Today was a day of cooking. I am truly amazed at the amount of baking I did today. 3 pumpkin pies, 1 apple pie, 4 loaves of pumpkin bread, 1 big batch of candied walnuts, and a chocolate cheesecake. All of this is in preparation for the feasting tomorrow. Chalain & Chaliren are coming to spend the day, help cook food, and help devour food. I’m really looking forward to it. During a preparatory pow-wow where Chaliren and I divided the list of things to be cooked, we agreed that we’d eat ham rather than turkey. Tonight at dinner Kiki expressed disapointment with this decision. She really wanted turkey. Or to be more accurate, she wanted a huge roasted bird so that she could peel the cooked skin off and eat that.
For anyone who doesn’t know, cooking a Turkey starts about 4 days before hand when you pull the beast out of the freezer and use up your entire fridge to give it room to thaw. When the bag the turkey is in starts leaking, you know it’s ready to cook. In short, it’s too late to acquire a turkey and expect to be able to cook it tomorrow. Besides, I baked all day I don’t want to go shopping. Howard was sporting a vicious headache and didn’t want to go shopping either. In hopes of heading off the looming Pout of Doom, I rummaged in our freezer and discovered a frozen turkey breast left over from last year. It was small enough that if I used the defroster in my fridge I might be able to cook it tomorrow. I triumphantly carried the partial bird up to Kiki expecting excitement and thanks. She took one look at it and sat back pouty again “It says turkey breast. Will it have skin on it?” sigh. I’ve no idea, but at least I attempted to not ruin Thanksgiving for her. If our sacreligous decision to have ham instead of bird does ruin her holiday, then she can add it to her store of character building memories.
In unrelated news I’ve got a new game at the top of the “We will never rent this again” list. It features a cartoony alien creature who runs sideways across the screen while violently slaying and infinite supply of identical FBI agents. It is repetitive and annoying and my kids love it. As I was baking I got to listen to them howling with laughter while shouting things like “I bit his head off!” “Die FBI!” and “I cut him in half!” It was rather disturbing, at least to me. I did discover that there was a feature that allowed you to turn the “gore” off. This meant that when you sliced FBI agents they spouted flowers instead of blood. I hoped that would be better. Instead I got complaints. “Mommy! The blood is all gone!” If I really believed that it was harming them, I would take the game back right now even though that would make me into the super bad guy for days. As it is, I’m going to work really hard at finding them more interesting things to do. It just feels wrong to hear those things coming out of the mouths of my beautiful little children. Yuck.
Oh, I am a huge fan of gore games.
Have been since I was little. Might explain a few things.
Turkey: If you have a styrofoam cooler, you can defrost the turkey in that. It works as well.
I also use a 5 gallon home depot bucket to do a quick thaw. The day before, commandeer a bathtub. Then fill the bucket with cold water and drop the turkey in. Let it sit for 3 hours, and pour out the water and then repeat until bird is thawed.
This year, I took advantage that we have unheated space downstairs and stuck the bird down there.
heh…
Someone watches Alton, I think…. 🙂
Frankly…
I think *I* would be disurbed by kids saying that stuff…
And I love gorey games…
What game is it? you have me curious about it…
Re: Frankly…
It sounds a lot like ‘Destroy All Humans!’ to judge by the alien and the fact that they’re killing a lot of people in very gory ways. Of course, this is coming from the guy who played Deus Ex the first time through with the ‘sneak through, selective disablings’ method. Well, except when it came to Gunther and Anna Navarre – the latter got a maxed-out sniper-rifle in the head from a guy who’d mastered Rifle skills, and the former met up with a the ‘laputan machine’ killword.
Re: Frankly…
Incidentally, it should be noted that you HAVE to kill both of them to finish the game – they can’t be disabled. Otherwise, it’s quite possible to get around the whole thing without killing anyone, or at least killing a VERY small number of people (Bob Paige, Gunther, Anna Navarre being the three who have to die).
Re: Frankly…
With the ‘cartoony’ bit and the side-scrolling, it’s more likely Alien Hominid. Destroy All Humans wasn’t particularly bloody, really, though filled with plenty of other themes that make it much worse for small folk.
Re: Frankly…
It’s “Alien Hominid.” I love the artwork, myself. I missed the part with the flowers, though. That sounds hilarious.
–Howard
Re: Frankly…
I don’t think yer helping there, sir…
Also, what console is this game for?
Re: Frankly…
Gamecube.
Anytime we’ve got a choice between GC and Xbox we go with the GC version. That’s the console for which we have the wireless controllers.
–Howard
Re: Frankly…
Heya.
I played through Deus Ex the “super moral way” for the first several missions. Fight as little as possible, pile the guys I hit with the tranq darts (or the electrified baton that stunned them) all neatly for the police to arrest them or whatnot. There are parts of the game that I found it nearly impossible to do that, though, and you didn’t get anything extra for it but the feeling that maybe you could’ve finished the game faster if you just used your gun or that glowy sword.
Alien Hominid. I can tell just from teh description. And it is, really, a good game, but maybe not what I’d give kids Link’s age or less.
Re: heh…
religiously.
I missed tonight’s leek episode, and am most sad.
Re: Frankly…
My guess was Alien Hominid, from the description. I’ve known about that game for years, due to Newgrounds.
Take heart in knowing that children’s fascination with gore is centuries old. I doubt that the more gruesome bits of Grimm’s Fairy Tales are in there because the *adults* thought they were nifty…
I am oddly pleased by your approach to the game, being “yes it’s bad” and “no I’m not going to take it away from them” and “I’ll find something they’ll like BETTER to do”. Because I gotta agree — I can’t see it being actually harmful, but there’s something unpleasant about the whole thing. 🙂
Re: Frankly…
That’s what I did the whole game – except for a few points, and towards the end, since it’s really hard NOT to kill Page – whatever you do ends up killing him, either by destroying Area 51, joining with Helios, or just the outright assassination the Illuminati wanted. Gunther and Anna are also the other two you can’t avoid killing – killwords or rifles (in Anna’s case, I was trying to save the target of the arrest, and waited till she’d brought up her gun). Otherwise, you can sneak past and neutralize most any target in the game. That, and you do have to kill the MIB and his companions when you rescue Paul, unless you want to leave him to die.
The SECOND time around, I just went for massive damage. This meant things like setting up multiple-LAM traps in the hallway outside Paul’s apartment, using the Sniper Rifle to take out everyone I might come across who was toting a gun, or who might run and panic, etc. 😀