The lost potato salad... that's very whistful to me even without a concussion.

My cranberry sauce is the Ocean Spray bag recipe with half the sugar and some orange zest. Not too much though or you barely taste the cranberry!

Thanksgiving at my cousin's was great. Lots of really good food, good company, and another cousin's sweetheart dog licking me as if I were a popsicle. The quinoa salad I made got lots of compliments, but was definitely in the lower tiers of the potluck—there was a fried turkey, excellent dressing, mac & cheese, couscous & mushrooms, and an orange pie that was out of this world. And somehow my salad expanded to almost fill its bowl when I took it home even though I saw multiple people spooning it out and had two servings myself!

And then her gf got mad at her and stormed off and sent multiple texts and a voice message….and so friend and I watched a movie for a bit and when I came back to my room to go to bed discovered the gf has left me a 5 minute long voice message. Ummmmmm…..

Someone's begging for a stuffed llama for Christmas!

ETA: I forgot to mention the horror of the new taco truck I tried out Saturday. The street tacos were okay, if a bit spicy for my taste, but the pork tamales had multiple tiny bones in them! They looked for all the world like chicken ribs or wing bones, and I can't think of anywhere on even a piglet that would have bones that small! So in addition to the basic yuck factor of finding bones in a tamale, I'm left wondering exactly what kind of animal that meat came from—I hope it was at least warm-blooded...

I got my Claim number. And I left a voice mail for the Case worker personnel. Hopefully I'll get q call back.

I made potoat salad several years ago and just improvised. I know I used whole small red potatoes and I made a dressing that had pickle juice in it as well as pickles, mustard, and I don't know what else I mixed up the dressing and then put the potatoes in while it was still warm and tossed them around and then seasoned to taste. I don't think there was mayo.

I think I was working off an existing recipe but who knows from where.

I do recommend adding potatoes to the dressing while the potatoes are warm so they can absorb more of the flavor.

I agree there should definitely be cranberries to cut the other foods.

Thankfully the five minute voicemail was not nearly as batshit as I feared—more “my side of the story” (thoug that was drama llama enough) and less what I feared (angry rant about me visiting or my friendship with her gf or whatever)

I am going to cautiously say I think I'm seeing some improvement. After dealing with workers comp and resting some I called Spectrum and canceled cable and just have the internet.

And I could talk mostly coherently and I haven't slept since I got up at whatever time that was. 11 maybe. Feels l Ionger ago.

Tomorrow I may try to tackle seeing if Geico can get me cheaper car insurance.

Or maybe not.

Matt, I am intrigued and would like to hear more about this orange pie of which you speak. I like oranges. I like pie.

I really liked taking as much time as we took around the holiday. We went from Monday-Saturday, and we were able to see DP's family multiple times while staying with my sister. It was nice. Now, it was also small and quiet, too, so I'm guessing that had a lot to do with it.

We went to Longwood Gardens on the way home, but it was daylight, so we didn't see the outside lights; we just went to the conservatory. It was pretty, but I think more than half the fun is the outdoor lights. I hadn't been in more than a decade, though. Glad we did it.

I would need to sample all the cranberry varieties to give an educated opinion on which was the best.

I am sorry it has been such a fraught visit.

Thanks. Just like my visit in July, it's difficult negotiating boundaries when we're still in the pandemic and I'm the one who's the most stringent. But I'm still testing negative, so I've got that going for me.

I would need to sample all the cranberry varieties to give an educated opinion on which was the best.

I'm all about the Cranberries cooked with Port and OJ with tiny slivers of orange zest. By far my favorite, and now Matilda knows how to make it.

I'm about to make more stuffing because it's already gone before the other leftovers and it's everybody's favorite, plus I can offload some to our friend Maggie. Also, I just like making muffin sized strata with leftover stuffing as a quick morning bite.

Yeesh, you guys, aging parents are stressful. At some point this week, Tim's dad should be moved from the rehab center to the long-term nursing care wing of his assisted living community. So he won't be in the super-swanky part any more, but the buildings are attached, which means his buddies can visit him, which will hopefully be good for his state of mind. And it will be a familiar setting for him, which should also be good for his state of mind.

His doctors have said that a significant amount of his physical decline is, basically, because he stopped getting any physical activity like 6 years ago. Including (pre-assisted living) not going to the grocery store *with* Tim and just staying home and letting Tim go for him, so he didn't even walk around Kroger once a week.

And while I'm not too fussed about turning 50 this year, seeing Tim's dad's physical decline has really hit home about how important it is to stay active (in whatever capacity a person is able to, of course), because it's not a magic wand that wards off everything, but it sure helps. It's motivated me to stay active.*

My own train wreck of a dad is still having hallucinations -- he apparently called my brother last week and recounted a long, vivid hallucination to him (I don't know what it involved, because I didn't ask). My brother called the geriatrician's nurse practitioner about it, and she just called and left a message for me, because I'm the only family member she's authorized to talk to. Honestly, I took a big step away from this entire thing with my dad and his hallucinations in September, because he thought it was appropriate to share something with me that was very genuinely triggering (in the clinical sense of the word) and disturbing. And that's why my brother took over, but I guess my dad has to give the geriatrician's office permission to share information with my brother. So I have to fucking deal with it right now, which is not what I was expecting.

*(Re: me, staying active -- I still don't have the cardio endurance I had before Covid. And when I say "cardio," I mean brisk walking. I'm at maybe 2/3 the capacity I was before. My therapist gave me some grief about not seeing Awesome Doctor about that, but seriously, there's nothing he can do except make a note in my chart. If this is part of long Covid, there's no magic wand to make it go away. Literally the best we've got for long Covid is "Well, give it some time." So I'm walking as much as I can, and trying not to beat myself up for my reduced capacity.)