Daily Archives: November 26, 2015

Pretty Painless . . .

and Very, Very Tasty.

First off, Jan and I want to wish everyone a very Happy Thanksgiving!  We hope you enjoyed your day as much as we enjoyed ours.


After we were up and had our coffee about 8:30, we headed out about 10am, with our first stop the Cracker Barrel right down I-45 in Conroe. I had called them on Tuesday to pre-order our Thanksgiving Meal To-Go that we were to pick up.

The restaurant itself was already jam-packed, but they had the whole take-out process streamlined. Signs first pointed me inside to a special line where I quickly paid the $65 for my order. Then it was back to the truck and around back to get in line to pick up our order. But here’s where the process kind of broke down.

The pickup area was a canopy at the backdoor where you could drive up and get your meal, but they didn’t have the direction really defined, so some people were trying to pull in from one direction and some from the other. And then while that was being worked out, other people were parking off to the side, and then walking up.

And this resulted in some upsetness (my new word) to the people in the cars who were there first, because the walkups were getting served ahead of them. Finally the lady in the car behind us got out and started complaining, and things quickly got straightened out.

But even with all this drama, it was less than 15 minutes before we were back on the road heading down to the Clear Lake area. As I said, pretty painless.

Traffic was about what I expected for a Thanksgiving morning, with the usual slowdown around the Pierce Elevated, but it freed up pretty quickly. We did luck up on our side of the freeway, because as we came down off the Pierce we saw that there had been an accident on the other side, with two cars having spun around and scattered large pieces of themselves all over the roadway. The result of this was 5 lanes of traffic backed up for several miles down the Interstate.

Getting into the Clear Lake area we were surprised to see how many changes had been done to the Interstate since we were here this past August for a few days. The El Dorado interchange was completely rearranged from before and the traffic flow is very different.

We arrived at Chris’ about 11:30 and got the food inside and unpacked, still warm, from the large, heavy cardboard box.

Cracker Barrel Thanksgiving Box

Inside the box everything was laid out, labeled, and ready to go.

Cracker Barrel Thanksgiving Contents

And as I said, still warm.

And following up on our easy peezy Thanksgiving theme, everyone just served their plates from the containers and popped them in the microwave for a minute or so. Then all we had to do was sit down around the table and enjoy our meal.

And it was very, very tasty. We all agreed that Cracker Barrel does a great Turkey Dinner. In fact, we often go to CB on a normal Thursday just so Jan can have their Turkey and Dressing.

As Jan said, “We didn’t cook for two days, spend 20 minutes eating, and then two hours cleaning up.” When we were done, the containers went in the fridge, the plates and silverware went into the dishwasher, and we were done. Then for dessert we all had some of the pumpkin pie that Chris baked, and some of the Coconut Cream Pie we got from the Fish Pond Restaurant yesterday.

Fish Pond Coconut Cream Pie

Like I said, pretty painless, and very, very tasty. Easy peezy.

After dinner, while we were watching the dog show, and then the Panthers – Cowboys game (a 33 – 14 blowout leaving Panthers 11 – 0 for the season), I checked online to see what it will entail to replace the broken glass screen on Chris’ Galaxy S5 phone. And it looks like there are two different ways to go. A cheap, difficult way, and an expensive, easy way.

The screen itself only costs about $10, but looks be a difficult  2 – 3 hour job, mostly due to having to separate the glass from the LCD screen. And if you accidently crack the LCD in doing this, you get to move on to the bonus round, and have to take the $150 expensive, easy route anyway, $150 being what a new LCD display with glass costs. So we’ll have to decide what we’re going to do before we’re together next time.

Wrapping up, another reminder about Landon’s Gingerbread Man project.

To recap, Landon’s class needs picture postcards from around the country mailed to his class describing sightings of the missing Gingerbread Man.

You can mail them to:

Traci Blocker
Keiko Davidson Elementary
26906 Pine Mill Ranch Drive
Katy, Texas 77494

Thanks for your help.

And once again, Jan and I hope your Thanksgiving was as nice as ours.

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Thought for the Day:

“Girls have an unfair advantage over boys: If they can’t get what they want by being smart, they can get it by being dumb.” ~ Yul Brynner

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