I cooked green bean casserole and stuffing today, and organized the fridge so that there will be room for the leftovers without squishing stuff. Next steps for me are finishing setting the table and making mashed potatoes.

Happy Thanksgiving, or Thursday, to everyone, wherever you are and however you celebrate, or don't.

There's the rattle of foil for the roasting pan and the muted babble of football. Things here are well underway.

So I am onerousing today. I've bought my ticket home for Christmas with the false bargain created by taking two more days off to drop the ticket price by a few hundred dollars.

Called the credit card company again to see why my fraudulent charges form hadn't showed up in the mail and I can't find it online, and now I'm faced with something that shouldn't be a challenge--there's a gas station charge that I can't work out if it's mine or not. My current idea to check is to see if that cryptic line shows up on any of my previous statements, but shouldn't there be a way for me to cross reference EXXONMOBIL 97640932 to an actual address, no?

At least I have mint.com which makes searching the past easier, but still. These codes show up on millions of statements. It's in some database somewhere.

Oh, and we listened to "Alice's Restaurant" on vinyl, no less.

Photographic evidence of the pies: [link]

Trace Adkins just made me cry with a song about fishing with his daughter. It's going to be a long day.

Aww. I like the idea of that song, even if I don't really like the song so much.

I am making chex mix (it has 15 minutes left) and then will put the pie in. We are watching West Wing (after the roommate and i tried for many minutes to figure out if we had something to connect our computers to the TV, and determined we didn't, and were going to try purchasing on Amazon through the TiVO, when I remembered that she OWNS all the seasons of the West Wing. Good grief)

Gnargh. Why am I going through my finances today of all days? I found more fraudulent charges to my credit card, a $100 phone call made calling support for work during the wee hours of the morning because the vendors 1-800 number wasn't working and I called the UK instead.

Which meant I logged into work email, and then there was stuff that needed to be answered, and the other stuff I should get a start on so it can be done before the west coast work day starts tomorrow, and ... I'm fucking putting this down on my timesheet, if they need all the details.

Ugh, and I forgot to account for an ER visit before going home....damn, this is all fucked up.

So, instead of staring disconsolately at my TiVo that keeps rebooting itself and then freezing (keeps me on my toes), I decided to flip through some of my open browser windows that have been cluttering the desktop forever.

And it's depressing stuff. I swear it has nothing to do with what day it is, but I found myself randomly reading the text of treaties between the US government and various Native nations, and I got as far as:

The Commissioners Plenipotentiary of all the Choctaw nation [...] shall also restore all the negroes, and all other property taken during the late war, from the citizens, to such person

and I realise I know nothing about the relationship of the Choctaw with slaves of this period. So, you know, Google.

Brought to Indian Territory in the 1830's Black Choctaws arrived with the Choctaw Indians as slaves. Prior to removal the Choctaws had been exposed to Africans in their native homeland of Mississippi. Slaves were a part of the European culture to which the Choctaws would later adapt. Slavery would be one of the institutions the nation would adopt. Chief Moshulatubbee had slaves as did many of the Europeans who married into the nation, with the Folsoms and LeFlores among the larger slave owners.

The only family of distinct free status in the Choctaw Nation at the time of removal was the Beams family, children of Nellie Beams. Though their status was later challenged by their half Choctaw siblings who sought to sell them for profit, their recognized status as free Choctaw citizens was noted by their fellow citizens. A full account of the saga of this family is found in the Journal of Negro History 1976. Slavery remained in the Choctaw Nation, till 1866, when the Treaty of 1866 signed in Ft. Smith, Arkansas requiring that The Choctaws release their Africans from bondage.

I did not know that Native Americans kept black slaves. Was this common?

I didn't know that either.

Not very, mostly by the more 'westernized' tribes that were in the south. It was encouraged at times by the local and federal government, because if the Native Americans were keeping slaves for plantation use, well that means that they are becoming just like the Europeans. Part of the reason it was not very widespread was that slaves were valuable, and if the Native Americans had stuff that was valuable, well, it tended to disappear into the nearest colonists' pocket. Slavery was only ever profitable in narrow circumstances, which required plantation agriculture. Land that was suited for that, well, that also tended to end up in European hands, and once the Native Americans were kicked off that sort of land for far less desirable lands, it became unprofitable. Despite that, several tribes did have slaves, the southern Cherokee seem to the worst offenders.

Wikipedia has an entry that leads to more info here.

A Breaking Bad thanksgiving (video) for those who are interested in such thing. [link]