Plei, I'm at a loss to understand how your brother could be a jackass.

Stupid universe.

Plei, I'm at a loss to understand how your brother could be a jackass.

Dude. He's like, if you took all the fandom crazy, and gave it form, then stripped the fan part out. A walking one-man Fandom Wank.

I keep forgetting that Ackles was in Dark Angel.

I think I'm going to get a fake tree this year, but not quite yet. I don't want to give the cats too much time to destroy it.

Thanks to Noisedesign, KristinT, MiracleMan, and Aimeé, for giving me the best Thanksgiving I've had in quite some time! Aimeé and Kristin, your cooking was wonderful! Thanks especially, Aims, for the vegetarian lasagna! I'm going to enjoy the leftovers for weeks!!

Today felt just like home, but with a healthy dose of Buffista-brand humor...

And, as always, I had a lot of fun playing and cavorting with the World's Cutest Nearly 2-yr-old! (The Punk!)

Also very much enjoyed getting soundly trounced at Halo 2 Multiplayer by Pete via XBox Live, complete with the sounds of Pete merrily chanting, "Killing, killing, killing" while slaughtering the four other players. (Which prompted my unexpected & likely imprudent use of the a-word.) Still, you bested all four of us at once. Well done, sir.

Good night all, and a slightly belated Happy Thanksgiving to All!!

Dude. He's like, if you took all the fandom crazy, and gave it form, then stripped the fan part out. A walking one-man Fandom Wank.

Crumbs! Badness!

Happy Shopping Day, USians. And L-Tryptophan Recovery Day.

Today was supposed to be Tree Up day, but our car quit working, so I spent the morning taking it to the garage, and will now spend the afternoon going to get it. We still might put the tree up this evening. I'm not sure how we are going to decorate it, since we don't really have any unbreakable ornaments...we failed to take the whole toddler thing into account.

ION, I leared today that if you are in the Greek military, you can be awarded the Order of the Phoenix.

So when do you sign up?

Yum, Thanksgiving food! We went to my aunt and uncles in Brookline (about a 45 minute drive from us) and it was a relatively small affair, aunt, uncle, cousin, Mom, Dad, Grandma, and another non-family couple which probably kept the rest of us civilized.

Aunt doesn't cook much anymore, so we had volunteered to make the sausage-sage-apple stuffing and cranberry-pear-ginger compote and brought over a chocolate pecan bread pudding, oat raisin rolls, and pumkin cornmeal bread from our local bakery. Then I told my aunt to sit down (she has back and knee problems) and I orchestrated the heating up of various things.

Things being: turkey (which she bought and we carved), our stuffing, vegetarian stuffing, mashed butternut squash, mashed potatoes, creamed onions, green bean casserole, our cranberry thing, and the cranberry jelly stuff with the can lines. Dessert was the aforementioned bread pudding, a pumpkin pie, an apple crumble pie, and a faux mincemeat pie that the cook had forgotten to add the brandy while mixing, so my uncle inserted 3 small funnels in the pie and poured Couvosier in before eating. My grandmother LOVED it!!! Heh.

I also spearheaded the cleanup movement. I got lots of props for all this, but it was all selfishly motivated, because being busy in the kitchen meant I did not have to make small talk and drink too much without really realizing it.

Then Tom and I drove home and caught the tail end of a Friends Thanksgiving episode marathon, which was exactly the kind of mindless TV I was in the mood for. Then slept like the dead.

This morning, we got up and hopped over to our farm so that we could get the jump on egg buying (they get snapped up quickly!) and, while chatting with the farmer, discovered that there were still some fresh killed turkeys available, so we bought a small one (6.5 lbs). There will be no brining of this bird, for the brine will overpower the very different flavor of this heritage breed, REALLY free range turkey. (These dudes flew, too - mostly at human eye level - Tom once almost got flown into!) So, YAY, second Thanksgiving!

Today we'll be heading back to Brookline for leftovers and stuff.

Sounds like everyone's had a relatively good holiday. It was lovely here. Lots of good food and good company.

Today is back to craziness. Off to do some research for a paper.

Whatever the hell that phrase means.

It means blown up by your own little bomb.

Our thanksgiving was neither good nor bad. It was good in the sense that we had very little responsibility or hosting stress, but was mostly a rather formal, unjolly affair punctuated by Matilda's arsenic hour. JZ stumbled around stoned on massive doses of allergy medicine. I think she said five sentences all night. After two hours my cat allergies kicked in hard. I spent most of the evening calming Matilda down and handing her off to somebody ignorant of the magic butt-pats, perfect angle of repose and bouncy walk necessary to keep her congenial between 6:30 and 8:30pm.

EM was good company, Emmett well-behaved and JZ's mom had interesting stories of her recent trip to India, but overall it was mildly strained and humorless.

Worse, her Dad committed the cardinal hosting sin of sending me home with NO leftovers. He had half a freaking turkey there. I need to go create my own turkey leftovers or I'll be depressed all week.

On the plus side, Matilda's arsenic hour in the evening is complemented by her honey hour in the morning after she's been fed. Emmett gave her a kiss and she smiled at him and he played with her in his lap for a solid half hour.