Overdue Thanksgiving Post

I've been meaning to post for over a week now, but I have been super busy. I wanted to tell you a little bit about our Thanksgiving, though.

This was the third Thanksgiving in a row that we have spent with our friends from Louisiana, Damian and Rebecca. They arrived Wednesday night and stayed through Sunday, and we really enjoyed spending time with them.

I really love to cook, so cooking Thankgiving dinner was lots of fun. I've realized, though, that even though my mother made it look easy, preparing the meal requires much "thinking through." Math certainly isn't my strong point, so I had to resort to pen and paper to calculate my cooking times.

Darryl and Damian fried a turkey (delicious!), and we also had dressing (my best yet!), sweet potato casserole, creamed corn, green beans, pineapple casserole,
rolls, pecan pie, and sweet potato pie. Here's a picture of the table. It's a little blurry, but you get the idea.

Later that evening, we went to Lake Lanier's Magical Nights of Lights. Even though the lights are pretty much the same every year (and the admission charge has gotten to be ridiculous), Darryl and I try to make it out there--it's becoming tradition, I guess. Anyway, Rebecca and I rode the ferris wheel. (Two years ago when we did this, the weather was extremely cold and the frigid wind blew up the legs of our jeans whenever we hit the top. Fortunately for us, the weather wasn't quite as nippy this year.)
We also took stuff to make s'mores at the "campfire" (really a gas-fueled pit of coals). Anyway, here are the four of us after all the ferris wheel ridin' and s'more eatin'.
Rebecca and I have made a tradition of participating in the "after-Thanksgiving shopping" madness, and we really took the sport to a new level Friday. Of course, we are supposed to be Christmas shopping for other people, but we somehow end up Christmas shopping for ourselves. All I'm going to say is I have not one, but two pairs of really cute shoes that I can't wait to wear. Darryl and Damian, of course, were avoiding the malls as much as possible and were content to watch the LSU-Arkansas game (Geaux Tigers!) and the FSU-Florida game (Darryl wasn't happy about that one).

So there's my long overdue Thanksgiving post. I'm judging from other people's blogs that it was a good holiday for many. While I'm thankful for many things I've been blessed with, I have one more thing to add to my list: I finally finished grading those blasted Grendel papers.

Additional Note: Now that I've "published" this blog, I really hate the photo arrangement. However, I've been uploading photos and trying to get everything "just so" for about 45 minutes now (I accidentally deleted some text once and had to rewrite), and I just have other things to do...like put up a Christmas tree. Oh, well.