Turkeys and pigs

We had Thanksgiving here with friends.  Melenie and Jay came the night before. All day Melenie and I cooked.  I’d made strawberry mousse [with local berries I had enormous trouble finding this year instead of the tasteless California biggie] and apple cranberry sauce.  I freeze pints and quarts of local berries in late June. Jay helped Woody put the lawn furniture away and tidy the sheds.  Then the guys settled in to watch football and Wood roasted the turkey and sliced the the gravlax.  We make gravlax several times a year. Melenie and I made a rum pumpkin pie, a fancy bean salad with chickpeas and peppers,  a sumptuous stuffing with bread, onions, celery, apples, dried apricots, madeira, eggs and rosemary.  We had a good bread.  For hors d’oeuvres we had the gravlax and some cheeses. Our other guests came at six with bubbly.One reason this blog is late is because on the weekend I came down with one of those quick viruses and was out of it till late Sunday, when I started to feel better.I was reading Robert Alarcon’s THE KING IS ALWAYS ABOVE THE PEOPLE.  It’s grim reading, every short story about alienated often desperate people events seem to push and which they cannot push against.  I can think of one exception about a feisty child.We had a killing frost this week.  We knew it was coming so Woody finished plowing manure and lime into every garden but mine.  It still had too much growing in it. Woody harvested some Chinese cabbages and bok choi, storing it in a cooler on the sunporch since the refrigerator was full of the uncooked turkey.  He harvested the last of the Brussels sprouts and we had them for supper.  We had few this year as a big fat rabbit had eating most of the plants in midsummer. I still have parsnips and a few remnants in my garden, so it’s now ready to be plowed when the rains stop.I only was able to work on one poem this week.  I’m still moving winter clothes out of storage.  Usually we have long falls but this year it was hot until just into September, started raining most days after the drought of the summer.  It’s officially the wettest fall on record here.  I’d taken out transitional clothes but am still working on woolens.Willow has recovered her mojo after all the workers coming in out. We were both very worried about her.  She is our most timid cat with people she doesn’t know.  Although Melenie only worked for me a few months after we got her from Joan Norris’s The Last Resort no-kill shelter, she is not scared of Melenie and Jay and didn’t hide from them.Today I open up submissions for my annual juried intensive poetry workshop.  I’ll post the opening on Facebook and on my website and late in the month, our ad will be in the classified secrtion of Poets and Writers magazine.  I don’t know how many more years I’ll do this.  I’ll have to see what it’s like this year.  Last year’s group was just fine.Parts of the dry brined turkey were salty and parts were just fine and tender.  Weird.  I think we’re going to return to the old fashioned non-trendy method of basting the turkey.  We never had trouble with that.We’re still trying to disentangle from Verizon.  They charge $700 to get out of a service contract they automatically renewed without our knowledge and they threaten to cut off everything if we dare to leave them. Utilities are such pigs.