It’s the end of week nineteen, our Twenty-Fourth Anniversary, and our Annual Turkey Soup and Christmas Decorating Day!

We’ll start with the end of Week Nineteen: We made it through Thanksgiving and still managed to lose a pound and a half! That is saying something because we had a lot of really good food, yesterday. Or, rather, we had a really good variety of some really good foods, yesterday. We both ate our fill – but didn’t gorge! I had cheesecake and apple pie but passed on the cookies and candies. Victor did the same. Those little things are making a difference!

We made it to the gym this morning for our normal Friday torture session and then we started our Day After Thanksgiving Turkey Soup and Decorate-a-Thon! This is definitely one of my more fun traditions – but my back is sore as hell as I write this! It’s a combination of getting beat up at the gym and then bringing twenty-something bins of decorations up from the basement, standing, bending, stretching… Bringing empty bins back down to the basement… Of course, old age has nothing to do with it…

We ended up with two turkey carcasses, so I made a really big batch of stock – and then a smaller pot of soup. The stock was the carcasses, onions, garlic, bay leaves, salt, pepper, poultry seasoning, carrots, celery, and leeks – roughly chopped, nothing peeled – leftover gravy… all into a big pot filled with cold water and then slow-boiled for about six hours.

The soup was the stock, celery, potatoes, carrots, turkey, and frozen mixed vegetables. Simplicity. There is so much stock and so little freezer space that I’m going to make another small batch of soup tomorrow that we can have for lunches.

And then there’s the Anniversary! Twenty-four fun-filled years. The things we have done in 24 years boggles the mind – and there are still a ton of things on the horizon. We’re going to celebrate at Niagara Falls in 10 days. We were there in the summer, but now I have to get Victor there in the snow. By train! It’s really beautiful in the winter, and there’s a huge Festival of Lights that will be fun to see. We’re also thinking our twenty-fifth will be warmer climes… Maybe Kaua’i. Next year our anniversary will be the weekend before Thanksgiving, so we could do the islands and then do Thanksgiving with my family on the west coast! It would be win-win!

In the meantime, it’s time to take a couple of aspirin and relax. There’s still more decorating to do, tomorrow!