Thanksgiving Time Again

 It was Thanksgiving! Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. But I suppose this Thanksgiving wasn't especially noteworthy. Which is fine. We had Thanksgiving dinner at the home of my sister, and my grandparents moved in with her last year, so it's also the home of my grandmother.

On Wednesday, as I was working from home, my mom made a large assortment of pies. In the evening, I went over to my sister's house to see how the stuffing is made. My grandma told me what ingredients to put in, and I mashed it all together, and then I put it in the raw turkey. I wanted to see how it's done. And also, if I didn't help out with that, I would have had to exercise, and exercising isn't as fun now that it's dark and trail season is over.

And I also made cranberry sauce that evening. Freshly made cranberry sauce is so much better, and it's so easy, so I don't know why canned cranberry sauce is even a thing.

On Thanksgiving morning, I turned on my Thanksgiving playlist while I cooked additional things. For the last several years, I have enjoyed making sweet potatoes with a recipe I found online. This year, I decided to use purple sweet potatoes. They were fine, but I think they're starchier than the orange ones, so I should stick to the orange ones. (I made the orange ones for a recent Friendsgiving, but they were undercooked, so I made sure these purple ones were plenty cooked.)

And I also made green bean casserole, which is so easy and uses mediocre ingredients, and yet it's amazing. It is truly greater than the sum of its parts. 

Ugh, blogging about food is hard on Fast Sunday

We took the food over to my sister's house, and there were ten of us for dinner. I wore my Thanksgiving sweater and Thanksgiving turtleneck.

And my turkey shoes and turkey socks. 

We took grape juice from our own grapes.

And my mom made apple pie from the apples that hang into our yard, and mincemeat pie with those same apples and green tomatoes from our garden.

Then on Friday, I spent the entire day taking down Thanksgiving decorations and putting up Christmas. My parents helped a little bit. We got everything finished yesterday (Saturday). I do all this while listening to my Christmas playlist, which currently has 2,082 songs and 113 hours. At the beginning of the season, I start at the beginning and make my way through it. Any new Christmas music just goes on to the end, so it's kind of a time capsule to think about when and why I added particular songs at different periods of my life. 

I do think Christmas decorations have gotten sturdier over the years. But I found these two Christmas ornaments that have smashed into each other. They died from their love for each other.

That's about all I have to say about this week's activities, so here are this week's dreams. 

I will say, I find it very entertaining to make AI images from my dreams. Dreams are silly, and AI is silly. And the images show how AI still doesn't get things right. But I get extremely frustrated by AI images being used to bait gullible and unintelligent people on Facebook. I find these horrible AI images, with thousands of people saying "amen" to these nonsense pictures.

There are an astonishing amount of pictures of Asian flight attendants helping a dirty Jesus

Anyway, here are the dreams.

a very short woman with auburn hair runs a locker room with industrial staircases

Ann sorts through Christmas t-shirts, one of which has Scrooge McDuck

two college-age men threaten three Latter-day Saint missionaries in a park in the middle of the night

a three-year-old boy carries around a safety pin made of wood

Mark asks a three-year-old boy if he liked Halloween, but the boy says he saw a flag on the Fourth of July

Mark finds an old floppy disk and shows it to his cousin's children

Franklin likes to put his stuffed animal inside an inflatable exercise ball, and Mark doesn't know how he does it

Mark writes his dreams on a sticky note

a restaurant sells Thanksgiving tacos

Mark is in the backseat with his crazy aunt

the town of Moroni, Utah, discusses the Book of Mormon in school

Mark is late to his Spanish class because he was making a special cookie dough

a spirit rides a witch's broom to avoid her disapproving mother

Ya-ping cleans out Mark's closet, and he finds clothing he forgot about

a man brings nectarines to the ward activity, but Mark thinks they're pomegranates

Mark tells a woman that Pilgrims didn't wear black clothes or buckles (I think words ruin these images, but I love this typeface)

Hillary complains to Mark about a BYU devotional that shows a stop-motion cartoon with a spider

Mark eats the legs of a stop-motion spider, but he can't bring himself to bite the head

Mark and Michael are going to be roommates at BYU for grad school, and their new bishop encourages them to go to the YSA ward, even though they're too old

***

Welp. Now that Thanksgiving is over, this is the final installment of pumpkinundation roundup. And it's small this week.

I was surprised that my ward activity had this Beehive Bakery Mince Pie, because I had never had a store-bought mince pie before. There's a reason this kind of pie isn't very popular. 5/10.

And I tried the Dee's Pumpkin Waffle. It didn't have a strong pumpkin flavor. It was just pretty bland. 6/10.

The Dee's Apple Pie was better, though. 8/10.

And Trader Joe's Everything but the Leftovers Seasoning Blend makes bland foods, such as cooked onions and mashed potatoes, delightful. They sell it for Thanksgiving. 10/10.

But pumpkin season isn't quite over. After Halloween, Walmart was giving out free pumpkins, so I took two and put them on the front step as decorations. Yesterday I cooked one of them, so I will have to find ways to use the pumpkin flesh now.

Cultural history, &c.

As you likely know, I am very much interested in cultural history, and this week I had many encounters with it.

My mom received her copy of the latest issue of Utah Historical Quarterly. She subscribed to the journal without even telling me or without me asking her to. Isn't she nice?

This issue has articles about sugar beets, turkeys, and WWII home front. And we literally have two articles about garbage (one about rail station artifacts and one about landfills). All of this is more interesting to me than the beaches of Normandy or the presidential election of 1924. The Utah Historical Society is part of the Utah Department of Cultural & Community Engagement (CCE), and the head of CCE (one of the governor's cabinet members) regularly sends department emails. This week, she complimented the quality of UHQ, specifically naming my supervisor and me. So that was a nice acknowledgment.

One of my assignments for UHQ is to clean up all the citations, which means I spend a great deal of time digging through old digitized newspapers to make sure the articles are cited correctly. That can get tedious. But since I'm fascinated by holiday histories, whenever I find references to holidays in these old sources I make a note of them. This week I learned that in the 1930s, Zion National Park held Easter pageants. As in Jesus's resurrection, that kind of Easter. I want to learn more about this! And on my own time I've been digging through Journal History of the Church for references to Thanksgiving. I just find it interesting to see how people perceived the holiday, even though it's probably dull for others.

Also this week, Utah State Archives and Records Service posted pictures of ZCMI from the early 1980s. In this image, I noticed all the Lladro figurines on the shelf. For as long as I can remember, up to the present, my grandparents have had a sizeable collection of Lladros on display. It was interesting to me to see them in this picture, because I have never seen them for sale in a store (except for that one time I saw a Lladro nativity set at Deseret Book). My grandparents' décor reflects a different era.

And I also follow a Nancy Facebook page, because I find it charming. This week I was amused by this strip from 1942.

This was part of a storyline about a wishing tree, but this was the only strip that was political/topical

Of course, cultural history isn't all I want to talk about.

On Tuesday night, I helped clean the Bountiful Temple, which I personally find more edifying than temple ordinances. As we were departing, one of my ward members pointed out a bat in the temple's atrium. 

This cat is obsessed with me. He's sitting on my lap as I type.

As trail season comes to an end, I have had to get more creative about what kind of cardio I do. Though there's snow in the higher elevations, the flat areas are snow free. I spent a couple of nights by the Legacy Nature Preserve.

But that gave me an idea. A few times I've visited the Bear River Bird Refuge near Brigham City, and I loved it. I thought it would be cool to ride my bike there. And this seemed like the perfect time of year for it—no snow yet, but also no bugs. So yesterday (Saturday), I packed my bike in my car and headed up.

As I biked along, I literally said out loud, "This is amazing!" I could not have asked for a better day. I have seen more birds on other visits, but I saw lots of seagulls, a couple of pheasants, and lots of duck-like birds. It was a wonderful bike ride. It was only twelve flat miles, so it didn't feel like much of a workout. I only have a mountain bike, but I don't mountain bike, so I thought it was a good opportunity to ride on a dirt/gravel road.

We think of Utah being dry and barren, so it's always fun to see all the water there, even though I know it's probably lower than it should be. I was disheartened to see all the phragmites growing, since they wreak havoc on the ecosystem.

And here are this week's dreams, which I think are less entertaining than usual.

a guinea pig latches on to Mark's finger with its mouth

Mark tells a pop singer how much he likes her song "Disease"

Mark visits a multilevel rundown building with many businesses, one of which has a leaky pipe

Mark is annoyed that a giant water cooler has leaves in the water

Mark goes into a fast food restaurant and bookstore that is rundown

an angry Pegasus

on Halloween, Mark wins a raffle for charity by guessing 15, but he doesn't know what to do with the certificate

Mark carries his friend, who is dressed as a vampire

Mark collects a snowball to put in his hot chocolate, but it melts in his hands

a restaurant doesn't accept tips and gives our New Year's appetizers [I usually type these on my phone, and I don't always catch the autocorrect. It's supposed to be "out" instead of "our."]

a man goes back to his elementary school to learn about National History Day from his kindergarten teacher and his first-grade teacher

an ice cream shop sells pumpkin ice cream with Hershey's Kisses and pumpkin ice cream with pumpkin cake pieces

on Christmas night, Mark walks to his friend's house in the snow, and he takes off his shoes

Mark forgot to take the song "Witches' Brew" out of his playlist after Halloween

Mark acquires Charlie Brown shoes and a Valentine's elephant Squishmallow made of hearts

***

Here we are at the penultimate installation of pumpkinundation roundup. 

Our North Salt Lake location was out of the Firehouse Subs Thanksgiving Turkey Sub, so I had to go to the Millcreek location. It was amazing! It has turkey, stuffing, and cranberry sauce. But I think it's overpriced. 9/10.

I like the crust on the Kroger Pumpkin Spice Pie, but the filling is just kind of weird. I give them props for including (a small amount of) pumpkin puree and dried pumpkin. 5/10.

My goal is to go to every restaurant in North Salt Lake, and we just got our first Starbucks. I don't drink coffee, so instead I got the Starbucks Turkey Sage Danish. I really enjoyed the pastry part; it was soft and chewy. The turkey sausage was good but forgettable. 8/10.

And another new NSL business is on Redwood Road, where I got the Big Bites Bread Pumpkin Roll. It was fine, but it didn't taste much like pumpkin, and cinnamon rolls aren't my favorite kind of sweet. (In fairness, it was a day-old one, because that was the only seasonal flavor.) 6/10.

I used to buy multiple bags of Trader Joe's Thanksgiving Stuffing Seasoned Kettle Chips, but I don't anymore. The novelty has worn off, and I don't eat that many potato chips. 6/10.

I've had Trader Joe's Harvest Blend Herbal Tea in the drawer for years now. As a Latter-day Saint and an American, I just don't know how to drink tea. It's so bland! This time I put milk in it, but that didn't help any. 4/10.

On my way home from the bird refuge, I stopped to get this Burger Stop Pumpkin Cheesecake Shake. It had chunks of cheesecake (not actual cheesecake, but the cheesecake bites you get in things like this). It was great! 8/10.