Turkey day's almost here

Before I forget, here's the finished product of my mom's birthday coffee nut torte. She loved it.

I started this blog to keep track of daily happenings and now that I've been skipping the weekend blogging, is it bad that I can't sit here and remember what we did all weekend? I can't really blame it on age since I'm still in my 20s. Maybe we can blame it on the aluminum in my deodorant. :) Let's see how much I can actually recall...

Friday my dad and I drove out to New Port Richy for a sales/service call for work. We left at 6:30am and after Friday 1-4 traffic, returned at 6:30pm. The total drive time should have been about 2.5 hours, so we left at 3pm but hit the mother load of traffic both in downtown Orlando to Maitland and then again around Sanford. I love my 10 minute (with traffic) commute even more. DH and I then went to a couple shops, got a new weed-wacker at Lowes and picked up Moes burritos and quesadillas for dinner. We then watched/fell asleep to Tropic Thunder. I was tired, but usually enjoy Ben Stiller and Jack Black. Not in this one. Sorry guys.

Saturday morning we went to the barber, Ace Hardware and our NEW PUBLIX! Love it! True, the small town feel of the old Publix is gone, but the new one is so big and bright. I just love Publix. And yes, we went to the new Publix just to walk around it. And then I took a nice long nap. I love afternoon naps. They just put that pep in your step for the rest of the day. Saturday's dinner was Hardee's burger and a fish sandwich from our local seafood place that was so dry it's not even worth talking about any longer. When I got home from picking up dinner, DH had a beautiful fire lit. I love being able to use our fireplace for a few nights throughout the year. We did watch Journey to the Center of the Earth Saturday night and it was pretty good. Typical fantasy show for pure entertainment. Brendan Fraser had his typical 'dumb blond' lines, but overall it was good. Hey, I stayed awake for it, so that says a lot.

I had toyed with the idea of doing most of our Thanksgiving grocery shopping at Walmart Saturday night but decided to go Sunday morning at 6:45 am instead. Yes AM. It worked out well. I was home by 8am and there weren't many crowds to fight through. DH and I ran some errands and did the rest of our shopping at the new Publix.

We also got some makings for smoked meatloaf which DH made later that day. It was pretty good (yeah, I tried it!). Ground beef and pork with a mozzarella cheese center topped with bacon. What could possibly be better right?

Here's the meatloaf going into the smoker on my Pampered Chef stoneware which worked out nicely. And to the right is the meatloaf sliced showing the oozing cheesy center and the nice smoke ring.

He also smoked a block of monterrey jack cheese. It cured in the fridge overnight and we tasted it last night. A little too smokey.

And the last project of Sunday was for me to paint over the bright green that has been on our guest bathroom walls for the past year. I painted it with Autumn Fog which was left over from our guest bedroom just to have something different up there. That whole bathroom is going to be gutted soon. This was just a bandaid temporary fix. I'm trying to pick a replacment shower curtain so there's something up for Thanksgiving. Here is a close up of the tiles, paint color and the mirror (the only thing I like in that bathroom aside from the new Cadet 3 toilet). And here's the curtain which will probably be in there until we can redo the whole thing.

Wow, I actually did pretty well at remembering the weekend. Yesterday was work as usualy, tacos for dinner and then some house projects to get ready for the company on Thanksgiving. The turkeys are thawing out in the fridge, they might need a little water thawing too so they're ready to go into the brine tomorrow. Now I've got to do some research on how long it should take to smoke a 12 lb. turkey...