can't rain on our thanksgiving day parade!

Me and Dave at the top of Mary's Peak on Thanksgiving 'morn

This year for Thanksgiving, I decided to stay pretty low-key and just do a small dinner with Dave. We started off the rainy morning by heading up to Mary's Peak in attempt to get above the clouds and get some sun (there was also rumored to be some snow up there!). As we ascended the mountain, we found that the clouds were not ceasing their stronghold over the valley...nor were they cutting us any slack by holding back on the amount of precipitation (unfortunately in the form of rain) they were releasing. The last of our overly-ambitious thoughts of playing in the snow on a sunny day at the summit were crushed as we reached the peak and were greeted by millions of cold raindrops, wind, and very, very little snow.

view at the summit of Mary's Peak

Although it was very wet and difficult to take pictures, we walked around the summit for about an hour and then headed back to his house be begin the (unforeseen) long process of baking our Thanksgiving feast.

Dave tried to take advantage of the snow and attempted to go penguin sledding.
Me checking out the view from the top. (photo taken by Dave Newborn)

We decided to do everything homemade this year...noodles, mashed potatoes, acorn squash with brown sugar, vegan loaf (the most strenuous part), and blackberry pie with berries I picked during my Mom's visit last summer. About the loaf...apparently we didn't read the baking instructions very thoroughly because we thought it would take an hour to bake. What we didn't read was that all the ingredients had to be prepared before being mixed together and THEN baked. What we thought was going to take 1 hour ended up taking ~3 hours... It was pretty good, but there was soooo much of it left over! We're seriously going to be eating "loaf" for the next month.

After eating, we busted out the beer-making supplies and brewed up a pumpkin ale. That also took much longer than anticipated. It wasn't until 2am when we were finally able to end our eventful Thanksgiving day.

yay for homemade noodles!

Loaf--it's what's for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the next month! (note: this is only 1 of the 3 pans of this stuff we made)