I got a flu shot this year as has been my practice for several years now. I don't know quite what the illness was that we got but mine was a very mild case of it. Most noticeably were the sore glands on both sides of my neck, the swollen dry feeling in my throat, and the weariness I felt weighted down with. It may have been a virus instead of the flu, I dunno. My theory is that if I do get one of the flu's going around that I don't get it half as bad as I would have if I hadn't had the flu shot. On Friday I had that out-of-sorts feeling all day. You know that feeling you have when you think you're starting to come down with something? It was like that. And I felt more tired than usual. It was around that time frame that the Muckheads started having symptoms, too.

I was able to make two pumpkin pies for eating and two loaves of bread for stuffing in anticipation of My Little Sunshine coming to visit the next day. I started calling Kip "My Little Sunshine" years ago when we all lived together and we watched the movie, "What's Eating Gilbert Grape." All the characters in that family fit all the people in my family except for Kip. Kip being the youngest son got stuck with the youngest son's role in the movie which was played by a fledging Leonardo DiCaprio. The character was a mentally challenged boy so Kip went around imitating him. "Match in the gas tank. Boom, boom." The mother in the movie called her son My Little Sunshine and so, naturally, I had to call Kip that. And that's the way family legends are born, heh, heh. The picture on the left is from Addy's birthday in September this year. That's Kip's girl, Emily.

By Saturday, my symptoms didn't get any worse, thankfully. I made stuffing and ate too much of it in the process. Just can't resist that stuffing. Amy had bought the turkey. She had a meeting at the UU church so she left Todd in charge of making their kind of stuffing and getting the bird in the oven. Which he did. He makes a pretty great stuffing. I got 20 pounds of sweet potatoes on to boil. It felt like 20 pounds but probably wasn't. It did end up being way too many but when we had our second Thanksgiving yesterday we used up those leftover sweet potatoes.

Yeh, we had a second Thanksgiving. Guess I just can't fight tradition. On the Saturday before, it really didn't feel weird that we were having Thanksgiving. Once we got into the big preparation for the feast, all the 'normal' sensations of it being Thanksgiving came back. We don't watch the Macy's parade anymore so we didn't notice that that was missing. If we wanted the traditional football game going on TV, we could have watched Ohio State's last football game of the season but we completely forgot about that. (I just now took a side trip to find out about my favorite Buckeyes and learned that they won the Big 10 championship this year and are going to be in the Rose Bowl on New Year's Day. Cool!) What I'm saying is that the holiday is just a state of the mind. To me, it didn't feel right to do it on a different day. It had to be on THE day or it wouldn't feel like THE day. Maybe I'm just getting older and stuff like that doesn't matter as much anymore. Go with the flow, you know.

Like I said, I boiled the sweet potatoes, and later Amy made them into whipped sweet potatoes and set them in the oven to bake along with the stuffing and traditional green bean almondine dish we always have. That's Kip's favorite. I managed to make a chocolate pumpkin cake (yeh, really, chocolate and pumpkin combined; makes it moister), too. And it was wonderfully good although I would change to regular frosting next time. Kip and Emily arrived right when the dinner was all set on the table and ready to eat. He has a knack about doing that. It was a pleasant evening, nothing really memorable to talk about, well, maybe Emily getting a bad attack of asthma from being in the house with our three cats might be something to remember. The next day she went to an urgent care facility because she couldn't breathe. Her lungs weren't quite rid of the bronchitis and the cat allergy aggravated the condition to a dangerous level. Thankfully, she survived that ordeal. Poor girl. It does make it difficult for them to come down and visit for any length of time in the winter.

So when the official Thanksgiving day came around, it just didn't seem right not to cook turkey. So I did. The turkey I had bought, at the same time Amy had bought hers, had been in the fridge thawing out. Again, the day before I made two pumpkin pies for eating and two loaves of bread for stuffing. Told you we love stuffing. All that stuffing from Saturday was all gone. For the rest of the dinner we had the leftover sweet potatoes, like I said, and Brussel sprouts. Pretty simple. It was nice not to have knocked myself out preparing bunches of food. I do like a big variety of succulent dishes at Thanksgiving and a crowd of family but my energy and stamina level aren't what they used to be. Maybe my three boys will come up from Tennessee some year. My mild illness was pretty much gone except for some soreness still in the neck glands. Todd wasn't with us that day because he had opted to work in order to benefit from the time and a half he would get. They bought a 2004 Honda Odyssey minivan last month and need to pay it off. That is how our holiday went. Bill went to work the next day at regular pay and Todd did, too, at time and a half pay again.

I did something that I have intensely avoided doing for all these years. I went out shopping on Black Friday. You know, that's the day after Thanksgiving when the Christmas buying season is officially kicked on. I needed a few groceries but I went with the intention of seeing if a certain yard decoration had been marked down. It wasn't, darnit. But I did browse the toy aisle and I did find a thing or two for Christmas gift giving. As I was going down one aisle to get to another I came across all these cake baking supplies. I was struck by the appeal of them and stopped to finger a few items. One was silicone baking cups that had feet on the bottom of them. Cute as hell but there was something about them that hit a nerve, a very sensitive nerve.

You see, I've been very upset about all the dastardly acts of war that have been brought to light for the past six years. Yes, six damn long years of misery and strife and killing in a country that should not have been invaded by us. I've been depressed as hell about how the current administration behaves. So, I guess I should not watch movies that add to any depression I'm having about the state of the world and add to my knowledge of world suffering. The movies that have gotten to me were all about Africa's stormy not-too-distant past.

"Hotel Rwanda" was a moving story about Don Cheadle left in charge of a hotel in Rwanda during the genocide of 1994. I watched this movie a couple of years ago. Then just a few weeks ago I watched Denzel Washington in the movie about Steve Biko, "Cry Freedom", and his crusade against apartheid in South Africa. That one stuck in my head quite profoundly. And then, on Wednesday of this week, I watched "Blood Diamonds" (starring an older Leonardo DiCaprio) and I was blown away. Enslaving men and children to stand in the river all day to find the diamonds for whoever was in charge that week, the children being taken and made to fight in the revolution, the brutality of tearing apart whole villages and shooting women and children, and then . . . the mutilations. Scores of people had their hands chopped off--one or both, their feet, their feet plus a hand, an arm, the ears . . . even babies weren't spared. How vile can a person be? To chop off an 18-month-old's fingers. Evidently pretty damn vile. This one is haunting me. How do you dress yourself when you have no hands? How do you feed yourself? Cook? Go to the bathroom? Just imagine that.