T Stands for Thanksgiving Weekend

 Hi everyone.  Tuesday and T Day have rolled around again, and today's post is a bit long for me. Just warning you!

For T, I thought I would share some snippets from the long Thanksgiving Holiday weekend in my world. It was a fun escape from the usual: my house got really messy, I ate too much food, I didn't get online very much, I relaxed and I got some major exercise. 

The quote in this first photo is true for my house both on Thanksgiving and the day before. It is the only room I seemed to clean up after the Thursday.

I recently bought a split pie plate that makes 2 halves  of 2 different pies. This way  I could make more flavors of pie and not have huge amounts of each. Normally I would make full sized  pies, but with this stay home Thanksgiving, it was just my daughter, my husband and myself. I wanted to be sure 

I made half pumpkin and half black bottom pecan. I had a bit of extra pumpkin filling (as I made half of each recipe) so I baked it in a ramekin. You can also see my first drink related image here too.

I always measure dry ingredients with a scale, which makes it easy to use recipes in both English or metric. This is drink reference number 2.

I also made these sourdough dinner rolls with a recipe from King Arthur. They were ok, both times I tried them. I would have prefered a roll a little lighter in texture than these came out. 

And I did make an apple pie. This one was full sized because it is the only pie everyone eats. I do wish however I made the pumpkin a full sized pie though. My daughter who told me about 10 times she does not like pumpkin pie, changed her mind this year and told me she liked the pumpkin better than  apple. Go figure.

If you are wondering why the top of the pie looks lumpy it is because I made my top crust by cutting our leaves with a cookie cutter and overlapping them.

Onto Thanksgiving.

That  day was a bit chaotic at first. When I got up and found my husband on the couch, he told me  that he had been sick a few times. Not knowing if it was something he ate or one of those covid symptoms (because I know that's how it started when my mom got sick), I wasn't  sure if I should even make the traditional turkey dinner. My daughter then decided she was going to go home so she wouldn't get sick. Luckily when she left she phoned her beau, and he talked her into coming back. I was really down when she left, especially since my husband, who had been up half the night, went back to bed.

(Originally my daughter and her beau were going to visit both his parents and then us on Thanksgiving.  With covid so bad here right now, my daughter decided it was best to skip her boyfriend's family and just come home. Some of you may not know my husband had a kidney transplant in 2017, and he is really immunosuppressed because of that. My daughter was trying not to come into contact with other people before she came here for Thanksgiving.)

I spent Thanksgiving morning disinfecting out of paranoia.

Once Katie (my daughter) returned, I cheered up. She and I made dinner, even if at that time we thought it would just be the 2 of us eating it. 

She is NOT a cook, so I love seeing her in kitchen helping me out.

My husband got up around one feeling much better.  He even carved the turkey. 

We all had a wonderful meal and NO ONE was sick. I think my husband must have eaten something on Wednesday, and his lack of much immune system got the better of him.

And in this photo above is my drink reference photo number 3. 

Friday we went and chopped our holiday tree and also put it up. Then my daughter left. (I wrote about this day here Christmas Tree if you are interested.)

My last big weekend plans were on Saturday morning when I met 3 of my work friends, and we went for a hike. Now that I am retired I don't see them that often, and it was great to catch up.

The plan was to walk up to the Stonehouse Pond overlook and then take the rest of the loop  back to  the parking area where our cars were. The landscape was rolling, and the trail was nice, although in some places it was covered with a lot of leaves. 

The overlook was quite pretty.

After an apple break, we headed  back. Not too far on the opposite side of the loop we came to a fork in the trail  There was a bright yellow sign with an arrow showing the trail going right, and some logs and branches down on the other branch of the trail more or less blocking it.

So we turned right and walked on. Luckily my friend who coordinated this walk realized she had never been this way before. (This trail is close to her home and she has walked it a couple of times before.) We pulled out our phones and yup, we were heading in the wrong direction. Not that trail maps online are always accurate, as we discovered when we each pulled up the online map. Each of us had the blue dot  showing our location at different points. Mine even had me standing in the middle of a nearby lake. 

Of course we had walked a mile off trail before this point and had to walk a mile back to the right trail.

Good things we had 4 smart brains to figure this out. Ha-ha.

We needed to go around all the branches in the trail and head that way.  I don't know what those branches were all about, but they could have been a really bad thing, (and  not just for us) had we walked a lot further and ended up far away from the parking area.

We passed a few bogs. 

And lots of  forested rolling hills.

Along the wrong trail we did pass this large glacial erratic rock covered in this really cool lichen.

And later on we saw this great lichen too.

Finally we came to this sign for the SELT trail. We knew we were back on track.

Even if we did have quite away to walk still. This sign was half way down the right trail.  We were heading to the Merry Hill Road Trailhead.

We did make it back to our cars though. We ended up walking about 8 miles, or just under 13 km. I checked my fitbit when I got home and at that point I was over 21,000 steps.

 My husband made me a yummy grilled cheese, I showered and then decided to lounge on the couch and watch  Jurassic Park:The Lost World. We'd been talking about that Jurassic Park sequel while walking, and I hadn't seen it for awhile. It seemed a good way to wrap up my day.

And if we don't get snow, one of my friend's birthday is on December 12th, and we are talking about another hike that day. I'm keeping my fingers crossed the weather holds a couple more weeks. 

OK, this is probably way too long as it is. Don't forget to stop by   Bleubeard and Elizabeth's    blog            and join us for T.

And Happy December to all of you!