The First Thanksgiving...

In our house, at any rate, and our first hosted Thanksgiving as well. We were lucky to have four guests come to celebrate with us; Mike's dad, Rick, his fiancee, Joann, his aunt Christina, and her girlfriend, Kim. Rick and Joann arrived around noon on Wednesday in the midst of a steady rain that continued the rest of the day. We spent the rest of the day prepping for Thanksgiving, mostly.

See...here I am working on the rolls ... I swear, there are more pictures of me cooking than I've ever had taken before!


I think we got the turkey in the oven around 10:30a(after a late breafast) ...that was one BIG turkey!



After that it was final prep time - peeling potatoes, setting the table, and putting out the snacks.





Christina and Kim arrived around 1pm Thanksgiving day, and shortly thereafter a pinball tournament commenced! Christina's the one getting some hip action into her play, and Kim's watching for pointers :)



The turkey arrived fashionably late(about an hour and a half!) and we finally got to sit down to eat! It was a good thing we put our so many snacks, or else the natives would have gotten even more restless than they did. The dishes were set out on the table, the turkey carved, and then we finally got to dig in.



Wouldn't you know it but all that work just tired us all out! Just about everyone crashed fairly early, appetites sated, and all the cooking even wore out the dog ;)



Happy belated Thanksgiving, All!!

And so it's done...

Well, the deed has been done. Turk was butchered this morning, and, thankfully, it wasn't as bad as I had expected. We dropped her off around 8:15, and went off to have a cup of coffee courtesy of the gentleman doing the deed. Apparently he has a deal with a restaurant owner in town for when people like us come in from out of town to have him process poultry. So, we passed an hour and a half, and when we returned, our turkey was ready to go. She dressed out at 24 pounds!! Mike was thinking she'd finish out at somewhere around 16, and I was expecting 20ish.

So, we have a HUGE turkey for Thanksgiving....I think I need more company ;) But, it's definitely doubtful that we'd raise our own turkey again. However, the area that we went to was absolutely breathtaking. Who knew that the Attica prison would be in such a picturesque setting. We both were wishing we had brought a camera, as the leaves were showing the most phenomal colors, and I wish we'd gotten a picture of the prison, with its casilated turrets and copper peaks and weathervanes.

Tomorrow we're off to my mom's to cut firewood and attend the haunted hayride that my aunt does every year. We'll take our dog with us(he loves going to Gramma's) and we'll let the chickens out before we leave.

Oh! The chickens...I almost forgot. We are getting an amazing number of eggs from them. We have six Buckeyes and nine Easter Eggers, and have been getting at least ten eggs a day from the group, with the last few days seeing daily totals of 13 and 14. We are definitely getting buried in eggs! We're taking a dozen to my aunt, and two dozen to my grandmother, hopefully that will have us at a little more manageable level. We met our local mechanic, and he helped Mike get the exhaust pipe tweaked to where it needed to be for free, so I took a dozen down to him yesterday. He seemed to appreciate the return of generosity and is definitely a character.

A Beginning....and an End...

Well, I never thought I'd do a blog, but, what the hell, right? So, here I am, with my own little place of the web to just ramble and ramble and ramble....scary thought, isn't it? But, hopefully, this will help me keep friends and family up to date on the goings on, and perhaps help me keep track of what day of the week I'm on! I'll probably post fairly frequently to start, just to update everyone, and then just do once or twice a week...unless things really get crazy! But, I think my first real one will be on just one subject...

Tomorrow is the day we take the turkey to the butcher. On April 3rd of this year, along with our shipment of chicks, we got 8 small turkey poults. Why? Because coworkers who had discovered we raised our own chickens for eggs and meat asked if we would raise turkeys for them. Well, we were interested in doing so for ourselves, and so we took the plunge.

Curious, striped, and social, they fascinated us with their little personalities. We lost one within the first 24 hours, to a chill, and another in 48. Four days later we lost a third. Raising turkeys was proving to be a great deal more challenging than chickens.

But, after than, things settled down, and soon we were moving them out to the chicken house. A few weeks of brooding saw us lose yet another to a chill when we had a cold snap, and we were lucky not to lose more. And so we were down to four. By this time we were fairly certain we would not try raising turkeys again. The weather warmed, and as the grass sprung up we created a yard for the poults and chicks to venture into.


And they grew...and grew...and grew. We lost one after three months, then the heat wave in July took another two. And so we were left with one. We had determined not to name the turkeys, make the butchering too hard, but soon the last turkey, a hen, became TurkTurk. She followed us like a dog around the yard, came running when called, and pipped happily when we came to visit. It wasn't long before we knew that butchering Turk was going to be very, very, hard. She made the trip from Southern Ohio to our new home south of Buffalo safely and well, and willingly made her home with the chickens in the old garage in the back of our property.


And so...we finally realized that there was no way we could do the deed ourselves. After five months, a roadtrip, and Mike having to nurse her back to health after the heat took her two comrades, we finally were honest and decided to look for someone who would do it for us. It took a while, but finally after giving our number to someone, who gave it to someone, who posted here and there that we were looking, we found a gentleman who butchers poultry on the side. And the day has arrived.

Tomorrow morning, Mike and I will get up, and settle Turk into a box for the trip. About a week and a half ago, while trying to keep up with her chickens, she hurt her left leg. We think it probably is just the toe, but since then she's been pretty well confining herself to the chicken house. The fact that she's not happily tooling around the yard has made the necessity of the trip tomorrow easier to bear. We can't stand to see her unhappy.

So, that's what we're doing tomorrow. I've taken the day off so that both of us can go, both to make it easier on both of us to have company, and as a tribute to a bird who's come close to being a pet.

We'll never raise turkeys again. But we will make sure to give her the honor she deserves, as the turkey, truly, is a noble bird.