Back to (What Passes For) Normal

The house feels very quiet with only the four of us in it. I miss the family, yet relish the quiet. If only they lived a couple of houses down... but one cannot have everything.

Some random snippets and musings from our festivities:

There is an awful lot of meat on a 20-pound turkey. (That was the smallest they had when I got there.)

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As a rule I disapprove of fancy labor-saving kitchen contraptions, but if anyone invents a pearl-onion peeler I'll buy it. Everyone (except me and Miss B) loves creamed onions, but no one wants to peel them.

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Me (in the kitchen): This new wool underwear I just bought from LL Bean is amazingly warm.
Dad: Doesn't it itch?
Me: It's merino.
Dad: Who's he?
Grant (from the living room): Used to quarterback the Dolphins.

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Have you ever played Catopoly? Monopoly, only instead of properties you buy cats. If you get a catopoly you can buy litterboxes, and when you have four litterboxes for each cat you can buy fish bones. Instead of free parking there is free catnip. It's quite amusing.

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Speaking of cats, ours aren't too happy with lots of strange people in the house. (No remarks from the cheap seats, please: I of course mean strange in the sense of unfamiliar.) But it happens only a couple of times a year, and they just have to deal with it.

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I boiled the hell out of the cranberries as Carole suggested, and I emerged victorious.

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After over 30 years together I had no idea Grant hated cranberry sauce. I like it, but cranberries are the one thing on my forbidden-foods list that I stay religiously away from, lest I pay soon and dearly for my sins.

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Everyone remained in good health for the holiday, except our desktop PC, which has some kind of nasty virus. I'm in the midst of the cleanup procedure, which involves a number of very time-consuming virus scans. It could be worse. (There was the year I got food poisoning, for example, while six months pregnant with Miss B.)

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Instead of exchanging gifts in the traditional way everyone put two items into a Yankee swap. We ended up with most of the ones I picked out, which is OK because I picked out what I thought most people would like and could use (and I am called upon to knit myself a pair of socks, which is good because I can wait very patiently), but next year I will try to do better.

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We fly out to Ohio Monday to spend New Year's with Grant's sister. A couple of days' downtime in between celebrations is an essential element of the two-party system.

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Back to disinfecting...