Giving Thanks!!!

So my Thanksgiving was awesome this year. It's probably against the rules of life to have an awful thanksgiving, but you never know. I'm grateful mine are rad (haha).

This year I headed down to Heritage Halls to have Thanksgiving dinner with my pal Nicole, she's a freshman this year, and I know her through her older brother Jimmy--who coincidentally I also had Thanksgiving dinner with my freshman year a couple of years ago. :) That one was a great time, and I figured if it ain't broke, don't fix it, so I was all up for another thanksgiving dinner in the dorms.

We, meaning mostly Nicole and a little bit of I, cooked the turkey. Nicole has some amazing neighbors who let us have a turkeybag to help out, and she was actually the one to rinse out the turkey and prepare it to be put in the oven. You can see this documented really well on facebook, if you've got time. She also had some fascination with the neck of the turkey, so we shoved that in the bag too, but I want to make clear that was all Nicole's doing. I was grossed out by it, and Nicole's roommate Genevieve said she was almost going to throw up. We listened to a lot of great Veggietales tunes while cooking too, I also highly recommend the "Barbara Manatee" part of the photo album. It's very true-to-life. It's awesome to have friends who have good taste in music. And by "good taste in music" I do specifically mean "love to sing along with/act out Veggietales."

I made the potatoes, and having asked my good friend Seth for the most amazing recipe ever. He had some pretty specific instructions like "boil until you stick a fork in them and pieces fall off" and other more hilarious oddities. I would like to state that I followed them to a T. Also very well documented on facebook. To get the full experience you totally have to listen to "Hooked on a Feeling." HIGHLY reccomend it.

Overall we had a great time. The food was amazing for a couple of college kids. I was really proud of us.

Turkey
Gravy
Mashed Potatoes
Bread and Butter
Grapes
Salad
Kiwis
Cinnamon Rolls! (not pictured)

we realized the only thing we were missing was pie, but also I didn't miss that "I'm going to explode out of my waistband" feeling. Although that is kind of traditional.

It was a great experience. Nicole carved the Turkey b/c let's face it: she's Nicole, she runs the show. That, and I remembered when I had Thanksgiving with Jimmy it was him and me and two other girls, so we made him cut the turkey because he was a man. So I'm a little sentimental about the Gillie-ness. *shrug*

I helped clean up, then exscused myself politely because I wanted some Betsy time. And I spent the rest of the night alone, which sounds sad, but really isn't very much. I recorded myself reading a chapter of Ella Enchanted--one of my favorite activities, and it made me very happy. I don't know why I love to narrate, but I do. And as I've done it more often, I've gotten a little pickier with how I record things. There was this one passage I couldn't get just right, and I had to splice it, and tape over it a few times before I was satisified. And Ella Enchanted is without a doubt my favorite book ever. I really enjoyed it. Then I watched Pride and Prejudice (the new one) because I was in the mood for some lush orchestrations and sweeping landscapes, and as reading Ella had already made me eager for a spunky female protaganist, it was a good fit.

It was, without a doubt, a great Thanksgiving.

p.s. Thought: I am also really grateful for my family. I'm not super close to a lot of my family, I mean, I love them and all, but we're not BFF's. But I am really grateful for my relationship with my Dad. Nicole has this picture of me starting to scrub potatoes while I'm on the phone with him, because I had talked mostly with Mom, and then she handed off the phone to him, and when I'm on the phone with Dad, mostly he asks about the boys in my life (none really, presently) and then he proceeds to tell me the local ward news in Green Bay. I think I'm a lot more like my Dad than any body else in my family, which is why we get along so well.