I spent most of the day worrying about my first attempt ever to make a turkey. I thought it was going okay, because the oven was on, and no fire had started. I was using the wrong element, which I discovered when after an hour, the oven barely had any heat and the turkey was not the least bit cooked.

I turned it up by about 200 degrees, and then the top of the turkey started to burn. I turned the bottom element on, and the bottom of the turkey started to burn. After many calls to all my moms, I finally lifted the oven rack up by one and turned it down by 100 degrees. It finally started to heat up without burning or sizzling or anything.

I sat down to watch a movie, and 1.5 hours into it, the sister showed up with more boxes of Stove Top stuffing. You're supposed to be able to stuff at least 2 packages into the turkey, but that wasn't happening. I think I got all of 3/4 of one package in there, and it was going all over the place, the sink, the floor, the counter.

I gave up on that and figured we could make it on the stove. The turkey was cooking well in the bag, but I wanted to make sure that it was cooking evenly, so I went to turn it in the pan. When I did so, a bunch of grease that had piled up in the back of the pan dripped directly onto the element at the bottom, which was 350+ degrees. So, a huge fire started that soon put itself out.

Not soon enough though. I am terrified of dying in a fire, and terrified of fire itself (except camping fires, I'm fine with those), so out of terribly fast reflex, I grabbed the oven rack (keep in mind, this rack was under the turkey, so it was probably 350+ degrees as well) and pulled the rack towards me, to get it away from the fire.

I then pulled my hand off the rack LIGHTENING QUICK as I had just burned the shit out of my entire hand. I would have taken pictures of the burns but it was very gross. I will definitely have scars from this event, that's for sure.

Anyway, the guests started to arrive about an hour after I burned my hand. The fire scared me enough that I took the turkey out of the oven completely, left the door a little bit open in case a fire happened again, and turned the oven off. See? I told you I was scared.

Sue came in and saved the day by using the turkey baster I'd asked her to bring to drain a ton of the juices out of the pan, so we could heat up the oven again and get that sucker back in there.

After the potatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, cheese sauce, and gravy were done, we carved the turkey and served er up. It was awesome, the meat was falling off the bone and was tender and juicy. Everything else turned out well as well.

After that we opened presents and started playing with the gifts we got. My sister's friend's sister found some of the body art jewels that I bought for Shaunn for the roomie Christmas, and put them on my brother:



Nik, originally uploaded by Neroausity.



We were still in the midst of opening presents, but because a few people were taking a break, I tried to get a good shot of Sue:


She was in the midst of explaining to me why she hates having her picture taken, and that she rarely smiles when someone has a camera pointed at her. Ahh well, it's not a direct shot, but it looks good anyway.

Overall the night was a smashing success. We had beers, presents, turkey, and ice cream cake, as one of our guests had a birthday the night before and was too hung over to eat the cake, so they brought it with them. I was in bed by I think midnight. Everything went over a little TOO well. I am ALMOST thinking about doing this again next year. Am I insane?