It ain't all bitching and whining.

This is the Bean's Thanksgiving art project. It's a turkey, and its feathers name things she's thankful for. She ran out of room so decided to go in a complete circle.

The Peanut's is harder to photograph - it's a paper chain with something she's thankful for written on each link. She included a lot of the same stuff her sister did (they worked on these "secretly" together in the Peanut's room the day before Thanksgiving), but with the chain format's limitless space she was able to add "hospitals, books, water, a bed to sleep in, trees, a nice teacher, [eye]glasses, a nice contrey, animals, love, a nice school, hollidays, a house, my stuft animals."

Why can't people leave people alone, part the nth

I guess this is as good a place as any for my rant about how Black Friday is emblematic of everything wrong with American culture these days. It isn't enough now that stores have to open at 5:00 AM... now they start at midnight, or even the night of Thanksgiving. So people who work retail have to cut their family holiday short to accommodate our collective lust for competition to buy cheap crap. Yeah yeah, we're grateful, we gorged ourselves to prove it, now get the fuck out of our way or suffer the consequences. Pepper spray is the new elbow to the ribs.

I know that everyone who shops the day after Thanksgiving doesn't behave this way, and I guess I should be thankful that unlike last year, nobody was trampled to death. Still, the whole concept disgusts me. Pffft.

I have some shopping to do today myself, hopefully while Black Friday lovers are still sleeping it off. Not Christmas shopping, which I plan to do only very locally or online this year -- just for groceries. Yet, even with Thanksgiving still visible in the rearview mirror, I can expect to encounter the bells, the bells, the relentless bells.

So I printed out my little notes for the red kettles, politely explaining that my donations go elsewhere while the Salvation Army maintains its position that homosexual people should not only not be allowed to marry, but should be celibate. 

Hopefully I won't forget which pocket holds which paper.  Both my purposes will be amusingly defeated if the red kettle gets my shopping list, leaving me with a scrap of cheerfully expressed social activism to guide me through the grocery store.

a non-update

Yes, I am still here, and no, I never did figure out what that ticking was.

November has been... intense. Memorial services for two terrific, accomplished, vibrant and beautiful women. My mother's stay in the hospital for hip replacement surgery and rehab, and my father's stay with us during some of that. A four-day conference of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees. Continued construction on the house. Meetings, playdates, parent/teacher conferences, basketball practices, Tuesdays in the school art room, Thursdays in the school library.

Thanksgiving.

All worth writing about, but there is no uninterrupted time for that any more, unless I get up at 5:00 AM, which is how it happened today, but as great as it is to sit at my desk unobserved and undistracted, I could probably have made better use of staying asleep, which I would have if I could have.

Now I hear little feet on their way downstairs, so that's the end of unobserved and undistracted.

I hope your Thanksgivings were all lovely, or, outside the USA, that your November 24ths were just super.

I sense a nap in my near future.