totient | Reading

derinthescarletpescatarian:
chekhovs-raygun:
headspace-hotel:
i-love-hyenas:
headspace-hotel:
My version of “doomscrolling” nowadays is just going to iNaturalist, browsing pictures of animals and fantasizing about where I would introduce them outside of their natural range if I was some kind of ecology-focused evil scientist. I do this when I’m depressed. I don’t know if it helps.
Bring hyena to Texas put Texas in hyena paws humans can trust Texas to hyena pack yesss
How could I disagree with such a trustworthy source
animals i really want to introduce to the USA:
-red pandas in Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio. they can live in those you-pick orchards and delight tourists, and in the winter the big ones can be harvested by the farmers for food and fur. america also has native bamboo, as well as plenty of escaped invasives.
-koalas in southern california. we already have a lot of feral eucalpytus in the state and it makes our wildfires way worse. let’s put koalas in there too. coyotes can hunt them like dingos do.
-cheetahs in colorodo, wyoming, nebraska, and oklahoma. we had cheetahs here once, that’s why pronghorns are so fast. let’s give them something to really haul ass about.
-spotted hyenas in texas and new mexico. did you know there’s actually a shit ton of oryx already roaming around new mexico? they were brought in for a game preserve. oryx can fight off lions, but spotted hyenas are actually superior pack hunters with some of the highest kill rates of large cooperative predators in the world. we might have a problem with ranchers, but like: fuck ranchers. they already decimated the mexican wolf populations. they deserve hyenas.
-pangolins. i would drop these guys in arizona honestly. everyone in arizona hates and fears fire ants. i think entire neighborhoods would throw ecstatic parades for pangolins (which smell much better than giant anteaters) at least until a pangolin dug straight through their pasteboard condo.
-new zealand’s little penguin in louisiana. they burrow into mud and sand banks during the day and tolerate quite hot temperatures! i think they’d do fine, and louisiana is sliding into the gulf anyway. let’s have penguins there. i’d also try them out in new england in case lousiana is just too swampy for them. i feel like new yorkers would go insane with pride over having penguins around. they would act like they invented the whole concept of penguins. we should let them.
-water buffalo. georgia and the carolinas. i just think it would give everyone there some interesting new problems.
-i firmly believe that asiatic elephants would do great in the southeastern united states. it’s a subtropical climate that’s only going to get swampier as things heat up, and there’s plenty of kudzu and tall grass species for them to munch on. they’re also smart enough to learn to navigate and negotiate with people, and to follow set routes around human farms rather than tromp through them, so disruption to existing human infrastructure would be minimal but occasionally hilarious. i think it would be so cool to have an american subspecies of elephant. if i ever win the lottery this IS what i am going to be doing with my millions.
Animals I would introduce to each continent:
Europe: Wombat
We’ve had enough of your fucking rabbits and foxes. Here, have a huge badger type thing that can destroy cars with its arse. It’ll outcompete your badgers and where will you be then. Haha.
Asia: Wombat
We’ve had enough of Indian camels ruining our deserts. Here’s something to ruin your terrain for a change.
North America: Wombat
We’ve had enough of United States tourists with no manners. Here’s some tourists with even less manners.
South America: Wombat
WE’VE HAD ENOUGH OF YOUR FUCKING CANE TOADS. WOMBATS FOR YOU.
Africa: Wombat
The feral ostriches aren’t actually all that much of a problem right now, but in revenge for the problem they will probably become in the future, have some fucking wombats.
Antarctica: Wombat
I’ll take it right back home and warm it up I promise I. I just really want to see a wombat walk and dig in the snow.
Australia: Wombat
The populations of all three species of wombat are dangerously low.
Let This Man Undermine Your House

https://gallusrostromegalus.tumblr.com/post/801646095476375552

dianec42

I started doing some more work on Upon A Star, and found myself asking "When did these rows stop being symmetric...?"

Dear reader, the rows are all symmetric; I had messed up and missed out a row quite a while ago.

I decided to rip out all of the offending stitches and redo them. It did not take as long as I feared.

The moon looks kind of like an ugly sweater at the moment, but at least it's a symmetrical ugly sweater.

gallusrostromegalus_feed

https://gallusrostromegalus.tumblr.com/post/801618150138445824

wizardarchetypes:

edit: okay making it rebloggable per the prompting/encouragement of friends
Hi!
When I moved here in Sept I got scheduled in with a cardiologist, which I need so I can continue my POTs meds. In fact, I recently ran out of my blood pressure medication which is not ideal, but I see the doctor in a couple of weeks so that’s great!
I do have health insurance, but I’ve just learned the appointment isn’t fully covered and will be €250, which I just don’t have to spare. The good news is that once I do this appointment and establish my meds routine, I shouldn’t have to be seen again for a long time.
But I do need help covering the cost of this one appointment, if possible. I’m sharing my Ko-Fi
Thank you!
Support slorglvr1000

https://gallusrostromegalus.tumblr.com/post/801618150138445824

denise posting in

dw_news

Hello, friends! It's about to be December again, and you know what that means: the fact I am posting this actually before December 1 means

karzilla reminded me about the existence of linear time again. Wait, no -- well, yes, but also -- okay, look, let me back up and start again: it's almost December, and that means it's time for our annual December holiday points bonus.

The standard explanation: For the entire month of December, all orders made in the Shop of points and paid time, either for you or as a gift for a friend, will have 10% of your completed cart total sent to you in points when you finish the transaction. For instance, if you buy an order of 12 months of paid time for $35 (350 points), you'll get 35 points when the order is complete, to use on a future purchase.

( The fine print and much more behind this cut! )

Thank you, in short, for being the best possible users any social media site could possibly ever hope for. I'm probably in danger of crossing the Sappiness Line if I haven't already, but you all make everything worth it.

On behalf of Mark, Jen, Robby, and our team of awesome volunteers, and to each and every one of you, whether you've been with us on this wild ride since the beginning or just signed up last week, I'm wishing you all a very happy set of end-of-year holidays, whichever ones you celebrate, and hoping for all of you that your 2026 is full of kindness, determination, empathy, and a hell of a lot more luck than we've all had lately. Let's go.

gallusrostromegalus_feed

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makingimages:

https://gallusrostromegalus.tumblr.com/post/801579197862690816

letthemeatcake_feed

Posted by TW Lim

https://letthemeatcake.substack.com/p/no-109-cousin

This is Cousin Henry. I met him for the first time yesterday, and neither of us is young. Cousin Henry is a professional poker player, and he was in Singapore scoping out the scene. He’d heard I was in town, so my sister brought us both to Springleaf Prata for lunch – the place that gave us the Original Murtaburger, Däs Pratwurst, and the Salted Egg Prawn prata.

Cousin Henry’s spent most of his life in Shanghai and Sydney, ten months in Hamburg, and a few days in Malaysia. But it still surprises me when he doesn’t know what roti prata is. My dad was one of 14, and most of his siblings were prolific themselves. Cousins rolled out of Muar like Katamari, picking up spouses and children on the way north to KL, or south to Singapore. There are enough of them for statistical soundness, and the sample is over 80% Malaysian. Maybe we don’t pass our food on in our genes.

We should order him anything, he says, “as long as there’s some meat.” Something about those syllables, or the subject, brought Henry’s accent out – gently sibilant, waves upon a pebbled beach. We get him masala chicken and coin prata. The prata are the size of small coasters, five to an order, crunchy on the outside, resistant within.

Henry’s mum was my dad’s older sister, one of two siblings who went to join the Cultural Revolution. I have just enough memories of her to mistrust them. The revolution needed her to be a nurse, and then a doctor, and eventually it wore thin. She finagled a visa to visit Australia and brought her son. There he stayed, while she returned to Shanghai.

It was 1987. Henry was 23. He had neither papers nor English, but he had the phone number of another aunt, who lived in Sydney. I have this photo of my dad as a young man – he and Henry share a jaw, a hairline, cheeks planed flat by a clean cut kind of hunger. I pictured that face at a bus stop in Sydney, looking for a payphone.

The prata come. He eats like a stranger to food. I’ve never before seen someone puzzled by a prata. They’re simple, but interactive. You tear them apart, the ragged edges embrace the gravy. Cutlery is an impediment, primarily there for serving.

We trade biographies. Henry’s is picaresque. Paperless in Sydney, he talked his way into a job with a clothier. The interview involved lying about his skills, being found out, and being given the job anyway. He got asylum after Tiananmen, but decided he didn’t like the offer. Too much uncertainty about the terms, five years residence and then what?

Henry decided to hedge. He’d met a German girl in Sydney, and she was going back to Hamburg. She said immigration would be a cinch. He went. Jobs in a mustard factory, in a 24-hour Burger King on the Reeperbahn. He found he didn’t like the Germans – “emotionally quite different from the Australians” – he said. Unrelatedly, his relationship was tanking. So Henry went back to Sydney and his shears. Later on, Henry tells me he’s never told anyone about his German fling. Our conversation makes me wonder how many people knew he was in Germany at all.

When I was in high school, my family went to London to see yet another aunt. On the same trip, we went to see a friend of my dad’s, in an unremarkable house in an unremarkable suburb. I remember wondering why we went, why my mum was so tense. Years later, I found out that we’d been visiting my dad’s first wife.

I watch Henry explore his plate. Like my dad, he seems not to pay much attention to food. The prata are a pile of piecework to get through. But my dad could be relied on to inhale whatever was on his plate, and I wonder if Henry’s uncomfortable or merely lost. I wonder what would make him feel at home – fish slices in wine sauce, or a meat pie and a beer, eaten outdoors. We’re sitting in a cut price wonderland of fairy lights, Deepavali tinsel, and unscrubbed floors. The cooks are scowling at the griddle. I’ve never seen a happy employee in a Springleaf, except the mascot on their logo.

Back in Sydney, Henry wound up running the cutting room first for one fashion brand, and then another. He traded shears for spreadsheets, then for a CAD program and cutting machines. Just once, 20 years ago, I used a pair of real tailor’s shears on a proper cutting table, and it was one of the most sensuous things I’d ever done.

And then somehow Henry decided to play poker professionally, trading silk and linen for baize. Officially, he became a custom fabricator of soft goods for film: backdrops and camera covers for filmmakers, so they could walk around filming in the rain, every piece of it custom work. But the fabrication business was, itself, a cover.

Eventually he comes to an accommodation with his prata: he piles pieces of chicken on the coins, and drowns them in sauce, then folds the prata over with his fork and spoon. A prata is not a taco, until it is. I don’t know if it’s his upbringing in China that prevents him from eating this with his fingers, but it’s all I can do not to interject to suggest that the utensils are optional. It takes a circus act with tableware to bring the prata-taco to his mouth.

There’s something intensely timely about Henry’s life. He couldn’t have lived it except in the few decades when he actually did, emerging from the ashes of Mao’s China into the toddler tantrums of the 21st century. I cannot shake the sense that I should know him. We are both fuckups, misfits, muddlers-along. Our fathers are not so distinguished that we can be failsons. A list of things I have been paid to do: theatre tech, advertising, cooking, pouring wine, interviewing dentists, babysitting video crews, all-purpose fixer, writing documentation.

The walls in Springleaf are covered with feats of concatenation: The Pratonomiyaki! Prata Al Fredo! The Prataco does not yet appear. The menu was written by teenagers with the munchies, but teenagers have always had the munchies, and only in the last few decades have they eaten teriyaki, prata, and spaghetti in the same day. Springleaf’s prata remain flaky, the ginger tea reliably strong. What else is a prata cook to do?

At Sin Ming prata, or to give it its full name, Sin Ming Roti Prata Faisal & Aziz Curry Muslim Food. “Plaster” prata in the bottom left, then clockwise, fish curry, coin prata, and chicken masala. The coins are maybe a little sturdier than at Springleaf, but the photo gives a sense of the challenge. They’re made by taking the stretched dough, rolling it into a rope, then coiling the rope – regular prata are just folded. If you ask for an egg prata you get the egg in an envelope, “plaster” gets you the egg on the outside. Prata places are generally judged on the prata, but here the curries are actually more intricate than at the average hawker stall, because they’re also a full-on biryani place.

The menu at Sin Ming, and the guy. I mean really, what’s a *prata* cook to do?

https://letthemeatcake.substack.com/p/no-109-cousin

gallusrostromegalus_feed

https://gallusrostromegalus.tumblr.com/post/801513547711561728

foldingfittedsheets:

demonicae:
shutyourmoustache:
Jurch
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything more incredible. Fifteen hundred hours of love to create this masterpiece. Humans are wonderful actually.

https://gallusrostromegalus.tumblr.com/post/801513547711561728

gallusrostromegalus_feed

https://gallusrostromegalus.tumblr.com/post/801513401065095168

vampirecatprince:

sharas-bae:
fuckyeahmarxismleninism:
Workers from Starbucks Workers United put their bodies on the line Nov. 19, shutting down Starbucks’ distribution center in York, PA, the largest in the US.
Stand in solidarity with these working-class heroes, DON’T BUY STARBUCKS ANYWHERE UNTIL THEY WIN THEIR STRIKE!
Via Eric Blanc
The union is asking customers not to shop at Starbucks while the strike is ongoing. (Not all strikes include a boycott component, always important to check!)
You can also sign the pledge to this effect (numbers are helpful) or donate to the union strike fund.
This is from earlier this week FYI- so it’s a ongoing, active strike.

https://gallusrostromegalus.tumblr.com/post/801513401065095168

gallusrostromegalus_feed

https://gallusrostromegalus.tumblr.com/post/801511740303081472

damazcuz:

Are you doing okay? We missed you at the devil’s sacrament. He mentioned you by name. Everyone was looking around and cheering until we realized you weren’t there. If you need to talk I’m always here. At the aforementioned devil’s sacrament.

https://gallusrostromegalus.tumblr.com/post/801511740303081472

gallusrostromegalus_feed

https://gallusrostromegalus.tumblr.com/post/801490670881751040

bananacockroach:

bananacockroach:
bananacockroach:
Do people deadass have grocery list apps? You don’t just use whatever paper and writing utensil nearby?
I’ll use a. 50 lb Clay tablet and stylus before I use an app
Grocery list options
50lb clay tablet
Whatever writing material is on hand
Im a slave to my phone
Special designated stationary
If you’re not on the poll don’t vote, I don’t give a shit about you. Tag yap see if I care

I do not have a grocery-specific app because that feels like spyware BUT I do have a group chat for my household so the four adults with wildly different work schedules and severe ADHD Can add to it when we think of stuff and then we actually get what we need, without duplicates, and we can confuse the grocery reward system into thinking we are some sort of superorganism.

My ADHD ass can lose paper immediately but the phone is harder to misplace and consistently on-hand, and the fewer steps on a task, the more likely I am to accomplish it.

https://gallusrostromegalus.tumblr.com/post/801490670881751040

gallusrostromegalus_feed

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2022dirt:

Sometimes apples will have a self portrait of another apple.

https://gallusrostromegalus.tumblr.com/post/801483284489125888

gallusrostromegalus_feed

https://gallusrostromegalus.tumblr.com/post/801482998448062464

winteryserpent:

gallusrostromegalus:
winteryserpent:
Hi, I’m Tom aka winteryserpent here on tumblr!
I am working on getting my life back together and getting support as an adult on the autistic spectrum. I’ve previously worked in the public sector and am looking to get a new job in the same field. I need to get my driver’s license, which would also allow me to get a car so that transportation will be less of an issue for me when job searching.
I already have a therapist and a psychiatrist that I am working with. What I need right now is to be able to focus on my health and stability since month-to-month living and anxiety over bills have been making it very difficult for me to function.
My fundraising goal is 30k dollars. This will allow me to cover my living expenses for a year, pay for driver’s ed classes, take my cat to the vet for her annual exam and money to pay for medical debt that I owe. The fundraiser will run from October 4, 2025 to December 15, 2025.
Thank you for your support – every dollar and share counts!
Donate to Help Tom find stability for the future, organized by Tom Zurkan
Hello Everyone!
Tom is a longtime friend of mine who has had a run of bad luck, but through a herculean amount of effort, he’s gotten his ducks in line and has a chance to escape the cycle of poverty- he just needs your help.
We’re working together to get him on track to manage his finances and get his courses done. Being able to take care of himself means Tom will be able to take care of his friends and family (and kitty), and THAT is how you build community support.
So! Let’s get Tom’s life on track for Christmas!!
A reminder that I am still running this gofundme. I have been a bit pants about reblogging this myself to remind peoplebecause of energy reasons, but @gallusrostromegalus has been helping me a lot. I am very grateful for their help!
I’m still only at 15% of my goal and the date that I am ending my fundraiser will be on December 15th! What I’ve gotten so far has been a great help in regards to keeping my internet and phone on as well as finally being able to obtain needed household items that SNAP benefits. It’s also helped with food.
I hope to at least make some good headway on my goal soon! Please donate or reblog or both. <3

Okay Tumblr! It’s Black Friday and we all hate capitalism, so let’s spit in the face of greed with a little good old fashioned community aid!

Tom is a good friend, kind soul and genuinely in a position to stabilize himself and start helping others, so let’s see if we can’t get to at least 25% of this goal before dec 15th.

Thank you all 141 of you who have donated so far, and thank you everyone who has shared this.

https://gallusrostromegalus.tumblr.com/post/801482998448062464

siderea

Very shortly after I posted my recent request for pointers on 3D printing education – a request which was occasioned by my getting excited over my new and improved typing capability courtesy of my new NocFree ergonomic keyboard and wanting to make it a peripheral – my shoulder/back went *spung* in the location and way I had had a repetitive strain injury a decade+ previously.

*le sigh*

I'm back to writing ("writing") slowly and miserably by dictation, because all of my other forms of data entry aggravate this RSI. (This explains how rambly and poorly organized the previous post was and this one too will be.)

I'm going to try to debug my ergonomics, but it remains to be seen whether I can resume typing.

Thanksgiving came at an opportune time, because it took me away from computers for a day. But I had wanted to get another post out before the end of the month. We'll see what happens.

So, uh, I had been going to post about how I have worked back up to something like 80%, maybe 90%, of my keyboard fluency on the NocFree. Eit.

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3174/

A lot of the highway department's budget goes to adjusting the sign whenever the moon passes directly overhead.

https://xkcd.com/3174/

siderea

I see that I didn't note last year's Annual Introverts Liberation Feast. Perhaps I wrote a draft that I never got around to posting. It was something of a grueling deathmarch. Because my physical disability makes me largely unable to participate in food prep or cleaning, it almost entirely falls on Mr B to do, and he is already doing something like 99% of the household chores, so both of us wind up up against our physical limits doing Thanksgiving dinner.

But the thing is, part of the reason we do Thanksgiving dinner ourselves to begin with, is we manage the labor of keeping ourselves fed through meal prepping. And I really love Thanksgiving dinner as a meal. So preparing a Thanksgiving dinner that feeds 16 allows us to have a nice Thanksgiving dinner on Thanksgiving, and then allows us to each have a prepared Thanksgiving dinner every day for another seven days. So this is actually one part family tradition, seven parts meal prep for the following week, and one part getting homemade stock from the carcass and weeks of subsequent soups. If we didn't do Thanksgiving, we'd still have to figure out something to cook for dinners for the week.
The problem is the differential in effort with a regular batch cook.

So this year for Thanksgiving, I proposed, to make it more humane, we avail ourselves of one of the many local prepared to-go Thanksgiving dinner options, where you just have to reheat the food.

We decided to go with a local barbecue joint that offered a smoked turkey. It came in only two sizes: breast only, which was too small for us, and a whole 14 to 16 lb turkey, which is too large, but too large being better than too small, that's what we got.
We also bought their mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, and – new to our table this year – baked macaroni and cheese. Also two pints of their gravy, which turned out to be spectacularly good. We also got a pan of their cornbread (also new to our Thanksgiving spread), for which they are justly famous; bizarrely, they left the cornbread off their Thanksgiving menu, but proved happy to add it to our order from the regular catering menu when we called it in.

We used canned sweet potatoes in syrup and grocery store cubed stuffing (Pepperidge Farm). The sweet potatoes were fine but as is traditional I had a disaster which coated half the kitchen in sugar syrup. The stuffing was... adequate. Our big compromise to save ourselves labor was that we didn't do the big stuffing production with the chopped and sauteed fresh veggies. The place we got the prepared sides has a stuffing but it's a cornbread stuffing, which is not the bread cube version I prefer. We did add dried sage to it.

Reheating the wholly cooked smoked turkey did not go great. We followed the vendor's instructions – leave it wrapped in foil, put two cups of water in a bottom of the roasting pan, 300° F for two hours to get the breast meat to 165° F – which turned out to be in Mr B's words, "delusional". We used a pair of probe thermometers with wireless monitor, one in the thigh and one in the breast, and an oven thermometer to make sure the oven was behaving. The oven was flawless. The temperature in the thigh quickly spiked up while the breast heated slowly, such that by an hour in, there was a 50° F difference in temperature between the two. The thigh reached 165 in about 2 and 1/2 hours, at which point the breast was 117 ° F. By my calculations, given how far it had gotten in 2.5 hrs, at that temperature we'd need another hour and a half to get the whole bird up to 165° F (for a grand total of 4 hours) at which point the drumsticks would probably be shoe leather.

There was a brief moment of despair while we entertained heating the turkey for another hour and a half, but then decided to just have dark meat for Thanksgiving.

The turkey turned out to be 1) delicious and 2) enormous. Mr B carved at the rest of the bird for our meal prep and picked the carcass; I broke the carcass and other remains into three batches this year. There is going to be so much soup.

Mr B had the brilliant idea to portion the sides leftovers into the meal prep boxes before the dinner, so we dispensed two servings of each side into the casseroles we were going to warm them in, and portioned out the rest.

I had the brilliant idea of checking the weather and realizing we could use the porch as an auxiliary fridge for all the sides we had sitting there in the crockery waiting for the tardy turkey to be done so they could go in the oven. Also it was wine degrees Fahrenheit out, so that worked great too.

For beverages, Mr B had a beer, and I had iced tea and a glass of wine. Happily, the packie near the caterer's 1) has introduced online shopping for easy pickup, and 2) amazingly, had a wine I have been looking for for something like 20 years, a Sardegnan white called Aragosta, to which I was introduced to by the late lamented Maurizio's in Boston's North End. Why the wine is called "lobster" I do not know, but it is lovely. The online shopping did not work so happily; when we placed the order the day before (Tuesday), we promptly got the email saying that our order was received, but it wasn't placed until we received the confirmation email. Forty minutes before pick up time (Wednesday), since we still hadn't received a confirmation email, Mr B called in and received a well rehearsed apology and explanation that there was a problem with their new website's credit card integration, so orders weren't actually being charged correctly, but to come on down and they would have the order ready for payment at the register.

As is our custom, we also got savory croissants for lunch/breakfast while cooking from the same bakery we also get dessert. As is also our custom, we ate too much Thanksgiving dinner to have room for dessert, and we'll probably eat it tomorrow.

The smoked turkey meat (at least the dark meat) was delicious. I confess I was a little disappointed with the skin. I'm not a huge skin fan in general, but I was hoping the smoked skin would be delicious. But there was some sort of rub on it that had charred in the smoking process, and I don't like the taste of char.

The reason the turkeys I cook wind up so much moister than apparently everybody else's – I've never managed to succeed at making pan gravy, for the simple reason I've never had enough juice in the pan to make gravy, because all the juice is still in the bird – is that I don't care enough about the skin to bother trying to crisp it. There really is a trade-off between moistness of the meat and crispness of the skin, and I'm firmly of the opinion that you can sacrifice the skin in favor of the meat. The skin on this turkey was perfectly crisped all over and whoever had put the rub on it managed to do an astoundingly good job of applying it evenly. It was a completely wasted effort from my point of view, and I'm not surprised that the turkey we got wound up a bit on the dry side.

That said the smokiness was great. I thought maybe, given how strongly flavored the gravy was, it would overpower the smokiness of the meat, but that was not the case and they harmonized really nicely.

The instructions come with a very important warning that the meat is supposed to be that color: pink. It's really quite alarming if you don't know to expect it, I'm sure. You're not normally supposed to serve poultry that color. But the instructions explain in large letters that it is that color because of the smoking process, and it is in fact completely cooked and safe to eat.

(It belatedly occurs to me to wonder whether that pink is actually from the smoke, or whether they treated it with nitrates. You know, what makes bacon pink.)

The cavity was stuffed with oranges and lemons and a bouquet garni, which was a bit of a hassle to clean out of the carcass for its future use as stock.

The green bean casserole was fine. It's not as good as ours, but then we didn't have to cook it. The mac and cheese was really nice; it would never have occurred to me to put rosemary on the top, but that worked really well. The mashed potatoes were very nice mashed potatoes, and the renown cornbread was even better mopping up the gravy.

The best cranberry sauce remains the kind that stands under its own power, is shaped like the can it came in, and is perfectly homogeneous in its texture.

We aimed to get the bird in the oven at 3:00 p.m. (given that the instructions said 2 hours) with the aim of dinner hitting the table at 6:00 p.m. We had a bit of a delay getting the probe thermometers set up and debugged (note to self: make sure they're plugged all the way in) so the bird went in around 3:15 p.m. At 5:15 p.m. no part of the bird was ready. Around 5:45 p.m. the drumsticks reached 165° F, and we realized the majority of it was in not going to get there anytime in the near future. At this point all the sides had been sitting on the counter waiting to go into the oven for over a half an hour, so we decided to put them outside to keep while we figured out what we were going to do. We decided to give it a little more time in the oven, and to use that time to portion the sides into the meal prep boxes. Then we brought the casseroles back inside, pulled the bird from the oven and set it to rest, and put the casseroles in the oven. We microwaved the three things that needed microwaving (the stuffing, which we had prepared on the stove top, and was sitting there getting cold, the gravy, and at the last moment the cornbread). After 10 minutes of resting the turkey, we turned the oven off, leaving the casseroles inside to stay warm, and disassembled the drumsticks. Then we served dinner.

After dinner, all ("all") we had to do was cleaning dishes (mostly cycling the dishwasher) and disassembling the turkey (looks like we'll be good for approximately 72 servings of soup), because the meal prep portioning was mostly done. We still have to portion the turkey and the gravy into the meal prep boxes, but that can wait until tomorrow. Likewise cleaning the kitchen can wait until tomorrow. This means we were done before 9:00 p.m. That has not always been the case.

Getting the cooked turkey and prepared sides saved us some work day of (and considerably more work typically done in advance – the green bean casserole, the vegetable sauté that goes into the stuffing) but not perhaps as much as we hoped.

Turns out here's not a lot of time difference between roasting a turkey in the oven and rewarming one. OTOH, we didn't have to wrestle with the raw bird. Also, because we weren't trying to do in-bird stuffing, that's something we just didn't have to deal with. OTOOH, smoked turkey.

But it was still plenty of work. Maybe a better option is roasting regular turkey unstuffed and shaking the effort loose to make green bean casserole and baked stuffing ourselves a day or two ahead. We were already getting commercially made mashed potatoes. It would certainly be cheaper. OTOOH, smoked turkey.

This was our first year rewarming sides in the oven. We usually try to do the microwave, and that proves a bottleneck. This time we used our casserole dishes to simultaneously rewarm four sides, and it was great. Next time we try this approach, something that doesn't slosh as much as the sweet potatoes in syrup goes in the casserole without a lid.

But I think maybe as a good alternative, if we're going to portion sides for meal prep before we sit down to Thanksgiving dinner, we might as well just make up two plates, and microwave them in series, instead of troubling with the individual casseroles. This does result in our losing our option for getting seconds, but we never exercise it, and maybe some year we will even have Thanksgiving dessert on the same day that we eat Thanksgiving dinner.

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Welcome to another thanksgivng themed Family Lore! Content warnings: Food, bigotry, fire and explosions, knife mention, conspiracy theories and Ohio. Please mind the tags, your health and safety always come first.
It’s November of 2012 and the last time I’m going to Ohio on purpose. My grandparents had passed away within a week of each other that February and since my mom’s family had spent the last decade caring for them there was sort of a void- we’d been putting aside grudges and problems in the interest of their comfort, but also setting aside interests and hobbies to make time for them. How would we get along without that purpose and burden?
So, the first family Thanksgiving my family had been able to attend in a decade was arranged, part family gathering, part wake. We drove from Colorado this time, I’d been taking a semester off after a viral infection nearly killed me, and my sister taking a gap year before college. Everyone was going to be there- my mother’s brother family, My grandmother’s sister and her daughter and her husband, Sue and Cliff.
Sue never really got the hang of critical thinking and as such conservative politics and conspiracy theories held tremendous appeal to her, and that crossed with the family’s double-dominant Dramatic Hoe Genes means that she’s prone to the occasional spectacular leap of illogic and will fight you in the street to defend it.
A decade prior, she’d taken issue with how my uncle stuffed the Turkey.
Seriously, read that one it’ll make this story make a lot more sense.
Upon arrival, she seemed to have mellowed slightly in the past 11 years and we had an entire salient conversation about fishing whilst preparing the bird. It was a little strange- after the last decade, it was like I was meeting the entire family again for the first time, but things were going well and I was starting to remember things again. Maybe I’d figure out how to get back next year.
“We should establish some more traditions!” Mom suggested after Aunt Stephanie mentioned how odd it was to not have grandma and grampa around. Being raised a 5th generation agnostic has got some advantages- I’ve never gotten up before noon on a sunday- but the lack of religious structure means you’ve gotta DIY your holiday rituals sometimes. We were used to applying this to Agnosticmas already and were willing to build Thanksgiving 2.0 (now with 200% less revisionist history!) if necessary.
“Like what? Decorations?”
“Yeah, food, decorations, party games, things like that. Bobby seems game to do his Pregnant Turkey every year, so that’s one down. Now all we need is some festive decorations and a party game and we’ll have a real traditional holiday.”
“Hand turkeys?” Suggested my sister.
“We still have pumpkins we didn’t carve at Halloween, we could make a turkey out of those?” Said cousin Sam.
“Oh yeah with the decorative gourds in the hallway- the long one is the neck and- do we have corn for the tail?” I said, missing art class and feeling entirely too overconfident in my ability to handle knives. Thusly, everyone under 40 went off to the garage to create a Squash facsimile of Ohio’s Most Murderous Avian.
We were doing pretty good for most of it- there was the initial debate as to whether the mock-turkey was going to be cooked or still kicking, but that was quickly settled by the locating of a spectacularly ugly nobbly gourd to be it’s head, but then JohnJack brought up an important point:
“Are we going to be putting a candle in this like a jack-o-lantern?”
We all paused, staring at the half-gutted pumpkin we’d started disemboweling on instinct like a horde of overexcited serial killers.
“I mean, we’re definitely setting him on fire eventually.” I said like a sane and rational person that should definitely be holding an eight-inch knife. “But I think the corn leaves would catch so we probably shouldn’t do that inside. We’ll set it on fire AFTER the meal, as a sacrifice to harvest gods.”
“That sounds reasonable.” Said cousin Sam, up to her elbows in pumpkin guts like another sane and reasonable person who should be allowed to have knives.
“What are we going to call him?” Asked my sister, shovelling the rest of pumpkin guts out like the only responsible adult in the room.
“Bob.” Said Sam.
“Your brother is named JohnJack because you guys named literally every dude Bob for like eight generations there, are you really going to start that up again?” Said my sister.
“Slagthor the Annihilator.” Suggested JohnJack.
“MUCH BETTER.” we all agreed, and set about the complicated technical challenge of getting his head to stay on securely enough to last through dinner.
Slagthor turned into a thing of beauty and terror- he had a resplendent tail of multicolored corn cobs and leaves, wings carved from the sides of the pumpkin and carefully offset and filled in with corn leaves, a long goose-gourd for his neck and some hideous knobbly thing for his face, the twisted stem a menacing beak. We even got him to stand with creative use of aluminum wire left on the garage workbench and another pair of drumstick-shaped gourds. The effect was completed by a pair of sunglasses balanced carefully on his stem-beak, giving him a fun, 90’s-radical kind of look. He was greeted with many oohs and Ahs and genuine surprise that none of us had lost a finger making him.
“It’s a Thanksgiving miracle!” Mom declared.
Things were feeling chill, feeling fun now, and we sat down to dinner under the watchful bespectacled gaze of Slagthor, who had been put up on the mantle as master of ceremonies. Everyone went around the table and said what they were thankful for- being able to gather, the time we had together, that the turkey didn’t catch in the smoker this year- and we sat down to what was a pleasant dining experience until about two glasses of wine in, when in the middle of an unrelated conversation on raised garden beds and rabbit control, Aunt Sue opened her mouth:
“-And Osama Bin Laden’s death was a Hoax!”
The conversation came to a sudden halt and there was a collective spiritual groan at the table, as everyone tried to avoid eye contact with her. Cousin JohnJack got up from the table in disgust.
“I saw the maps! Abbottabad is nowhere NEAR the ocean!”
Her mother, unfortunately, took the bait.
“Sue, the navy has helicopters, they don’t need to take the boat everywhere.”
“They couldn’t drive a helicopter with their flippers!” said Sue excitedly now that someone was engaging with her.
“They wouldn’t need Scuba gear in the desert Sue.” Said Uncle Bobby, taking up the fight since she wasn’t going to shut up about this.
“Why would a Seal need Scuba gear?” She said.
There was a long minute of confused silence as we tried to puzzle that out. I recused myself immediately and continued eating twice-baked potato.
“Sue…” My father said cautiously, having stumbled upon her line of reasoning. “SEAL is an acronym for Sea,Air, Land. They’re human men, not trained seals.”
“No, the navy trains animals to do things underwater, they have dolphins that find bombs!” She argued.
“That was a TV show, Sue.” he said gently. “Flipper wasn’t real.”
Sue faltered, opening and closing her mouth like a confused grouper. “It-it-!” She stammered, scrambling for another theory to satisfy herself.
“Hey can we clear up so we can set Slagthor on fire before it starts snowing?” I said, which gave everyone a nice out.
We gathered in the front yard, dressed like michelin men to ward off the late-november cold, and set Slagthor atop the stump Uncle Bobby had failed to dynamite out the year before. We gathered around as Johnjack carefully lit his tail, then watched in confusion as he sprinted back towards the house. The more mentally adept members of the family started sprinting as well.
“Why are you all standing there?” he asked from the porch.
“It’s cold and we want to be near the fire, why are you running?” Asked Aunt Stephanie.
“We’re destroying him, so-”
JohnJack was interrupted by Slagthor suddenly and violently exploding, flaming cobs of corn and miniature gourds flying in all directions and the pumpkin amplifying the sound of the roman candle inside to a deafening roar. The family scattered, taking whatever cover was available- cars, snow drifts and shrubbery alike. It took a good three minutes for Slagthor to stop exploding, reduced to a charred ring of squash and flaming pieces of produce scattered about the front lawn. In the distance, sirens began to wail.
“- SoI stuffed him full of fireworks.” He explained.
We all glared at him from our various partial covers.
“I shoulda said that earlier, right?”
“Yes JohnJack, You get to clean him up.”
And thusly, the family thanksgiving 2.0’s traditions are set: the Pregnant Turkey, The telling and defending of the wildest conspiriacies we can think of, and the creation and destruction of a produce turkey.
This year I’m planning on “The earth isn’t a ball OR flat, it’s actually shaped like a donut, with the equator on the outside and the poles in the middle. The moon is the donut hole.” and putting Slagthor the Harvest Turkey out on a float so he explodes in the lake like a particularly dramatic viking funeral.
If you enjoyed this story, please consider donating to my Ko-Fi or PayPal, as this is my primary source of income. Thank you!

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was looking back for a cute photo i have of Little Bird in a cat bed by Charlie but instead I found this menacing photo @gallusrostromegalus took of LB in the middle of the night