Thanks

Much like the Thanksgivings of old in San Francisco, when we would sleep in, go see a movie or three and come home to make ground turkey burritos, Bif and I managed to avoid any family drama (directly anyway) for Thanksgiving. To which I give thanks.

Being she can begin having a child at any moment, she decided she did not want to make the hour to an hour and a half drive to Bremerton for the family Thanksgiving celebration. We had dinner at Mandy and Jason's, just the 4 of us, and just delightful. To which I give thanks.

We got dropped a small bit of family drama in that as Biffy's mom and dad have come up here to be with us with the impending baby, Thanksgiving itself was in jeopardy. In a glorious, passive-aggressive move from a grandmother who had attempted some other delightful passive-aggressive moves to keep the parents-in-law from leaving Los Angeles, the news came down the wire that Grandma did not know how to cook a turkey. As it turned out, the other grandmother claimed to not know how to cook a turkey either.

Okay, what? Not only did these two woman hail from the generation where they cooked every meal ever eaten in the household as the husbands obstinately refused to cook - and this is DEFINITELY true of these ladies, cooking a turkey is not akin to roasting a pig in a pit with hot coals. How did Thanksgiving go down when mom-in-law was too small to cook the damn turkey for them? What happened to their cookbooks?

And then other family members began jumping into the fray and throwing blame on popular family scapegoats... Whatever, family drama. As I was saying, we managed to avoid the great brunt of it. To which I give thanks.

Dinner? Just a giant slice of fantastic. There was turkey of course, which Jason also did not know how to cook, but managed to do it without purposefully trying to cause trouble and make people feel sorry for him at the same time - he's awesome. There was enough mashed potatoes to make an actual sized replica of Devil's Tower, gravy, sweet potatoes (and not that sickeningly sweet variety of them), corn, cranberry sauce from scratch, stuffing with apple and walnuts, brussel sprouts (thank you again Eric), and homemade rolls that I managed to burn on the bottom a little - sorry guys. There was also pecan pie and Mandy's chocolate pudding pie creation. Insert sound of smacking lips here...

Good dinner, good friends, inappropriate conversations and board games. Apparently Mandy will not play Scene-It with me anymore though...

Thank you M&J for having us over, for a great dinner and for a brief reprieve from the formless fear of what's to come any minute now.


No!vember song of the day: An Ode To No One by The Smashing Pumpkins.