Thing Two and Thanksgiving

The second parrot on Mary Otter is complete and I'm on the band that marks the halfway point.

This parrot is much closer to both the verse and border than the first one. This is the second sampler I've worked that had a similar situation. Sarah Williams also seemed to run out of room for the motifs on the second side.  In addition, Mary had to cram some words together to get them to all fit inside the border she had stitched. So . . . that leads me to believe that at least these two girls stitched borders first and then made everything else fit into them.

I may take a break from Mary today to work on the 2017 ornament from Barbara Jackson. It's one of my favorites from the ones she has designed for SNS, and that is saying a lot since I've loved every single one of them.  I have started doing some Christmas decorating, and I want this one on the tree, so I need to get that needle moving, too.

Now if you came for stitching, you can stop reading right now. The rest is about our not-quite Thanksgiving.

For a variety of reasons, this year Dearly Beloved and I were planning to have Thanksgiving alone. Mother can't travel any longer, the Saint had an invitation from a friend, Baby Girl has to work Black Friday, the Big Kid not only was scheduled to work, but then his whole family came down with some kind of virus that we would really prefer that they keep in West Virginia and not bring to us.

So we decided we would have a turkey breast instead of the usual humongous turkey, the green bean casserole that only Dearly Beloved will eat, I was going to try to replicate Mother's macaroni-and-cheese with no one here to critique it but me, sweet potatoes, and whatever other vegetable I felt like throwing into the mix.

I went online and through several cookbooks and the general consensus on thawing out turkey is to give it 24 hours for every four pounds. We had a six pound turkey breast. That meant probably Monday evening until Thursday evening would be ample time, actually more than enough, for the thing to thaw out.

Wrong.

Either the "authorities" were all wrong or we have a wormhole to an Arctic planet in the back of the frig, because when I took the thing out yesterday to start cooking for our evening meal, it was still hard as a rock and had a chunk of ice in the middle.

So I did the thing where you put the turkey in the sink with water and change the water every hour and it finally thawed out. It finally got into the oven. It finally got roasted about 9 last night. At that point, we had had barbecue sandwiches from the barbecue we bought earlier in the week and Tater Tots and salad for dinner.

Tonight we're going to put the sides together and gently warm the turkey slices and try it again.