Merry Christmas, All!

Thursday night my sister's clan came over for dinner. My Mom brined a turkey ala Alton Brown and I roasted it, it came out FANTASTIC. Short of dry aging, which I've never done, it's perhaps the absolute best way to do pretty much any meat. I'm not sure if my mom's oven is tremendously heat-imbalanced front to rear, or if my thermometer is wonky, but I had to turn the bird and give it a lot more time. I think it was a combination of both. Regardless, turning the bird is good and I'm getting a new meat thermometer in the new year. Hopefully this one will last more than a year.

I also made a German potato salad and a carrot salad, both of which very little was left over. My sister brought a green bean cassarole and a sweet potato cassarole. But the real Christmas Miracle was that my brother not only sat through dinner Thursday, but Friday he went with us to my sister's house for steaks done by the B-I-L. To be honest, they needed some seasoning, but the Christmas Day meal was fine overall. Yesterday was my Dad's birthday, so officially yesterday was my Dad's birthday dinne and Thursday was our Christmas dinner.

My wife and I got $50 cash from my parents to get ourselves something, a bulk of which will be used for movie-seeing while we're in town, and we got a shadow box sort of thing from my wife's sisters in Maine made from things collected at the beach, which they live just a couple of miles from as the proverbial crow flies. I'm not sure that I've seen a crow in my few trips that I've made there. Russet gave me a Mark Knopfler/Chet Atkins CD that is quite good, along with a copy of the complete run of Saphire & Steele, a UK SciFi show starring Joanna Lumley and David McCallum. I don't expect it to be very good, but it should be lots of fun. I gave Russet a DVD box complete set of The Sentinel, formerly only the first season was available and earlier this year they released the complete set, and the most recent CDs from Enya and Lorenna McKennit. She was very happy, she knew Enya had a new CD but didn't know about the McKennit.

The capper last night was hanging out and gabbing with our old friend Steve for four hours, then coming home and watching the current Dr. Who Christmas special with River Song and the previous Matt Smith one with Matt Smith that had Dumbledore in it.

Good times. I hope you all had a good holiday celebration!

"You have cleverly fallen in to my trap!"

My wife was playing with our poodle. She'd throw the squeaky toy, he'd fetch it and then wouldn't want to give it back. This time he jumped on to the couch that she was standing next to, and she was easily able to take the ball away from him and uttered the above line.

I have absolutely no idea how to parse it, but I'd LOVE to see it said in a Bond film!