Christmas 2009 was a wonderful time. It started out with a potential for disaster on the home front. Buddy got into a wrapped box of chocolates on Christmas Eve afternoon (Fuzzy being the intelligent female she is did not participate in this very bad behaviour). He was quite ill and after a few hours of no improvement we headed to the emergency hours vet (read $$$). They put some goop in his eye that made him vomit all that was left in his tummy, syringed a charcoal treatment down his throat (and all over his white beard) to absorb residual poison, inserted fluids into his back, suggested an overnight stay (read $$$$$$) and told us he may not make it through the night:( We decided to bring him home and look after him with the knowledge that we might have to bring him back in if things got worse. The vet told me I had to use their special medical diet food and I told him I had issues with that. We discussed the crap ingredients in the special diet and he reduced the original 5 days to 3 days for how long I should feed this to Buddy. I went along with it and bought the food but you know I didn't use it. I was very thankful for all the good they did for Buddy. And I also confirmed for myself that despite the good intentions - that business is set up to make money and most of us are going to end up spending more than we really need to because we want to do what's best for our pets.
Happy ending, Buddy improved through the night and was pretty much himself the next day and completely himself the day after that.
So, onto the turkey. Our family is one of those that has Chevy Chase's Christmas Vacation movie in our holiday history together. We have watched that movie several times over the years. So of course when cooking the turkey we always hope it won't turn out like the movie. Well, I read or heard a tip somewhere over the years about cooking the turkey breast side down to keep the white meat moist. So that's what I did. When Steve went to carve the meat.....he struck bone with his knife where he thought meat should be. He had a moment of pure terror wondering how he was going to tell me I had completely over-cooked the turkey.....then he realized it was "upside down" and felt a flood of relief that all was well. The look on his face when he told me what happened was priceless and this will be one of our family's traditional stories from now on.
My beautiful friend Kim sent me some pictures over the holidays to brighten my days. Looking at those pictures brought back to life the picture journal beast with-in and so I'm back here in Blog World. Thanks Kim, I didn't know if I would find my way back here ever again.
Love to all and hope your holidays have been filled with wonder!
