A Brief Tale of Two Thanksgivings

I have a gihugic Arisia-related post that I've been working on for a while but I also have some light things to say so let's try doing both, bwahahaha. Did I mention that the amount of typing and editing I'm doing has been hurting my wrist? Yeah, that's not troubling at all.

So OK, Thanksgiving. We went for the actual day with the relatives we have been going out with these past few years. Unfortunately, my aunt's condition has deteriorated to the point where going out to an elaborate meal would be more ordeal than pleasure so we planned to have Turkey Day with aunt/uncle at the facility she's living in. Found out that it's actually a lunchtime meal and knowing what the quality of food was likely to be I had a bright idea.

Y'see most turkey is white meat, which I find to be bland, uninteresting and often (despite gravy and cranberry sauce) too dry. I, and the family, prefer dark meat to the point where we'll pay silly amounts to get roasted turkey legs at places like King Richard's Faire. So I suggested to Pygment that she get a couple turkey legs and we could roast them in the evening when we got hungry again. She... um, yeah. Went to the butcher near her and got four entire legs.

That's FOURTEEN POUNDS of turkey leg. Yes, they're that big. She brined them and I put them up with some herbs (mostly dill and parsley thanks to MizA's garden) to marinate overnight. Throw that in the oven with some chopped up sweet potatoes, scallions, and a few more herbs. A-MAY-ZING, if I do say so myself. We've had three meals for three of us and we're not quite done with them yet, nor tired of leftovers as I usually get.

It doesn't entirely make up for how depressed I got seeing my aunt in such difficult shape - next month will be their 50th wedding anniversary - but it's rare that I like my own cooking this much.

This is my church (VNV)

We saw VNV again, this time at the Royale in Boston. It's a good venue for such a show - last time they overfilled the Sinclair in HSQ. This venue held a good crowd but always with room to dance.

Opening acts were forgettable. A DJ with a couple of cute tricks and not much repertoire and a quartet that reminded me of very early Sisters of Mercy. Not a bad comparison, just "hey, it's been done, what new are you bringing?"

VNV this time was a quartet with a different drummer. A good show, about two hours of music with about half from the new album (Noire) and half older favorites. Ronan was obviously in a good mood and energetic, but there was less of the idiosyncratic banter that usually highlights a VNV show. There was one moment where - in the middle of an elaborate interactive left-of-house versus right-of-house thing - some system died. I think it was the synth because Ronan made some comment about Ableton Live, but it was hard to tell from the audience what went wrong. They decided to abort that track and Ronan ad-libbed a bit while the techs rebooted things about imagining we'd just gone through this and that and now were back to seeing VNV, as the band started on the next song.

We got several favorites, but they did not do the end-encore Perpetual I'd been hoping for. Still, I managed to move and sweat and get out some of the emotional slush that had accumulated over the past couple weeks. Ronan remarked on the concert space being a kind of "temple" and a place where outside cares could be set down for a while. Yeah, I needed that.

As usual we bought the CD at the show (artists make a much higher percentage per disc when you buy direct from them) and I've been enjoying listening to it in the car. Also notable, we brought Thing 2 to the show. They knew more words to the songs than we did, I think.