I love your pig stories. When they have personalities and names it sure would be hard to eat them. They sound like they really like to ride in the van....who would have thunk it??? LOL!!! After finding a gold mine of food in the van, they will really try to go for a ride!! Thanks for sharing your story and hope you continue to feel better! I included a link of a pig that would not walk on the dirt unless they put it boots on it. It even has pictures. Thought you might enjoy it. Joyce Here is a link that might be useful: Pig in Boots

Well, it had been in the cooling oven for nearly a day, & I was afraid of salmonella, too. Evidently, a skunk had been digging it up every time I buried it. When I buried it close to the house, I just invited him closer. & when I let the dogs out while he was busy digging, he sprayed! Odd as it may sound, I feel pretty lucky about the whole thing: didn't set the house on fire. the smoke was white not black, so it didn't soot up the house. skunk sprayed a general "atmospheric" spray & didn't make a direct hit on any of the dogs or on me. I did lay in a bunch of baking/browning bags, just in case I get the urge to cook anything involving oil, fat, grease, ovens...

John, I diligently rescheduled everything so I could suit everyone else's time requirements. My son in law, Kevin, is a police officer and had to work on Thanksgiving. My daughter, Amanda, is a CNA at a nursing home and had to work the midnight shift the night before. Since she has a seizure disorder and her triggers are stress and fatigue, her being allowed to sleep is tantamount. Plus Bud got his tonsils out last week Wednesday and we wanted to give him a couple of extra days to heal up so he didn't miss the meal altogether. So we just had dinner a few hours ago, with everyone being able to attend and we got an "extra" in the form of Dave and Amanda's nephew Tommy. Not a problem, there's always enough food here for at least a couple of extras. The only problem was seating, so I put everyone around the table to eat together but the food stayed on the counter and everyone filled their plate buffet style. It worked.... I do have one burner that works really well, but with my new double ovens I try to do as many things in there as I can. The real issue is that the cooktop is on a homemade (and extremely ugly) "island". We're planning to rip that out this winter. For some reason that cooktop is situated on the end of the island, but perpendicular to the work surface, which is also several inches lower than the end that holds the cooktop. So, it's kind of like a "t" with a step down, and it gives me no work surface at all other than about 4 inches on each side of the cooktop. It's extremely inconvenient. I'm not living with it for 10 years, since we just bought this place last year. This year we tear that out, or I'm hiring someone! Annie

https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/article_9243bb74-ecfa-11e8-8f73-0f42fb5dada2.html "The Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank is filled these days with people volunteering their time and sorting food donated for the hungry. But what this 170,000-square foot facility on Choctaw Drive doesn't have as the holidays start is food. The situation has gotten bad enough that the charity, which serves an 11-parish area, is putting out public calls for extra help, for extra donations of food, and especially for money to purchase additional food. High-profile disasters, including hurricanes Florence and Michael, as well as the ongoing wildfires in California, have diverted the supply of donated food as well as drawn away cash donations that might ordinarily have gone to help hungry people locally at Thanksgiving and Christmas. “You would ordinarily see all of these shelves full,” said Mike Manning, pointing to two tall, long and nearly empty stretches of metal shelving at the rear of the facility. These shelves is where the the charity normally stores its dry, canned and staple foods. Manning, president and CEO of the Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank, said instead he is flush with candy, a relic of the Halloween holiday, pointing to a big box of M&M bags. “We’ve got a lot of candy,” Manning said. “That’s not what we need.” About 30 volunteers, several of them employees of ExxonMobil, were on hand Monday sorting donated canned food. Many people brought their families. The empty shelves are not visible from their work area. Katie Skiles volunteered on Monday with her father Joe and brother, James, but she said she has worked there by herself since she first volunteered more than a year ago. “My parents made me come,” Katie said. “Now I love it.” A senior at Lee High in Baton Rouge, Katie, 17, said she was not aware of the food shortage. She said she might talk to the National Honor Society at her high school about doing a food drive. The warehouse currently has about 1 million pound of food in its inventory, about half of the normal inventory, Manning said. One million pounds of food is also roughly what the food bank distributes each month to its 100-plus member agencies, he said. And to top it all off, this is normally a time of peak inventory, when the food banks stock up in order to have sufficient supply for the early months of the year. “I’ve never see it this bad going into the holidays,” Manning said. Besides recent disasters and the resulting “donor fatigue,” another food supply factor is the shrinking donations over time from commercial grocers who carry less excess inventory than they used to, Manning said. To help restock, the food bank has asked local schools to do special food drives. What would help most, though, are cash donations, which people can donate online on the charity’s website, Manning said. “We are kind of held hostage by the national situation, unless we can get sufficient money to purchase food,” he said. It doesn’t necessarily take much money to help. Manning pointed to palettes full of canned vegetables without labels on them. These cans, when they have commercial labels, cost 70 to 90 cents a can at the store, but without the labels, they cost the food bank between 5 and 10 cents a can. Manning said he’s talking about having a more formal fund drive around New Years to raise money, but he’s been too busy to pull together anything more formal sooner. “We’re in firefighting mode right now,” he said. “We’re just asking for help.”