We will pick things up a little to start out our Christmas Day music list. Something to wake you up and get you going so that big dinner is actually ready on time, or you’re out the door to go to that big family dinner on time.
Lincoln Brewster: The Little Drummer Boy
This was, I believe, the 2015 Christmas Eve service at Bayside Church in Granite Bay. On top of Lincoln’s musical career, he’s a music director and pastor there.
Trans-Siberian Orchestra – Christmas Eve / Sarajevo (Timeless Version)
A piece if music that speaks for itself. I’ve been to 4 or 5 TSO Christmas concerts and they never disappoint.
Trans-Siberian Orchestra – Carol of the Bells 2018
This was actually the last TSO concert series I attended, back in Sacramento. Fabulous show.
Lincoln Brewster – Hark the Herald Angels Sing:
AND… *IF* you’re feeling brave… I give you Twisted Sister’s version of Oh Come All Ye Faithful. You won’t be hearing things either… “We’re Not Gonna Take It” uses an up tempo melody line from “Come All Ye Faithful”
Last post for today. ๐ It’s already Christmas on the other side of the international date line though, so it seems appropriate to send general well wishes now.
Merry Christmas to all, and wishes for a fabulous time if you celebrate some other holiday. ๐
Another blog subject I’ve fallen behind on. I’m bending the rules for it with Christmas falling on a Saturday this year. Today’s edition is the list of shows that are the “must watch” shows for my Christmas to feel complete. Most of them are silly, and truth be known I like most of the old animated Christmas specials. These (again) are the “must watch” ones however.
1 The Original Die Hard
I say it every year; it’s not Christmas till I see Hans Greuber fall off of Nakatomi Plaza. ๐
OK, that’s a little grim I know, BUT I love starting the holiday off seeing the bad guy get theirs. ๐
2 The Muppet Christmas Carol
OK, let’s be real. There’s several spectacular versions of “A Christmas Carol” out there. The one with Patrick Stewart as Scrooge is one such example. This version is a little lighter and more fun though while still getting the message through.
3 A Charlie Brown Christmas
4 Batman The Animated Series: Christmas with the Joker
Classic Mark Hamill voice acted Joker. I also love seeing Batman going from he’s never watched “It’s a Wonderful Life” because he couldn’t get past the title, to admitting at the end that he liked it, AND that maybe life ain’t so bad after all. ๐ Note that’s actually Charles Manson that Joker exchanges salutes with before climbing up the Christmas tree.
I’m putting Friday Night 80s on a brief hold for some Christmas music. I’d intended to do a longer series of these posts like some other blogs have, but the whole spider drama kept me sidetracked. I’ll make a handful of these posts today and tomorrow in between all the cooking / prep and cleaning I have to do. ๐
So we’re going to start with the silly and fun stuff first. We’ll get to classics and religious Christmas songs a little later.
We start with one that only the SoCal beach hot rodder culture could have come up with:
This secret now revealed; I’m a huge Beach Boys fan ๐
And no list of this type would be complete without the infamous Mr Grinch song:
Nobody does it better than the original
Next stop; The Muppet Christmas Carol. There are several good songs to choose here. I was tempted to pick the Scrooge song from the beginning, but I want to keep things positive and upbeat, so…
And last for this post, we’re going to pay Snoopy a visit. This is another one you Millennial kids probably never have heard. ๐
Time for another brief personal update. The post’s tile is partially a pun. I’ve been sidetracked and away from the blog not only due to holiday stuff, but because I also literally got bit by.. something.
My suspicion after doing some internet research is that it’s a spider bite, likely a black widow or brown recluse. I never felt the bite nor saw any spider though. The first day I noticed it, I wasn’t sure what it was and it didn’t look TOO bad all things considered. I decided to wait a day and see how it progressed.
This is a pic from the internet. For new followers, I’m paranoid about personal photos online, hence this pic as a stand-in. My apparent bite is on my calf and looked similar but the center is darker and hard like a scab.
Getting back to the story, by the end of the day, my calf was showing some swelling, and I wasn’t feeling so good. Long story short, we spent almost 3 hours waiting in the local ER, got literally one minute of face time with an actual doctor (who barely looked at the alleged bite), and sent with some antiseptic wash and a prescription for major antibiotics.
Aside from the lousy ER experience though (and they were not that busy BTW), the whole event has been pretty mild for what was likely a bite by a dangerous spider. I felt lousy for a few days, and slept ALOT, but the wound is slowly healing as opposed to the horrific click bait pics out there of widow or recluse bites just rotting away huge areas of flesh.
At this point, the worst of it all is that the Doxycycline antibiotics make me sick to my stomach, even if taken with food. That’s minor in the grand scheme of things however. ๐
The big trick is going to be catching up on all the Christmas stuff I still have to do. We’re hosting not one, but TWO dinners this year. Christmas day will be five people, and then Sunday will have 11 of us after the out of state in-laws finally make it to town.
I could have just left everything at Sunday only but Christmas is supposed to be celebrated on Christmas, dangit. ๐ ๐
That’s what today’s personal update is about; struggling between faith and fear. That’s kind of where I’ve been the last week or so. Enough so that I’ve really struggled to put words to “paper” about it and thus been absent here as I struggle to find my footing.
I should start where I last left off I suppose. ๐ Even before my last post, I’d been picking up little messages here and there urging me to shake off the slump I was in. A Buddha quote in a blog post, the underlying theme in Cobra Kai (which we’ve been watching), etc… I could make a whole series of posts about how neither Johnny nor Daniel are balanced emotionally until the end of season 3, but that’s another story…
More to the point, all these messages got me to see two important truths:
No matter how bad my life has gotten, in the end every situation resolved itself in an essentially positive manner
There’s truth in the adage that there’s no point in worrying about problems because either they can be corrected and thus solved, or they’re completely out of your control anyway.
Perhaps stress and suffering (partially) come from not knowing the distinction between the two and thus categorize one’s problem.
At any rate, I’ve found a great deal of peace in the combination of those two realizations. I’ve accepted that whatever comes, we will get through it and eventually get back on our feet. It’s always happened, no matter how dark the moments in my life. Funny how much things have changed in the last week also. I’m thinking more clearly and FINALLY noticed that a bog contributor to my back pain issues has been my stubborn refusal to wear shoes. Circumstances required shoes for 3 or 4 days though and I noticed how much better my feet and back felt vs wearing sandals.
On a level that could be written off as coincidence, but I’m choosing to attach some spiritual meaning to, we also had a minor breakthrough on our legal case; our lawyer found out that the home inspection company we were referred by our realtor wasn’t licensed to do inspections in Georgia. If true, that’s going to leave them open to a legal broadside.
I have a habit of searching for deeper meaning in things, and part of me wonders if all the bad experiences weren’t used by (not orchestrated by) God to try to teach me I’ve got the strength to overcome all of it if I had faith in myself, AND to teach me to have faith in Him since I always landed on my feet.
Am I in a perfect place now? Far from it. Fear of everything that could and might go wrong is still warring hard against my new sense of calm. I’ve had so many things go wrong in the past after multiple times taking a step in this direction that I’ve been outright afraid to even make this post. Maybe it’s time to stop looking for the other shoe dropping though and try to get on with life.
Yes, it was a few days ago, but I needed time to recover, LOL. As usual, I spent WAY too much time cooking. The results and everybody’s enjoyment make it worth while however. ๐
I once again cooked the turkey on out Recteq(Formerly Rec Tec; they changed the spelling) pellet smoker. I also had my cousin-in-law (is that a thing? ๐ ) drop off a ham since his kids are not turkey fans. Plenty of room in the smoker for both.
200 degrees (93degrees C) for 7 hours…
Since cooking low and slow will turn any poultry skin rubbery, I peeled the skin off the turkey before smoking it. At the point this picture was taken, it was looking better than it did going onto the grill. The ham was pre-cooked and spiral cut, so it went on for a shorter time to simply warm it up and add some smoke flavor to it. We’ve had that brand of ham before and it’s overly sweet out of the wrapper.
I had actually started with the desserts, as they’re the most time consuming. Up at 2:30am start also. There were 2 dutch crust apple pies and a Ghirardelli double layer cheesecake.
Before the dutch crumble topping was added and after it was done baking.
One of those pies went to the next door neighbor, who was kind enough to bring us over a store bought pumpkin pie. The cheesecake(link to recipe at Ghirardelli) was major work. I didn’t remember to get a picture until after we’d cut into it also, lol.
It looked prettier new.
What you have there is a chocolate graham cracker crust, then a layer of regular “vanilla” cheesecake topped by a layer of chocolate espresso cheesecake, then covered with Ghiradelli chocolate ganash, fresh raspberries and mint leaves as garnish.
Since the layers are both liquid when added to the springform pan, they come out with a marbled look instead of even layers. There are some things I’d change with that recipe, having made it now. That will be a separate post in the near future though. ๐ Overall it was a hit, and almost as rich as my goo-goo cluster cheesecake. Something I just realized I’ve never posted here… O_O
Once the desserts were out of the way, I was able to focus on the actual dinner.
One very easy side dish I did was a giant butternut squash:
I know, kind of small. At least it didn’t have a phallic appearance though, lol.
All I did here was skin it, dice it into cubes, throw it in a casserole dish with melted butter, and top it with brown sugar and cinnamon, then bake.
It’s an easy, old school recipe for a veggie dish that even most kids will devour.
There was also some homemade dressing, not stuffing. The difference there is that stuffing goes IN the turkey for cooking. Dressing goes in the oven in a baking dish. Unfortunately, I forgot to get pictures of those two items.
Family also brought over some green bean casserole, fresh baked bread and store bought pecan pie. Yes there was as much dessert as there was food.
From bottom to top: Bread, Turkey, Cranberry Jelly, Dressing, Gravy, Green Bean Casserole, Ham, and WAY at the back off to the side, the Butternut Squash.
Note I wasn’t able to get the skin off the drumsticks or wings, as the picture shows.
How did THAT experiment work out? Reasonably well. I won’t call it a huge success because the turkey was just slightly dry. That had more to do with my thermometer breaking on me though. That, in turn, led to the turkey staying on the smoker a little longer than it should have.
And that’s my Thanksgiving dinner recap. With that, I’ll leave you with this important Thanksgiving thought:
Silk Chatters 