Ok, first of all I wish to high­light that I’ve placed a new count­down on the right hand side­bar of this site for the movies being released in the upcom­ing month. I will try to keep this updated on a monthly basis but can­not promise to do so merely because I may become too busy to update it reg­u­larly. Hope­fully this won’t be the case.

Now on to those reviews (note: I won’t review all of the movies that you see on the monthly list, only those that I am inter­ested in either see­ing on the big screen or on dvd once they have been released). On with those reviews!

I really don’t know if any­one actu­ally reads my movie picks for the year or not (started doing them last year), how­ever it is a handy tool for me at least. I use this as a means to keep in mind what movies I would like to see dur­ing the year as long as I have the funds to do so. I will place links to trail­ers if I am able to find them, if not I will prob­a­bly only give a very short descrip­tion of the film.

With­out fur­ther adieu I give you my picks for the new year.…..

The only order these are in are chrono­log­i­cal. I may com­ment on how much I really wish to see the movie in the description.

My first choice will be Crazy on the Out­side star­ring Tim Allen, Ray Liotta, Kelsy Gram­mer, and Sigour­ney Weaver being released on Jan. 8, 2010. This one looks quite good and will most likely be a Net­flix rental for me when it is released on DVD. I doubt if I will go to the big screen to see this one. Here’s a link to the trailer:

Had a won­der­ful Thanks­giv­ing this year with Mike, Nikki, Tim, Grandma Dar, Der­rell, Emma, Jean and myself in atten­dance. Jean decided she wanted me to smoke the turkey this year (which I have not done in MANY years) and as such we needed to down­size our bird selec­tion. The experts state that you need to use a 10 to 14 lb. bird to smoke in order to pre­vent pos­si­ble sal­mo­nella con­t­a­m­i­na­tion since the cook­ing process is slow and low (low tem­per­a­tures at a very slow pace). So, with that in mind we were off last Sat­ur­day to Jewel/Osco to pick up a prop­erly sized bird since they had them on sale for .89 per lb. with a $10 off coupon on birds between 14 and 24 lbs. Of course we were unable to find a 14 lb. bird so we had to ask my buddy Chris to help us out. He found a 15.3 lb. bird for us and we decided that would be close enough so we pur­chased it (thanks for the help Chris!). So we brought it home and on Mon­day evening I moved it from the freezer to the refrig­er­a­tor to start the thaw­ing out process. We also went to Sam’s Club to pick up a spi­ral cut ham for those who do not care for smoked turkey. I also got a 5+ pound roast­ing chicken out as I hate to smoke just one item at a time (since it uses so much char­coal you really need to con­sol­i­date as much smoked meats as pos­si­ble). After two days of thaw­ing out I made my brine on Wedness­day night for both birds. In case you don’t remem­ber the basic brine process here is the recipe for that:

Title: Thanks­giv­ing
Date: 2009-11-26

Been hit­ting the same hunt­ing grounds this year pretty hard since I’ve been off of work so much. The good thing about that is that I have lots of oppor­tu­nity to har­vest a deer early and put some meat in the freezer, the bad thing about that is that I have lots of oppor­tu­nity to get frus­trated by not see­ing or not get­ting the white­tail deer close enough to shoot. Kind of a dou­ble edged sword there. As I put in an ear­lier post my deer blind was basi­cally under water for a week or so while we were in flood stage along the creek bed. Dur­ing this time I moved my stand to another piece of land that I hap­pened to acquire while ask­ing the landowner for per­mis­sion to har­vest any deer that I shoot if they ran onto his land. He stated that he had given some oth­ers per­mis­sion to hunt his land but no one had taken him up on his offer. Well I decided to a quick scout and found an oak grove at the top of the hill that looked like it had a LOT of activ­ity in it. Basi­cally this oak grove (about a dozen mature white oaks over­look­ing a nice glade) is between 3 corn fields and the landowner has seen lot’s of deer run­ning the area. The bad part is that the trees are so mature that my tree stand will just barely fit onto the tree. It’s up now and I won’t be mov­ing it again until after sea­son when I can get an actual lad­der there to help me take it down (not as young as I used to be). I had some other mat­ters to attend to for the next 2 days and did not get back to my stand until the 3^rd day. No sight­ing at that time but I have hopes for this spot.