My computer's been down for over a week, thanks to my boys apparently infecting the machien with a virus. Anyway, now we have Linux instead, so no more virus worries. Unfortunately, I don't have Opera installe as a browser yet. Netscape and Konqueror both suck. I can hardly read wat I'm typing here, due to messed up font size, so please bear with me on th etypoes and misspellings.

Thanksgiving: I had it yesterday. Today I worked. I made:

A free range turkey, stuffed with oranges and cranberries and fresh sage from the garden, and orange and cranberry juice. I used an oven bag for the first time. (If you're wondering, I didn't really have any trouble with the bag, but it seemed sort of artificial and disagreeable in general, sort of like a condom. Just a nasty layer of plastic in the way, if you know what I mean). Um....I failed to realize how very lean my free range turkey was. It wasn't fatty l;ike th efactory-farmed ones. I also forgot to use at least a stic of butter, which I normally do. The result? A well cooked but too-lean turkey (honestly, I didn't know that was possible, but it is).

Potatoes: organic Yukon Golds. The gravy was tart (like oranges and cranberries) but a lot more flavorful than the usual bland smeary brown liquid. Again, it could have used soem fat. I never thoguht I'd be one to cpmpalin of a lack of fat in anything.......

Sweet potatoes: I sauteed them in butter and olive oil instead of baking them.

Green bean casserole: the old classic, but I added more mushrooms.

and cranberry relish, pumpkin cheesecake, pumpkin ice cream, and black olives.

The garden: I just planted about 300 or 400 flower bulbs. Maybe that's an exaggeration:

40 mixed daffodils
30-50 pheasant eye narcissus
24 fosteriana tulips (mixed colors)
24 mixed dutch crocuses
3 seedlign grown red daylilies
1 Charles Johnston daylily (also red)
peppermint- mayeb 5 plants
marjoram- 2-3 plants
lemon balm, 1
3 frittilaria persica
1 frittilaria raddeana
24 drumstick alliums
24 allium (do't remember name of species, starts with 'O' an dhas lots of letters)
24 tulip turkestanica
12 tulip clusiana "Cynthia"
3 eremurus "lemon chiffon"

I think that's all. The worst of it was digging up the huge rocks that kept cropping up eveyr time I tried to dig a hole for a bulb. The soudn of the shovel hitting rocks, eeeek!!! It started snowing as I was finishing up.....

I was going to write more, but I can't see what I'm writing and it's irritating beyond belief. Work, I've been a bitch, but am makign a serious effort to behave myself. I think half of it is that the days are geetting so short up here. At 7AM it's still dark, and it's dark again before 5PM. Some days, I hardly see any daylight at all, and it isn't even winter yet. I thought about sugggestign full spectrum lights at wrk, but seriously,. what are the odds of that happening? And yet, it's affectign us all. The short days make us crabby and teaful and depressed.....ugh.