Miscarriage of Justice
It’s bad enough when someone is convicted of a crime they didn’t commit. They’re sometimes out thousands of dollars for their defense and appeals. They’re sent away to prison where they endure hardship, danger, disease, and worse. They miss weddings, birthdays, holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving, and funerals.
Sometimes, they can prove their innocence, and they get to go home to try to put their lives back together.
Then they get to ask the state to compensate them for the time they lost.
Texas gives wrongfully convicted people $80,000 per year they spent in prison. Kansas gives $50,000.
Oklahoma caps it at $175,000 though last year there was an effort to change that.
Michael Sullivan, of Massachusetts, was wrongfully convicted of murder and armed robbery in 1987. Released in 2012 and cleared in 2019, Sullivan eventually sued the state. The jury awarded him $13 million for the 26 years he spent in prison.
He’ll get $1 million due to state law.
Thanksgiving
If you celebrated Thanksgiving, I hope you had a good day. I know I’ve got plenty of friends who were marking their first holiday without a loved one, and I hurt for them.
We had a full house again this year, with all of the kids save Oldest Son. Second Son and his wife brought their niece because she informed her parents that she was going with Uncle Second Son and Aunt McNugget Tamer to his parent’s house. She’s kind of cute like that.
We ended up with seventeen people for dinner, including Middle Daughter’s new boyfriend 24-Pack. He got major brownie points from me for bringing along some cranberry-orange sauce. My mom used to make this and I lost the recipe years and years ago, and have missed it. Having it this year brought back some great memories.
I remarked to Diana that it was a little disturbing that we’re allowed to invite any number of people into our home and cook massive amounts of food for them with no supervision. I enjoy big gatherings and having lots of food for people. But I’ll confess to being more than a little paranoid about the whole production.
Timing is a big thing for me. I don’t want people to have to wait on something because I didn’t have whatever ready on time. Case in point: I told everyone to be ready for dinner around 6, but I didn’t actually pull the turkey until after 6:15. Yes, it’s a big holiday meal, so no one was upset about having to wait an extra half an hour. We had plenty of snacks and games and people to keep the littles occupied for the extra half-hour, so that wasn’t an issue either. But with a Southern-raised mother and German father, punctuality was a big thing when I was growing up. Heck, even my band director stressed it. So there’s that.
And when you’re playing with poultry and (deviled) eggs and so forth, there’s always a risk of salmonella contamination. As far as I know, no one has ever gotten sick from one of my dinners. But it’s constantly in the back of my mind, and even more so when other people bring food. Like, I know the precautions I take in my kitchen. But what about all these other people? Do they keep their kitchen as clean as I do when I’m cooking?
Cooking
I smoked the turkey again this year, second-guessing myself the whole time. I had a newish gadget to help out this year though. I’d previously picked up a Thermoworks Smoke remote thermometer for the smoker since the built-in thermometers aren’t known for their accuracy. The Smoke gives you one probe to monitor the cook chamber and another for the food, and there’s a remote screen that lets you keep an eye on things from inside the house.
Thermoworks also has the Signals unit with wi-fi capabilities so you can track things from your phone. I’d looked at it when I bought the Smoke, but decided at the time I didn’t want yet another app on my phone. I’d just keep track of my cooks using the Notes app. Piece of cake, right? Plus the Smoke was like $100 cheaper.
Right.
What I found was that I had a hard time remembering to check and record the temps with any kind of regularity. I might go fifteen minutes, then I might go forty-five. That made it hard to keep the cooking temperature consistent.
Then one day a few months ago, I discovered that the batteries on the remote reader had corroded, making the tension spring in the battery compartment break. I contacted Thermoworks to see if they’d warranty the unit, and they would. Cool. Great service from them. And while I was talking to them, I learned that they had a wi-fi Gateway for the Smoke now, for like $90. I thought about it for a day or so, and the warranty guy said he’d knock 20% off, and they’d cover the shipping if I bought it now, since they were already shipping the new remote.
Sure, why not?
Once I got things connected (the gateway only works on 2.4Ghz networks, so I had to fiddle with the phone and change networks), I really appreciated having the graphing of the temps to review. There’s a big notes field to go along with each cook session, so you can write down what woods you used and so forth. There’s also free cloud storage for your data along with three paid levels. The only thing I’d like to see is the ability to add events to the graph, like when you add wood to the firebox or something. But otherwise, I’m really happy with the gateway.
I may have created a Thanksgiving monster. Now that I’ve successfully smoked two turkeys, the boys want me to do a turducken for next Thanksgiving. To quote Dr. Sam Beckett, “Oh, boy.”
The Game
Holy crap. What an absolute nail biter of a game. And really, I don’t think I’ve seen a more classic version of The Game in years. This was a defensive battle from start to finish.
I wasn’t expecting a win. Quite honestly, I wasn’t expecting us to even lead at all during the game. I wanted us to make it hard on Ohio State and to give our best on the field. Pretty sure that’s exactly what we did.
Ryan Day is now 1-4 against Michigan. Four losses, especially four consecutive losses, are a huge psychological barrier, I think. There’s a graduating class at Ohio State that never won against Michigan. I think when Michigan was on the other side of that, it became a significant barrier that kept our mindset focused on the losses rather than working towards winning. And I don’t want this to turn into another dynasty like Urban Meyer had against us. The series is so much more enjoyable, I think, when it’s something of a back-and-forth contest, like the 10-year war between Bo and Woody.
Writing this section twenty minutes after the game, I’m still in shock. I enjoyed our flashes of brilliance, especially the interceptions against Howard. But I kept expecting the wheels to come off the bus. We’ve done this throughout the season, where we played a good game for the most part but then things just fell apart late. I worried that we didn’t have the endurance, especially with our defense. We were 6-5 coming into the game, so we’d had quite a rough year. Yes, we’re technically bowl-eligible, but we weren’t anywhere close to the conference championship or the playoffs. We weren’t even ranked in the top 25. Tulane ranked higher than Michigan. I’m sure somewhere my mom is giving my dad grief about that.
I completely expected our guys to be smoked halfway through the third quarter because I expected Ohio State to absolutely dominate offensively. But we held them to 77 yards rushing which was an absolutely phenomenal performance.
Today was a good day for football.
Writing
I didn’t make goal this week, missing by 2,300 words, but I didn’t expect to, either. We had a bunch of Nutcracker rehearsals since all of the kids at the studio were on Thanksgiving break. I may not make goal the rest of the year. We have two shows plus tech and dress rehearsals the second week of December, plus another show at a different venue the following week. Then we’re into Christmas. We’ll see. I expect to hit the ground running after the first of the year though.
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