Happy pending Thanksgiving.  Hopefully everybody loaded their freezers with $0.69 turkeys that will invariably stay there until next year.  (Or the year after, or the year after…)

We got a bit of an early start on that weekend.  We actually went out Thursday night for a great dinner at Marina Grog & Galley.  We met Donette’s parents out there to celebrate their 52nd anniversary.  (Congrats!)  Aside from a long drive there and back it was a fantastic meal.  I had a ribeye myself, which was perfectly cooked;  No doubt the best steak I’ve had in a long time.  If I was ordering again I would have chosen a baked potato over the rice, but I was trying to be healthy.  (Which NEVER pays off, especially when you consider I was already tackling a 14 oz. ribeye.  Would a big buttery potato really have made that much difference at that point?)  Anyway, we’ll be going back sometime in the future.  It’s definitely in the “special occasion only” range for us price-wise, but another one will come up sooner or later I’m sure.

Friday we got back into our rut down at the good ol’ Brooksider.  The Group sorta threw me off by sitting outside though;  They are generally a fair-weather group.  I wasn’t really dressed warm enough for patio-sitting, but they cranked up the heaters and it was tolerable.  We stayed a bit longer than usual too.  There was some sort of MMA-related event going on inside so we stuck around and watched it.  I don’t really know what it was, or how to describe it.  They called it a “weigh-in” but there was no scale involved.  Who knows.  It was a spectacle to be sure, and we love a good spectacle as much as the next person.

Saturday I crossed The River for the second time in as many weeks.  Getting a little wacky to be sure.  Martin had generously offered to fire up the smoker(s) again and sent out an email to the world in case anybody wanted to smoke up some holiday fare.  It turned out to be quite a popular offering too.  For my part, I had a nice brisket to do which will be going out to Mom’s this Thursday.  There were also 6 turkeys, 8 slabs of ribs, 4 other briskets, and two pork butts.  Wow.  Yeah the smokers were full.  They are big though, so there was plenty of room.

We stayed the night up at Martin’s, sort of like a little mini-vacation.  If you’re going to drive that far, might as well make it worth the while.  We had a lot to do Sunday though so we got up and scampered back across the river bright and early.  As it turned out, “a lot to do” turned into reading the paper, watching football, and surfing the Web all day.  We did take a brief foray up to the gym but it was a rather lackadaisical effort.  We made a weak attempt at working out, then sat in the hot tub for the better part of an hour.  Hey, we can still say “We went to the gym this weekend.”