It was a day to feel like things are pleasantly normal, rather than appearing to be in the opening moves of the Crusades 2.0. Thursday, we enjoyed what has become our traditional Thanksgiving celebration at my brother's house in south Florida. There and back combine into five hours of driving, but it's mostly the Florida Turnpike and I-95 so it's easier than driving in stop and go traffic. We spent from about 1:00 to about 6:00 PM with my extended family. We had a different day than last year's, which was at my nephew's over on the west side of the state. Both were nice, but the meeting at my brother's has been going on since that nephew was a teenager.
Friday was our Thanksgiving here with just us. I smoked a turkey using a method I found years ago on Serious Eats; a combination of spatchcocking the turkey together with a dry brine and then smoking in my Weber kettle grill. It gives such a nice pink smoke ring in the meat that you just don't get with the electric smokers. I've done this basic recipe several times and it does produce a good turkey. I have fooled around with what I do a bit but I never know if the main difference is what I've done or how the turkeys are being raised. An aspect of this guy's recipe I never made the effort to follow is to add a tablespoon of baking powder into the dry rub. It's supposed to make the skin crisper and I didn't notice that at all.
Disclaimer: not this year's turkey. This picture is from 2021.
The rest of my "usual activities" have been a bit on Abby's side of normal (Abby Normal...). Solar activity has been low and radio propagation has pretty low activity. I haven't bothered to turn the station on in days. I have a sale offer from the station software I use most (Ham Radio Deluxe) and I really need to spend a few hours working on that, trying to fix some odd issues I see when it automagically logs a contact for me. First step is to get the latest update installed - which I downloaded last weekend.
We do have the potential for some improvement in propagation. A large sunspot group just rotated across the solar limb and started its one week voyage of pointing more directly at us each day until it's in the middle longitudes of the sun's face. Top story at SpaceWeather.com. In the last 24 hours, the Solar Flux has gone up from 120 to 160 and the planetary K index has increased from 2 to 3.
It's worth watching a bit more closely.
Other than that, it has been fixing odds and ends around the house. We've been in this house 41 years. I don't think there's anything beyond big pipes in the slab that hasn't been replaced by now.
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