Thanksgiving weekend #2

We had the in-law Thanksgiving on Saturday. The turkey was great. So was all the other food.

Robin (Cherity's sister) and Chad bought a 1/2 beef (organic) and brought about 65 lbs of Hamburger up to Luck, WI and we used Rick's electric grinder to grind about the same weight of venison in with it. I didn't think it was going to take as long as it did. I played a little poker with the family and was the second one out (I rarely play) so I went and helped do some grinding. The venison had already been ground once by Cherity so I went and accomplished step # 2 of grinding beef and pork tallow in with the venison. After that we mixed 3 parts beef with 2 parts venison/tallow together and baged it in 1 and 5 lb ziploc bags and then wrapped that in paper. I mainly just did some grinding and a little mixing. Robin, Kris and Cherity did a lot of bagging and a good portion of the griding as well...

Weird huh? It was kind of strange. I was sitting in a garage shoving chunks of meat down an inch and a half hole with a plastic tube and watching the meat squish out the other end, all while there are about 8 folks playing cards under a large birch log spanning over their heads. The birch logs were there so the dead could be hung and slaughtered.

Earlier that day the Rick had gotten his muzzle loader out to target shoot because the sights were off. Chad and I dutifully watched while the women were inside with the kids. After that, Ryan got out some pistola's and we played around with those. There was german pistol that had passed down. It was a really small .22 pistol that's pretty famous. A ruger or a luger or something like that. I've heard the name before but not sure of the spelling. We also did a little target shooting with a six shooter. Good times.

Oh yeah! I forgot. We also went to a tree farm and picked up our Christmas tree for 14 dollars. It was one of those cut-it-down yourself places. Rick and I went and got some ratchet straps earlier so I could strap down our tree. The tree sat on the roof of our car for about a day and when we finally got back to Winona we put it up. The boys were very exited and helped break 2 or 3 bulbs. They've almost already met their yearly quota for bulb breaking.