First turkey ever and the to-do list...

I now, finally after all these years, understand how holidays can be stressful to some people.  In just under a week, I will be cooking my first Thanksgiving bird for my girlfriend and her parents.  I bought a 12 lbs.  turkey at the Park Slope Food co-op yesterday and am planning on cooking the poor thing in my own kitchen...which means also hosting the dinner at my apartment.

So naturally, I'm in organizational mode and have been taking on more than I can handle, it seems.  Lukcily, I was able to outsource the pie and some of the sides to my girlfriend and her parents.  But Meanwhile, here's a few of the things I've decided to make:

Sweet potato and turnip mash, because we went back and forth about whether to have mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes or one or the other, or turnips, or not turnips and then this recipe surfaced:

Gluten free rolls, which I'm going to adapt to be as close to my mother's onion rolls that she would always make on Thanksgiving.

And as for that pie I'm outsourcing, Alexa found this.

Now, it's all a matter of cleaning up the apartment, planning the timing of everything I'll be cooking, and somehow, finding two extra chairs.  Thinking about seeing if I can borrow something like that from my neighbors or buy cheap ones.  As it stands I have 2 kitchen chairs, a piano bench, an office chair and two sofas but I think I'd rather have everyone sitting on something as chair like as possible.

The trick to all this is to do lists and time management.  I've found them to be invaluable all these years for the enormous amount of stuff I try to accomplish in the 16 or so waking hours I have every day.  Without to do lists my brain would melt into an incomprehensible pool of obligations and deadlines and I wouldn't know what to do with myself.  And without time management, I would never get anything done...or at least I wouldn't get nearly as much done.

My current remixing project would be nowhere without the lengthy to do list I have in place as there are multiple pieces I'm working on.  It's fluid and each piece has it's own sub-to-do list, with tasks to complete before I get to the creative phase of changing things around (tasks like separating out all the individual tracks and putting them into a new project file in Logic).  I'm changing things daily and deciding which songs I should cut as well.  Hopefully, with the technical stuff out of the way, I'll be getting on with the creative aspects, which are better taken care of in the lair, i.e. when I'm at home.  So I'm doing all of the technical stuff while I'm on the move and here at work.  That's time management.

With that said, I need to take care of a few more of those technical things before I leave tonight.  And then figure out the seating arrangement for Thanksgiving dinner.  Wish me luck.