Good day, Thomas Jefferson. Our podcast listeners. As always, we are so grateful that you take the time to listen and we thank you for it.

Yes, it's great. This is a program being recorded just before Thanksgiving, which by the way is far and away my favorite holiday of all holidays in the United States.

I love Thanksgiving. I will be alone this year, partly because of the international COVID pandemic, but also because my child is off studying in England and is not coming home for this holiday season, fearing that if she did she might get stuck here.

Who knows what's going to happen in the year 2021, as we all look forward to a better year and to widespread use of vaccines.

So I will be alone. What will you be doing my friend? Nothing too outrageous or you know, I mean, the pandemic is affecting all of our plans for certain, but I stand with those folks who are saying, you know, being safe this year means that we'll have a much better one next year.

I mean, there's a lot of people that are very, very, very tired, me included of the pandemic, but it's like it's going to go on for another few months.

Maybe in maybe longer than that, you know, we may be tired, but but it's not over and and and we have to avoid letting ourselves to surrender to it just because it's no darn fun.

Now, normally and years past, you and your family go out to some lonely cabin in the middle of the middle of nowhere in the bad landscape.

It's great. Yeah, not this year, not this year. No, I've never done that. You know, one year I had the, I bought the whole thing for the deep fried turkey. Oh, yeah.

You know, you buy the thing and you buy a big propane tank and then you buy like five or 10 gallons worth of oil and you, you boil that oil and then you hook the turkey onto a kind of a meat hook.

And you did it in your living room. No, that, that always burns down the house. No, you do it as far away from the house as you can because it actually does usually burn down the house.

And so then at some point, I lowered that magnificent 20 pound beautiful turkey into that that and it it was like a, it was like a turkey chip.

It, you know, it shrank to the size of a of a of a of a of a game hen or a little plover. It was tasty, but that is a very, very dangerous way of cooking a turkey and it and it didn't pay off.

And then you have the problem of the oil. Now you're stuck with this toxic oil. You can't, you can't keep it for another year. You don't really want to put it down the drain.

I have never done that and I can say with a pretty fair degree of certainty that I never will.

You know, I, I, I, my mother was still I've had she lived a hundred miles away and she came as she always does for Thanksgiving. And so she was here and when I told her like on the Monday of Thanksgiving that this was my intention.

She was a very strong personality as you know, and she said, I am going to the store and I am buying a second turkey, which will be cooked in the usual way.

I, you know, I, I didn't know your mother very well, although she was a type of person that you didn't have to meet her and see her often to know who she was.

And I would give anything to see the look on her face when you pull that turkey out.

Well, she, so she sat in the house here looking at this. It was, it was like the worst kind of Thanksgiving in North Dakota. It was like six below and Gail Force wins.

And so I'm out there with wearing everything I own, you know, gloves, mittens, scarves.

Oh, please, please.

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