Wednesday, Nov 21st

It was a gorgeous day in AJ, not quite as nice as yesterday, but still very nice.
  We did a few things around the house then had to be at the hall for 10AM to help with the turkeys. Before we left our neighbour across the road came over with a butternut squash pie, she said it was just like pumpkin pie, so can hardly wait to try it.  They are very friendly, good neighbours.
 We are on the kitchen crew to cook for Thanksgiving, so being here early this year we will have two of them.  We had 5 turkeys to prepare this morning.  Marg worked with the ladies chopping stuff to put in the dressing.  I had the job of running a Turkish bath, well not really but I did wash the turkeys.  Then they were stuffed by the ladies.  The routine here is a bit different than we are accustomed to.  The cavity is filled with halved oranges and a lot of butter is put in the turkey.  They are cooked in roasting bags held in aluminum roasting pans.  There was lots of clean up as we went along and everyone helped with it.
  After the turkeys were in the ovens we went home for lunch, French toast today.  This always makes for a good day.  After lunch I went to play pool, Marg went to Ross's for a look around.  She found a couple of tops and a set of sheets.  Last year we took the spare set of sheets home and we forgot to bring them back, so only have one set of cotton sheets.  I played with one guy who has been here quite a few years and another who is new in the park.  We had some good games and a few laughs.  I always try and invite new people who are interested, remembering that we too were once new.
   By 4 PM we had to be back in the hall to carve the turkeys.  The birds turned out nice and the ones in the big convection oven came out a bit darker than the ones done in the conventional oven.  They pretty much leave the breasts to me and the other 5 people did the dark meat.  The association has two electric knife's since our first year doing this, so I just used one rather than bringing my own.  It went pretty well and we were done in a little over an hour.  This all meant missing happy hour today, but we don't go every day anyway.
  Supper tonight was a bit of a rush affair, so we went to Taco Bell.  Marg is funny, she almost always has the $5 special. Hers was a chalupa combo, I had a burrito supreme combo.
  The rush was so I could be back to play poker.  We had 7 players tonight, so a full house.  LOL, get it very punny.  I started off really losing, then my luck turned and judging from the weight of my bag I came out pretty close to even.  Marg stayed in and had some self time, so dyed here hair and some other stuff around the house. .