According to one of the national news channels, 271,000,000 Americans will consume 675,000,000 pounds of turkey today.

Thats roughly 2.5 pounds per person. So we should have had a ten-pound turkey. Throw in another pound or two for each heeler, and we still only needed a sixteen-pound bird.

It was 23 pounds.

Wife did a wonderful job. Perfect, moist tender meat with the crispy skin that heelers love. Along with everything else in the dinner...oyster stuffing, mashed potatos, yams (yuk!), cranberry-raspberry sauce, corn, relishes, crescent rolls, with pumpkin and Fruit of the Forest pie for dessert. Two bottles of sparkling non-alcoholic Cold Duck.

My only responsibility was to carve the turkey.

I have news for you folks: they do not include this as one of the skills taught in shop class. And I do not believe this is an innate male talent.

I am quite good at it, however, since it is just a simple necropsy of a large avian. Much easier than the smaller specimens I occassionally have to deal with, and it's already gutted. And not bloody.

The masked heeler was allowed out of her confinement in the living room den to join the pack in the dining room. She was thrilled, and only tried to jump up on a chair once. Her little sister occupied any vacant seat within 3 seconds of it being emptied.

A couple other observations:

Why does the smell of cooked turkey make you want to retch just two hours after the same aroma smelled so wonderful?

Heelers are unanimous on this one: cranberries are not food.

We have limited space in the refrigerator for leftovers. Wife stacked and rearranged to give the maximum volume possible, and I found a large container that fit that space. It was filled to overflowing with turkey muscle fragments, mostly from the hyper-expanded but functionally useless breast muscles which were low in myoglobin (i.e. "white": the more the bird flies, the more myoglobin that builds up in the muscles to support anaerobic exertion, and the darker the meat).

All other scraps of edible avian were scraped off the skeleton and stored for the heelers. Meat, fat, skin and giblets.

Happy heelers.

Which left us with a large basting pan with about 3 cm of turkey grease and water, with particles of meat, fat and skin in suspension. Wife wanted me to ask: what do we do with that? No way we could ever need that much gravy. Nor could we stand the aroma any longer to boil it down to a nice paste. Considered straining it to get the goodies for the heelers, but that still leaves water laden with clog-forming fatty oils. It went down the drain, but is there a better use?