Wednesday December 29th to Friday December 31st, 2010

Wednesday December 29th to Friday December 31st, 2010

Up bright and early (well for me early, I got up at 9:30) to get ready for our Bad Santa Party. Now, if anyone doesn’t know what Bad Santa is I will tell you, it is a movie with Billy Bob Thornton being a really, really, really bad Santa Claus. He curses the kids, drinks to way excess and robs the stores he is hired in on the 24th, he has a mini person accomplice playing his elf…………anyway the movie is so bad it’s kinda funny! Sue and Harold have wanted us to have a movie night to watch this movie and since it is Christmas and Ross and I have been craving turkey we thought we would have a small party, buy a turkey and watch the movie. Well, the small party turned into I think 15 people (I can’t remember if I counted Ross and I in that total or not), so we got a fairly large turkey. I prepared the stuffing and was ready to stuff the bird when Ross opened the wrapping on the turkey and guess what??? The skin was already brown………………we bought a smoked turkey!!! How do you stuff an already cooked bird…………….will it taste the same????????????? Ross went back to Mega, at my request, to see if they had a regular thawed turkey that I could cook instead, well, I guess smoked turkey is all the rage here in Mexico cause Mega and Walmart didn’t have any regular turkeys. Once I settled down (from pulling my hair out) I decided to go with what we had, and cross our fingers it would be ok, what else could I do? I stuffed the cavity of (oh my god……..we forgot to name the turkey, that is kinda a thing I started a long time ago, I will call him Smoky), and we put Smoky in our big roaster we brought down with us as to keep Smoky warm as he was already thawed and we didn’t want to poison anyone!!!

All in all the meal was ok, I am not really impressed with the flavor of smoked turkey but it was very juicy and the rest of the meal turned out well. I had sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, broccoli, Sue’s church corn, of course cranberry sauce, wild rice (and people loved it), stuffing and unfortunately we had to buy gravy, which actually wasn’t bad. We found some really good polish sausage here with little bits of jalapeño in it; we cut that up and had some cheddar cheese with Ritz crackers for nibblies. Roxana brought over a wonderful cold noodle salad (which was good because I forgot all about having a salad) and both Dick and Mary Carmen and Ronnie and Tony brought over cake for dessert!

We ate then watched the movie outside with the projector then chatted for a while before everyone left stuffed and happy……..at least I think so! We will have to make this an annual event, so watch for Bad Santa party number 2 at the end of 2011!
Thursday was our holiday party with the Beta Sigma Phi sisters; we had it at Karen King’s house, which happens to be in Los Mangos, a really nice gated community about a block from our house (as the crow flies). We had to bring our secret sister gift (I didn’t have a secret sister as I had just joined, but I have one now!) and a white elephant gift. After our meeting we had a beautiful buffet of appetizers everyone brought, wow, it was pretty awesome, food galore! We exchanged the secret sister gifts then the fun began. We put all the white elephant gifts (these are things you find in your home that either you don’t want anymore or think another person would like it better) in the centre and we picked a number from 1 to 13 (the number of gifts there were) and the first person picks a gift and opens it. The person who picked number 2 could either steal the other person’s gift or select another one; number 3 person could steal the gifts from person one or two or pick another gift to open. What fun we had, I had number 6 and I got 4 really nice square coffee cups, they have a yellow and blue stripe.

Thursday night we went to Philos for the open mike jam, always a good time, the place was just packed. Ross played for a bit, he always loves to do that!!!
New Years Eve! We were going to go to Los Arroyos Verde for a 5 course meal and listen to Tom Lilienthal and friends, when Ross was asked to play at Britannia Pub in La Cruz! Now Tom plays bass and lives down here full time (he just got engaged to be married) but when living in the states he played with a band for about 40 years in San Francisco. These friends came down to play with Tom here and Ross loaned them a drum kit and sound gear, to pay him back they offered to pay for us to eat and listen to them. Instead we went to Britannia and stayed there until (I think) 3am. What a night, Mike even came up to play for a bit (he is the guy that need facial reconstruction surgery after hitting a horse coming home from a gig). Mandy put out a beautiful buffet, salmon, cold cuts, pickles, roast pork hors d’oeuvres, potato salad, coleslaw and a bunch of other stuff (I asked Ross cause I couldn’t remember it all, he did!!!)

Ross Kim and Critters in Paradise!