The meat needed to be sucked out from the middle, and it didn't taste very good. Oh well, live and learn.

We also cooked some normal meat for the less adventurous guests. And for the moments when you just needed something familiar. We had kielbasa, sausage, and an entire chicken.

Sausages and kielbasa

Chicken

All in all, it was probably the most successful Halloweiner ever. Everyone got to try a bit of everything. We discovered that venison should not be made into burgers, kangaroo is delicious no matter how you slice it, rabbit is better roasted than grilled, and snake isn't worth the effort.

I can't wait for next year!