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Nov. 27th, 2017 12:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stitchwhichLast Thursday I proposed to my card-playing friends that we bring our Thanksgiving leftovers to our game and thereby have an easy supper together. They all agreed. And today, preparing for that supper, I realized that we had no leftovers to contribute save a bit of the cranberry sauce. So I pulled mini quiches out of the freezer along with a peach tart from Trader Joe's. When our first guest arrived, he came with store-bought cole slaw, baked beans, and potato salad because he, too, was out of leftovers. The next set came with store-prepared rotisserie chicken, King Hawaiian bread rolls and a cake - and the last one to show up had another cake. Yup. Three days after Thanksgiving our leftovers were all gone. We started the evening with a good laugh at ourselves.
Bossman and I volunteered at Jamestown Settlement on Friday and Saturday. It was hard to make ourselves get up at 5:30 in the morning on our free days off, but it was worth it. As it happened, we didn't interact with our SCA friends who were there as volunteer costumed interpreters. I was stationed inside the conference room with a vacuum sealing machine while Bossman, being an angel, hefted two large (LARGE!) coolers full of meat and ice from the butchering area to my table and then took the ice-only coolers back to the butchers and the vacuum-sealed packages of meat to the big freezer in the 'kitchen' (two freezers, one fridge, two sinks, and a large shelf storing huge wooden bowls and platters.) We processed two pigs. I was a little grossed out by the meat handling - seeing unwrapped pig chinks on bare ice gave me a twinge or two even though I knew that the temperatures were fine for that. It was in the 20s (f) overnight so there is no chance that the meat would have gone off overnight. The coolers were packed full when we got there at 8am. They were empty when we left at 3:30.
And can I just say that pig guts are - - - yucky. Livers and hearts felt like handling squid fresh from cold water, and the lungs, which I'd never touched before were odd. Just odd. So light in the hand it was almost like handling three or four balloons that had been tied together.
The staff was grateful. They are used to doing the butchering and then having to stay an extra two hours to package things up. 8-7 makes for tired workers the following day. We had everything done so well that there was nothing left for us to do on Saturday beyond washing out the coolers and then running off copies of a dance master's book. And then we went home amid a shower of "thank you"s.
So this non-costumed volunteer work is very satisfying. We did swing through the fort and say hi to our friends as they were manning their stations. Next year we'll remember to find out when they get their lunch break (they got them in shifts of three) so we can take our break at the same time.
And we now have extra T-shirts from the Fort, given to us when we looked at the bloody pig parts and then at our white JS polo shirts and light khaki pants. Saturday we wore jeans.
Bossman and I volunteered at Jamestown Settlement on Friday and Saturday. It was hard to make ourselves get up at 5:30 in the morning on our free days off, but it was worth it. As it happened, we didn't interact with our SCA friends who were there as volunteer costumed interpreters. I was stationed inside the conference room with a vacuum sealing machine while Bossman, being an angel, hefted two large (LARGE!) coolers full of meat and ice from the butchering area to my table and then took the ice-only coolers back to the butchers and the vacuum-sealed packages of meat to the big freezer in the 'kitchen' (two freezers, one fridge, two sinks, and a large shelf storing huge wooden bowls and platters.) We processed two pigs. I was a little grossed out by the meat handling - seeing unwrapped pig chinks on bare ice gave me a twinge or two even though I knew that the temperatures were fine for that. It was in the 20s (f) overnight so there is no chance that the meat would have gone off overnight. The coolers were packed full when we got there at 8am. They were empty when we left at 3:30.
And can I just say that pig guts are - - - yucky. Livers and hearts felt like handling squid fresh from cold water, and the lungs, which I'd never touched before were odd. Just odd. So light in the hand it was almost like handling three or four balloons that had been tied together.
The staff was grateful. They are used to doing the butchering and then having to stay an extra two hours to package things up. 8-7 makes for tired workers the following day. We had everything done so well that there was nothing left for us to do on Saturday beyond washing out the coolers and then running off copies of a dance master's book. And then we went home amid a shower of "thank you"s.
So this non-costumed volunteer work is very satisfying. We did swing through the fort and say hi to our friends as they were manning their stations. Next year we'll remember to find out when they get their lunch break (they got them in shifts of three) so we can take our break at the same time.
And we now have extra T-shirts from the Fort, given to us when we looked at the bloody pig parts and then at our white JS polo shirts and light khaki pants. Saturday we wore jeans.
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Date: 2017-11-27 06:28 pm (UTC)