Penny and the Big Dork: A Hard Candy Christmas

Episode 41 of the "Penny the Big Dork" podcast, hosted by Darin and Penny, begins casually with music and technical checks, including Darin muting his TV and acknowledging live viewers. The hosts discuss their Christmas photo organizing chaos involving 65,000 Muppet pictures and Google Photos' facial recognition features for their family. They announce that the following Sunday's episode will be a potentially emotional show featuring their grandson Brantley to talk about his surgeries and life, which they need to finalize logistics for. The conversation then transitions to Thanksgiving plans, excitement for mashed potatoes and Ama's famous, thicker-style deviled eggs (as opposed to Penny's creamier, mayonnaise-heavy version), and Penny's plan to make shrimp cocktail from scratch using pre-cooked, but needing-to-be-poached, shrimp. A brief digression is made to honor the 250th Marine Corps Birthday (November 10th, 1775), which Darin missed mentioning last week. Penny then updates listeners on her college coursework, where she's struggling with general education classes—specifically getting D's on short papers for not writing enough and a recent A-minus on a job-related paper because she didn't formally cite her sources (her job experience and memory). She humorously vows to cite "SIRI" and her "brain" on future papers. The hosts conclude by sharing their "Song of the Week"—Dolly Parton's "Hard Candy Christmas" from the 1980s Kenny and Dolly special—and Penny's ongoing "issue" of finding the mysteriously absent squeezable guacamole tube from Walmart, which Darin's online search suggests might only be available at Target.