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.