Thanksgiving plans and pumpkins

 Handsome Son visited yesterday with groceries, and we continued talking about how to do a safe Thanksgiving meal.  I'm a bit hazy on safety of food sharing from a common dish at this point, so we're thinking he will pick up individual prepared foods, ready to reheat, at the store where he works, so that will be minimal contact, but we can sit at either end of the table.  He estimates it at six feet distance, so that will work. One Christmas when I was too sick to cook, he picked up a lovely meal, first course crab stuffed flounder, next cooked turkey with some veg, forget what, and pie.  It was great, what I could eat of it.  So we're thinking of a version of that, for different reasons, we're both hoping to be well then.

When he visits and I serve him tea and a snack, I'm gloved handling his food, and we have separate teapots, milk, etc.  I also wash my hands before gloving them.

So yesterday we had the Victory Cookie and icecream.  They had to be separate because the cookie is crisp enough you need to pick it up to eat it. But we bravely managed anyway.  Handsome Son liked it enough to do this whole thing a second time.  And now he thinks it would make a great Thanksgiving dessert.  Fine by me.  One issue solved.  He really enjoyed this. And texted me this morning to say he's still recovering from the sugar overload!

Then, while we were in this high level conference, next door neighbor opens the front door, calls out here's the pumpkin I promised, and leaves this in the hallway for me.

This is part of the Pumpkin Exchange Program.  He doesn't like pumpkin, loves the seeds.  I don't like the seeds, like the pumpkin.  So when I had my mini pumpkin I washed and dried and gave him the seeds.  He's removed the seeds from this much bigger one, and it's now mine to cook.

It's better for soup or maybe cake than pie, not really a pie pumpkin.  And it's in the oven now roasting happily away for the moment.  I looked up recipes for roasting pumpkin, mainly to find out the oven setting, and found a major problem in all of them:  they all say to cut it down first.  But here's the thing: I can't possibly get a knife through this behemoth. I need to roast it in order to cut into it.  So I just went on in the way I think might work. 350F for and hour and 20 minutes. Since it's already empty, this will be an easy job to peel and dice. I'll let you know how this works out.  It's on the last 20 minutes now.

Beautiful weather suddenly, in the 70s.  I was sitting out reading yesterday afternoon.  So, the allergies made a brief reappearance in the middle of the night, had to get up and attend to my eye.  Better today. It's such a treat, though to be able to be out without a coat, if only for a few days.  Lovely walking, too.

New alarms about the GOP admin refusing to release funding for Biden's transition team.  This may be another, yet another, court case. She's claiming the final vote is not yet official. Except that every state with a complete count has called it officially. But I really won't be alarmed about this.  There will be a lot of deliberate obstruction, and we will have to overcome it.  Kamala is a topflight lawyer, she will know exactly the remedies.  And there's ACLU which has done wonderful work through this whole period.

Meanwhile, Biden's already assembling his Covid team for planning to handle the virus. A real team, this time, with doctors and epidemiologists and people who know what they're doing. So I'll try to leave it to them to worry about!

Today is walking and spinning and just enjoying the day.  Seize the day, as they say.  Carpe diem. Which does not mean carp all day long.