Turkey day!

I don't know why even Mark Bittman, who's something of a recipe guru at my house, doesn't like turkey. Turkey is fabulous, especially when Omaha makes it.

Thursday started with my conducting a massive decluttering and vacuuming of the living room, dining room, and kitchen, rendering the house navigable. It also meant that piles of stuff the children had left lying around were dumped onto their beds for them to deal with. Yamaraashi-chan was with her mother, but Kouryou-chan grumped and groaned while I made her put her stuff away. I did a furious vacuuming of the living room and hallway, and swept everywhere else there was bare floor, and had the place mostly cleaned up, the kitchen cleared, the couches ready for guests, by the time lisakit showed up with the salad.

Omaha cooked up a storm, making a 13-pound turkey masterpiece using an overnight apple cider brining, along with a pecan yam casserole, browned butter carrots, the flakiest dinner rolls on Earth, bread-based stuffing, and I can't remember everything else. It was a feast. Shasta and LSB showed on time with Stone in tow, bearing some exquisite cheeses. Suprisingly, Stone and Kouryou-chan got along pretty well despite the lack of a moderating influence from either Joy or Yamaraashi-chan. We ate, we had dessert, we catted about relatives and ex's, played a round of Quiddler, and eventually the guests went home.

Omaha and I did an amazing bit of teamwork while cooking, and the guests were just as helpful cleaning up. I had a lot still to do this morning, but not nearly as much as I might have otherwise. Still, given how tryptophaned out I was last night, I had only a few hours this morning to do all the dishes and all the hand washing (because we used Omaha's super wonderful and super rare Avon glassware) before Kouryou-chan and I headed out to lunch with Lisa. Omaha was gone that morning; she had gone out with a friend at 4:45AM to do the Black Friday thing.

We had lunch at the food court and Uwajimaya, which was much less busy than one would expect from a mall food court on a Black Friday.

When I got home I was so exhausted that I just took a two-hour nap, and when I woke up my brain wasn't home. It just kinda sparked uselessly until bedtime. I tried everything to wake up, I even drank an afternoon coffee, and still went to bed at 10:30 and slept like a rock.

Not buying.

The other day, I was with Kouryou-chan and Omaha at Third Place Books, one of the most amazing bookstores in the Greater Seattle area. Situated at the north end of the city, Third Place is amazing not for its book selection, which is pretty large for an independent but it's no Powells. It might not even have the same selection as a Barnes & Noble. It's amazing for the surrounding food court, complete with a stage, at which local bands regularly appear to put on free concerts and generate huge attention among the crunchy granola set.

But while Third Place's book selection is average, it's SF selection is well informed. Rather than huge strips of boring media tie-ins, the SF section has small sections of cutting edge authors; this is the bookstore where Matter was on the shelves three weeks before the US release, and where copies of Rifters and Blindsight can still be found on the shelves. It's the kind of bookstore where someone puts little hand-written review slips under some books, slips indicating "Someone here actually read this."

And yet, despite my love of reading, I didn't buy anything. I found that amazing. For the first time in ages, I was in a great bookstore and left empty-handed. My to-read stack is full. I already have a half-dozen books yet to read, and I've gotten very tired of carrying dead tree editions. Heck, even though I bought Saturn's Children the day it came out I didn't read it until I procured an unlocked e-book edition that I could put on my Palm.

I don't know if that's a sign of maturity, economic wisdom, or just senility. Or if it's just sad.

A Puzzle In An Enigma In An Earworm

Every day I wake up with a song stuck in my head. Usually, I'm left scratching my head trying to figure out what, if anything, it's trying to tell me.

Today's song is particularly perplexing. It's Those Were The Days, the theme song of All In The Family.