Thanksgiving...

I now have a much better appreciation for all the Thanksgiving meals that I have enjoyed at other peoples houses. After years of being spoiled by the wonderful cooking of all my fabulous relatives and friends, I decided it was time that I held a proper Thanksgiving feast for other people. This idea led me to host a Thanksgiving dinner for some neighborhood friends this past week. I must say that it is a little more difficult to celebrate Thanksgiving here since we still have work, school and after school activities on Thanksgiving Day and the day after.

The run up to our Thanksgiving dinner was a test of our organizational skills. If I did not have my dear friend Michele Bote to help me every step of the way, I am pretty sure I would not have been able to pull it off. In fact, if you read her blog, Michele's cycling blog noted under "My favorite Blogs", you will find her own account of her Thanksgiving week here. We did our best to pack in as many site-seeing trips as possible in between our cooking sessions. However, time was against us since I had to pick up the kids from school at 3:00pm each day.

Despite the fact that we were spreading ourselves thin trying to see the sites, fit in bike spinning classes, and eat meals other than the big one we were trying to prepare, Michele and I managed to present a lovely feast to our guests from England. They were all gracious and enthusiastic about our tradition and made the day even more special.

For our dinner we smoked a 20 lb. turkey on a Weber along with as many traditional dishes as we could create. This included sweet potatoes, stuffing, oyster dressing, green beans with bacon, cranberry relish, a big salad and mashed potatoes with gravy. We had pumpkin pies and apple pies for dessert after which we all had to roll ourselves out of our chairs.

The hardest part of our wonderful feast was the next day when everyone had to get up and go to work and school. Because it was a workday, our Thanksgiving meal did not commence until 6:00pm. After a late evening on Thursday, all I wanted to do was curl up under a blanket and do nothing on Friday. However, when I showed up at the school grounds Friday morning to drop the kids off, I was greeted with wide smiles from all my guests who expressed their great hope that I would host Thanksgiving again next year.

The rising and setting of the sun...

Our clocks turned back from BST (British Summer Time) on Sunday, October 28. The main reasons given for the use of summer time are the saving in power given by the longer hours of daylight in the evenings and the increased useful daylight leisure time available to those who work. This differs from the US where (starting in 2007) the time change does not take effect until 2 AM. on the first Sunday in November. This is a change from past years due to the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Now the US time changes are different that the rest of the world. When the US time changed prior the the UK back in March 2007, I remember hearing a great deal of concern, voiced particularly by the financial markets, that the time difference will create problems.


The reason the US opted for a longer period of daylight savings was stated by the authors of the
Energy Policy Act of 2005. The amendment to shorten the winter, lengthen the summer and save energy by extending daylight saving time by at least four weeks, was, proponents claimed, going to save "the equivalent of" 10,000 barrels of oil per day. It remains to be seen how much energy will actually by saved, but hopefully the US will actually "save" that much oil, not simply put it to use in some other mode.

I have not quite adjusted to our time change here. The sun rose at 7:05 AM this morning and will set at 4:20 PM. I have been scrambling to get dinner on the table, thinking that it is later than it is with the darkness closing in on us so quickly at night. By November 30, the sun will rise at 7:42 AM and set at 3:56 PM and by December 22 (the shortest day of the year), we will only enjoy a mere 7 hours 50 minutes of daylight when the sun rises at 8:04 AM and sets at 3:54 PM. At the rate I am going now, by December we will be eating dinner at 4:30 PM and be in bed by 7:00 PM! I am sure I will adapt, but I don't think I will ever quite get adjusted to quickened pace of the setting sun here in the UK.