Thanksgiving excitement.

This year I'm really looking forward to Thanksgiving, quite unexpectedly so.

Usually I don't do anything or I go over to a friend's, but last week the resthome announced to us out-of-the-blue that they were giving us a turkey and sides as a thank-you, and to keep us from going out to stores during such a busy time of year.

So, I'm going to make it up at my one assisted living client's with disabilities, and then leave some leftovers there for her and her sister and her partner!

Usually they'd go to their aunt's, but that's cancelled this year, and she knows how to cook a turkey but can't really do it anymore or at least right now, given her condition, and her (lesbian) sister and her partner aren't good with cooking like that and don't want to risk trying to make a turkey.

Before this her (lesbian) sister was thinking that she'd just make a green bean casserole for her and her partner on Thursday and then bring some leftovers over for my client the next day, and she's still going to do that, but now there will be a turkey, too!

It was exciting to read about turkey preparation, and I'm going to chunk up vegetables and put them on the bottom of a cookie tray and lay the turkey on that, and I'll use the drippings to make gravy and maybe add it into the instant stuffing that the resthome gave us, too.

I also read up on sweet potatoes, and I'm going to make some mashed sweet potatoes with some brown sugar added in.

I'm also also going to use an oil rub and butter pats and some strips of bacon fat laid on top of the turkey to keep the turkey breast nice and moist while it cooks.

It was so much fun to chit-chat about prep and cooking techniques and ideas with my client, and she told me about how years ago she made up her first turkey ever and accidentally baked it upside down, only to have it come out with the white meat so incredibly moist, since all the fat ran down in the bird and settled in the white meat parts that are usually sitting out on top.

Years later, too, she saw some chef on TV or read about it or something like that, and they recommended doing just what she did.

"I guess I was ahead of my time," she was like.

Since her cat also now follows me around the apartment if I have a treat in my hand and will lean up on things in order to get the treat if I set the treat down on something, I joked that I could also set a cat treat on the oven when I go to open up the turkey to check on it on Thursday, and then BOOM close the oven door real quick...

(I also joked when I was behind the kitchen counter that has an overhang on the other side that extends out over the litterbox, and when her cat was using it, that I could start thumping my hands up and down on the counter real quick, to see what the cat does. "Oh no!", she was like, "The poor thing will never come out again," and I was like, "But it will teach her important lessons, about surviving in the wild." Later that night, even though I didn't do that, she thought she saw cat turds on the floor, but it was actually a couple of dryer lint pieces that had somehow ended up there after I'd done the laundry earlier that night.)

It really is such a ray of light in an awful year, especially since we had our first resident death last week, someone who was in their 90s and got it from a private caregiver who was in their apartment a lot and was asymptomatic.