Happy Thanksgiving, 2016

Happy Thanksgiving to all our furnends, far and wide!

We hope you all have had a wonderful day of thanks. Being thankful, giving thanks and letting others know all about your state of thankfulness. When you give thanks for each blessing, small as they might be, it promotes a spirit of well being and a lot of times the bitterness you may harbor in your heart will melt away if thankfulness takes over. Because when you are thankful, there is no room for greed, or envy or bitterness at circumstances.
Each new day is a blessing, in fact each breath is! Bad things may happen, even horrible ones, but we must not let those quench our ability to still give thanks for the blessings we have. When petcretary was very ill and undergoing her chemo treatments, she could have moped around at home or felt sorry for herself. But she thanked God for allowing her to be used even by this nasty cancer in her body to show thankfulness and a cheerful spirit to others. Some fellow chemo takers asked her how she could smile and greet all who she would go to (walking from room to room to say hello and chat a bit with other fellow patients)...but it is not like petcretary to just sit and let be...so she spread her own form of sunshine to others, just by saying hello. One lady told the nurse who told petcretary, "that lady came in my room and smiled and chatted with me and I don't even know who she is! And she has come to see me each time we are here on the same days..."
Petcretary will often start a conversation with strangers in the grocery checkout lanes. Why waste a moment that can be used to bring cheer into someone;s life just by chatting with them. Sometimes its about pets, because she sees doggy or kitty things in their carts. 
So now that  is illness all behind her and how thankful she is that she doesn't have to be doing that at the moment...she spends some of her time working hard at the nursing home and spreading her cheer and smiles there. Even as she labors, because smiles are free and don't have to be carried in bags or pockets. Nope! She loves to make others smile too, so...she will dig out her silly Christmas socks and show them to any who might be willing to look down at her feet, MOL! She will also wear silly head gear on Christmas weekend...OMC! You betcha the residents will grin:)
This is how she will deal with the fact that she has to work those two days, even though she worked them last year too...sigh...oh well...she might get a free dinner out of it too!

Wow, how she has babbled on with her thoughts...

Well, last night the unfurbros arrived here. Dog-guy barked with happy glee and his grin was there for boss boy to enjoy. He mostly keeps his grins in short supply even though he is a happy pup! And we kitties had two more warm laps to choose from!

One came from 49 miles in the rain and fog, the other came from 26 miles in heavy rain. From the east and from the west they came, MOL! At least they were thankful they did not have to deal with snow or ice.

Pawppy came home form work.
Happy we were to be a complete family once again. Petcretary was busy in the kitchen getting things started for today, Thanksgiving.

But wait. Pawppy went downstairs to get something, and he came back up and said, wow the rain is making puddles down there! What???!! All we had was drizzle. Petcretary goes down there to check it out...and nope it was not from a leaky foundation (we have a boulder foundation, common here in old dens, and sometimes they may leak if the rain is hard enough. such is the fun of a 'Michigan' cellar). The water pump  was having a trouble. The pipe from the well where it attaches to the pump is leaking...about a drop per second. Yikes!! Shoot, its Wednesday night, late, and today is a holiday. Good perfect timing. OMD! So its pail under the pipe to catch some of the drips, and bring the pail upstairs to dump it out, cause there is no sink/tub down there...and don't forget to put on your hip waders so that your feet stay dry...and of course our extra fridge is down there...way on the other side, so we have to trudge through the whole wet mess to get to it...sheesh...what else could go wrong.

The plumbers we use are not answering their calls, or returning them. We sure hope they do on Friday. Black Friday, we shall rename it FunkyFriday. Because the wet floor down there smells funky! MOL!

So we just turn off the well water supply and its power when we go to bed and or leave the den. And we are thankful the pump itself is OK, and that the whole basement did not become a pond...yet...

Today petcretary and furmily all went to Church early in the morning. We always have a service on Thanksgiving Day. To thank God for all His blessings and to praise Him for them too.

Then when we came back, petcretary about had a whole box of baking things stored up high, come down on her head...it was like an avalanch of clattering pans, OMC!! Tomorrow that will be funny but today it was just annoying.

Then she wanted to get something to bake the stuffing in, and that pan was stuck behind another thing in the cupboard, it took way too long...but she got it out. Later she almost broke another glass baking pan in the same cupboard when she wanted to get out the mixer to make whipping cream...did we evfur tell you our den is not big, and the kitchen is teeny tiny! BOL! But she did bake her stuffing, we got to eat  turkey, the roasting tin for the turkey did not squish when it fell off the shelf, and the whipping cream was yummy! She made a spicy cranberry chutney (Ground raw ingredients including jalapeno peppers) and it was deemed purrfect by the menfolk, but petcretary needed a watering can to put out the fire in her mouth. She made a note in her cookbook to make two batches next time...one as written and one with 1/4 the zing added, MOL!
Next problem arrived. She could not find the recipe she wanted to use for her apple pie. Not the filling but the crust. hard to find cause its a paleo crust. So she made a crumble topping instead,OMC! It was crumbly all right...but it did not brown up and the rest of the pie was more than done. Ah well, dog-guy helped with some of that topping...thankfully the pumpkin pie was great! It too was paleo. No grains, and no refined artificial anything. Except petcretary cheated by using canned pumpkin instead of baking a real one. She has done that but its a lot of work and messy, too. Dog-guy was lurking to get his share of the pumpkin lickings before it went into the pieshell, BOL!

Then the time came to take the turkey out of the oven. Ahhh, what a yummy aroma. Pipo and Minko came by to check it out and so did dog-guy. Dog-guy gave up and went to his bed to take a nap. Minko and Pipo were given a teeny bit of white meat...they both sniffed it and stalked off...hey, its good! You kitties are silly!
So the table was set, and the trimmings were there...and the turkey was about to be carved. OK. That is a petcretary job here because pawppy swears he cannot do that very well. Hmmm...that may change...petcretary began that chore and all of a sudden the platter she was putting the meat on, became unbalanced and several pieces of succulent turkey slid off onto the kitchen floor...dog-guy was right there because he heard her shriek. Nothing worse for a pup than all kinds of turkey parts, esp the drumstick he wanted to snag...whoops! OMD:(

So boss boy put MJF on the leash and led him away...and petcretary cleaned up the mess. When the mess was gone, dog-guy returned and began his own cleanup...he licked the floor! Wow, we should give him a job! BOL! Or teach petcretary how to get turkey smells off the floor in a better way, MOL!

Well, soon the peeps were all sitting down. A blessing and a prayer of thanks was given and they began to eat. Then unfur-the-younger spilled his wine(Its OK he is 24...)...sheesh, will it evfur stop!?!

When it was time for dessert, out came the pies! But wait, petcretary had forgotten to make the whipping cream! OMD! So she put on her galoshes and went through the miry mess downstairs...bailed the water into the pail, got the whipping cream and looked to get out the mixer...but it was stuck. Some not thankful HBO words were muttered and soon that mixer did its work. Yummy whipped cream.
Cut the pies...and when it was time to clean up, petcretary saw she had cut right through one of the pie plates!  Oopsie! Good thing it was not directly in the table cloth...so she gave thanks for that small mercy.

And now its time to say goodnight.

Oh yes, the unfurbros are driving to Canada tomorrow to get new Canadian passport pictures taken...the US passport picture takers just do not get it, that they standards are not the same...pray for travel mercies...and a good border crossing...this day of avarice & greed in the retail world may make the border crossing very busy and tedious. Petcretary just hopes they remember to take their US passports or enhanced license with them...

Pipo & Minko hope you all had a thankful and blessed Thanksgiving. MJF woofs the same sentiment. And Calamity Jane...wait, Petcretary also wishes that you all enjoyed this special day. She is thankful that Turkey  dinner like this is mostly only served once a year!! And now she just sees that she forgot to put the leftover wine in the fridge...she had better or else there might be three drunken furs here in the morning...tee-hee!!!

((Sorry Tabbies that we dragged on and on about burdie things today...))

Just think of all the fun she will have telling these tails to her residents when she goes back to work!!! Are you smiling too:))