Chapter 179
Dirty Thursday

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The next time we went to the parks was a Tuesday after work, and we were excited to try out the new Pumpkin Pie Hot Cocoa.

We ordered it in the souvenir holiday mug because we liked that it had Duffy on it.

One “attraction” Tracy and I had yet to visit was the Sorcerer’s Workshop in the back of the Animation Building. Honestly, we hadn’t even realized that there was anything to see until someone tweeted about one of the experiences back there. Disney does a really awful job making it clear that this area is worth checking out.

The first room is where you can draw your own character and then animate it.

Next, we went through to the room modeled after the Beast’s library—where you can use magical books to tell you which Disney character is most like you.

It told Tracy that she was Cinderella and told me that I was Scar…

We were really impressed how much effort had gone in to theming these rooms back here. It was bizarre since we had never realized how big the Animation Building actually is.

We thought the next room sounded like it would be fun. Themed toward Ursula’s grotto, it gave us the opportunity to record our own voiceovers to accompany clips form different animated movies.

While the concept was fun, it was a little lame that each clip was only about 10 seconds long. We did a scene with Belle and the Beast and then another featuring “Hakuna Matata.”

It was basically time to head home after our relatively short day in the park, but we thought it was fun to discover a new little area of DCA that we didn’t know existed.

Thursday was Thanksgiving, and we didn’t really have anyone to celebrate with, so we invited the cat over to watch the parade with us.

We’ve had a few Thanksgivings away from family, so we’ve cultivated something of a routine. When we’re only feeding ourselves, we have no need for a full turkey, so we make a turkey breast in the crock pot instead.

We’ve actually got our incredibly simple recipe down to a science, and it has never failed us. You just dump a packet of onion soup mix on top of a Butterball breast and cook it for about 6-8 hours on low. And then voila!

While the rest of the traditional fixings might not have been necessary, we still like them.

Here was my plate—complete with a slice of cranberry-in-a-can.

We also always wait to decorate our Christmas tree until Thanksgiving.

We have LOTS of Disney ornaments.

And we even got a Crooky ornament long before we knew he would be ours.

We followed up decorating with our homemade pumpkin pie—always delicious.

Right after we finished decorating the small Christmas tree, we made a big decision. You see, we have long stood up against stores opening their doors earlier and earlier on Thanksgiving each year. Even so, we were done with our celebrations pretty early in the evening and didn’t have much else planned. We were also at the height of our personal poverty this year and had been intrigued by some of the Black Friday sales we knew were going on across town. So we broke our personal rule and headed to Target to score some deals.

One of the best sales was actually a six-foot, pre-lit Christmas tree for just $20. It was sold out at the first Target store we went to, so we decided to try another. Again, sold out. Though we knew we should probably just go home, we had committed to finding that dang tree at this point, so we tried a THIRD Target store and finally found one in stock.

Of course, finding the big tree meant we needed to come home and un-decorate the small tree we had just ornamented. We were glad to actually have room for all our decorations finally, however, and this tree just looked so much less ridiculous in our giant living room.