Create a Thanksgiving Sign Up Sheet

You’ve got a lot of research to do now that you have that turkey thawing in the refrigerator. Should you smoke it? How about frying? If you are frying, make sure you read all of the warnings so you don’t create a poultry inferno (seriously, be careful)? How about a Bourbon glaze? You are hosting this dinner, so you need an excuse to buy a BIG bottle, right? Speaking of hosting, don’t forget those last few hours when you realize everyone is coming over and you and start to frantically clean the house. All of this planning and work and you haven’t even STARTED thinking about sides and desert, right? I’ve got a question. What is the rest of your family stressing over? Shouldn’t you get them to work on those casseroles and pies? I mean, there are a lot of delicious recipes out there just waiting to be brought to go along with your amazing turkey (I have faith in you, it is going to turn out great, soooo juicy). Get the rest of those slackers working too by creating a Thanksgiving sign up sheet!

I know you want to do everything yourself, but everyone else wants to contribute too. Everyone at the table this Thanksgiving wants to take their turn explaining how they came up with that recipe from scratch (they are lying). Don’t deny them their moment and take the side dish burden off of yourself at the same time. With ThingToBring.com, you can create a sign up sheet for Thanksgiving, your next potluck or any other event where you want to tell people what they can bring to the party. Don’t know what you want them to bring? That’s cool, they can add their own Thing to Bring when they RSVP on the site. Simply create the event, invite all of your family and friends and they will get an email saying they “have a Thing To Bring” to your Thanksgiving dinner. Once they click on the link, they can RSVP and then sign up for anything you listed as needed for the party or they can add their own super-secret mac and cheese dish. You just sit back, keep researching that turkey and sip on some of that extra Bourbon. Everyone else can spend their time online trying to find a recipe they can take credit for too. Stuffing, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, broccoli casserole…..oh man, and the pies! I need to get to work too!

Win the Tailgate and Discovering Missing Features

As a season ticket holder, I am generally very optimistic about my USF Bulls. Given the many upset wins we have had over the years, I am convinced we can beat anybody on any given day. However, I am also a realist, so I knew we were in trouble when the number 4 team in the country (Florida State) was coming to town. You see, this was the highest ranked team we have ever played and given the fact that FSU is a more established Florida football program, we knew the sellout crowd would be split pretty evenly. So if we didn’t have the advantage in the stadium, we needed to make sure we did in the parking lot. That meant we needed to really blow it out and win the tailgate! Even though the game didn’t work out in our favor, the party did and we won the tailgate by a landslide.

Our tailgate planning started as usual, with an “anchor” protein around which we wanted to build a menu. I had dedicated myself to smoking 12 pounds of pork shoulder overnight, so I needed everyone else to make the sides while I grabbed a power nap before the game. I created an online sign up sheet for our party and my awesome tailgating partners did the rest. The pork was amazing, we all ate too much and then entered the stadium fat, happy and optimistic about the game.

I’m still working out the kinks with ThingToBring, so I keep running in to new features I need to add to make my party planning life easier. This week’s realization was that we need a way to let attendees add new friends. When you send out a sign up sheet for something like a tailgate or picnic, inevitably someone is going to want to ask “mind if so-and-so comes too”. Of course the answer is yes, but then the follow up is always “what can they bring”. So I need to work on a way to let “so-and-so” be added to the sign up, but in a way that doesn’t let people go crazy and start spamming people (spamming bad, party good). Maybe a way to let the organizer approve the addition of a friend prior to the invite being sent out?