odds and ends

disguised-turkey

I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving. Ours was very good, and we still have most of two pies to look forward to for the next several days.

Did anyone have any disasters in the kitchen yesterday? I remember the year one of Mom’s teacher friends told her that the best way to cook a turkey was to put it in at about 200° the night before. The other teacher swore that it came out pefect and was ready whenever she wanted to serve it. So, Mom did just that. We got up the next morning at about 8 and found that the turkey was done. Mom called all the guests and told them that dinner would be a little earlier than she had planned. When they tried to get it out of the roasting pan, the legs came off. As I remember, it tasted pretty good…

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Someone asked on Facebook the other day if we had to get dressed up for dinner on Thanksgiving. The answer, of course, was “YES!” We got dressed in white shirts, ties, dress slacks, and suit jackets for all the holidays. And when we’d go out to dinner. That was just the way things were done in those days. Sometimes Mom would let us take off our jackets. But not often. Feels weird now. The only time we see people dressed up to go to dinner anymore is in the afternoon when we see some business people dressed in suits. But we don’t see it that frequently. I don’t miss it.

So, today is “Black Friday,” the day that retail stores finally get in the black for the year, but so many stores are opening on Thanksgiving that it’s taken the frenzy out of the day. From some artices I’ve seen, the tradition of Black Friday is moving overseas to the UK. What’s the attraction? If you do plan on going to the sales today, be careful out there.

If-you-have-a-bunch-of

Kristen Lamb once again hits it out of the park with “How to Become a Lean, Mean Writing MACHINE.” Since I began blogging every day, I look at these entries as my daily column, and I’ve learned that “getting it perfect” is nowhere near as important as “getting it done.” Kristen tells us “blogging is the new journalism,” and goes on to explain why.
Today’s WordPress Daily Post asks, “As a kid, were you happy or anxious about going back to school? Now that you’re older, how has your attitude toward the end of the summer evolved?”

I wasn’t particularly happy about going back to school, but I wouldn’t say anxious, either. I had four First Days of School where I was excited: starting high school, starting at a new high school, starting college, and starting at a new college. The rest of them were “eh, first day of school.”

The one year it was interesting was third grade: Dad would take his vacation the week before Labor Day, and we’d go to Wisconsin for the week. Well, that year they decided to start school the last week of August. Dad had a hard enough time getting vacation that week, and we had already put a deposit on a vacation house, so he decided that we would just start after Labor Day and the nuns would just have to suck it. The nun I had was not happy that they let my father get away with that, and I remember being picked up by the ear and told as much for some minor infraction of classroom decorum. Mom was never shy about calling and giving the principal a piece of her mind, when the occasion called for it, and that occasion did. We had no further trouble with that nun that year, but I did have a contretemps with the principal later that year that resulted in lacerations to my cheek.

Now that I’m older and living in the south, I’m happy for the end of summer, although it stays hot and humid until about mid-October.