Thanksgiving

Fandango’s Flashback Friday — November 25th

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Wouldn’t you like to expose your newer readers to some of your earlier posts that they might never have seen? Or remind your long term followers of posts that they might not remember? Each Friday I will publish a post I wrote on this exact date in a previous year.

How about you? Why don’t you reach back into your own archives and highlight a post that you wrote on this very date in a previous year? You can repost your Friday Flashback post on your blog and pingback to this post. Or you can just write a comment below with a link to the post you selected.

If you’ve been blogging for less than a year, go ahead and choose a post that you previously published on this day (the 25th) of any month within the past year and link to that post in a comment.

This was originally posted on November 25, 2011 on my old blog.

Turkeys and Crabs

Who knew? I suppose that having spent the majority of my 65 years back east (with very brief stints in southern California, Dallas, and Chicago) contributed to my perception that the traditional Thanksgiving dinner across America always involves turkeys. (I’m not talking, for the most part, about those who attend Thanksgiving dinner, but about the main course.)

This year, though, my wife and I are in San Francisco for Thanksgiving and I’ve learned that in this city by the bay, it’s the Dungeness crab, not the turkey, that apparently serves as the Thanksgiving entrée of choice. Sadly for San Franciscans, according to this article in the San Francisco Chronicle, Dungeness crabs are scarce this year.

“Looks like the Bay Area will actually have to eat turkey this Thanksgiving,” the Chronicle article warned. That’s because crab processors are unwilling to pay a penny more than $2 per pound for crab, while the crab fishermen are unwilling to accept anything less than $2.50 per pound.

And so the crab fishermen are not out there catching crabs — at least not Dungeness crabs. Who knows what kind of crabs they are catching now that they have all this free time?

Anyway, this is good news for Dungeness crabs and bad news for turkeys. Hmm, I guess this year the President won’t be granting, in the annual White House tradition, a pardon to a particular Dungeness crab. Oh wait, that presidential pardon is exclusively for turkeys.

I hope everyone had a very pleasant Thanksgiving.

Apple Pay

Fandango34 Comments

I was sitting at the kitchen table this morning, reading the newspaper, drinking coffee, and minding my own business. Suddenly my wife exclaimed, “Shit. You need to run to the grocery store. I need some fresh organic cranberries, a shallot, four pounds of Brussel sprouts, some fresh thyme, an organic orange, and unsalted butter.” Seems she had decided, at the last minute, to bring a side dish with us to the Thanksgiving dinner at my son’s home.

I wasn’t dressed, so I quickly slipped into a pair of jeans, put on my sneakers, grabbed my car keys, and drove to Safeway. I dutifully filled my cart with all the items on the list my wife gave me. I wheeled my cart to the checkout aisle and loaded my groceries onto the short conveyor belt as the cashier scanned each item.

When I reached for my wallet in my jean’s pocket, the cold, hard realization hit me that I had forgotten to bring it with me. I looked plaintively at the cashier. “I seem to have left my wallet at home,” I said.

She looked at me, saw my iPhone in my cart, and said “Give me your iPhone.” I shrugged and handed it to her. She looked at it for a second, handed it back to me and instructed me to tap on the icon on my screen that read Wallet.

I did as she instructed and this popped up on the screen:

Then she said, “Hold your phone up to the scanning device.” I did and in an instant, the word “Approved” showed up on the scanner’s screen.

“Cool!” I said.

“Here’s your receipt,” she said, handed me the paper that popped out of the register. “You’re good to go. Happy Thanksgiving.”

“Happy Thanksgiving to you, too.” I said.

When I got home, I said to my wife, “Guess what I learned how to do at the grocery store.”

Happy Thanksgiving — Encore Post

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This is an encore post of what I wrote on Thanksgiving Day last year. My wife and I will be heading over early this afternoon to our son and daughter-in-law’s home for this year’s festivities. We’ll be visiting with our grandkids, our daughter-in-law’s mother, father, brother, and a few aunts and uncles. Our own daughter and her husband will also be there. I’m re-posting this because it takes a comic look of what Thanksgiving in America can be like. And because I’m too lazy to write something new.

For those of you who live where Thanksgiving is celebrated today, I hope you have a great Thanksgiving dinner and gathering with friends and family.

Maybe this year it will be different than last year’s Thanksgiving, when Uncle Henry got drunk and became abusive after Aunt Mary kept hitting him with those thinly veiled digs about what a failure he is.

And maybe Grandpa won’t keep bringing up all of his nutty conspiracy theories that he heard on Fox News and will stop complaining about how the American culture is going down the tubes thanks to all of those “goddam woke libtards.” And perhaps this year, Mom won’t be standing there all akimbo when Dad inevitably screws up carving the turkey that she slaved over for hours.

Yes, maybe at this year’s Thanksgiving get together, everyone will be on their best behavior and will be thankful for everything they have. Maybe then it will be a perfect, Norman Rockwell-like Thanksgiving.

Yeah, right! It will probably be more like this:

Written for these daily prompts: The Daily Spur (uncle), Your Daily Word prompt (veiled), Ragtag Daily Prompt (conspiracy/akimbo), Word of the Day Challenge (culture), My Vivid Blog (thankful), and Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (everything).

The Heat Is On

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It seems like it was just yesterday that I was grousing about the ten-day, 100+° heat wave we were having here in Northern California in late August and early September. But then, last night temperatures dipped down to 35°, and we turned on the heat for the first time this season.

Not that I’m complaining. I actually prefer cooler temperatures to oppressive heat, anyway, so I’m cool with putting on the heat. (Did you see what I did there?) And even better, we had a decent rain yesterday and more rain is heading our way this weekend and early next week. Boy do we need that rain.

And speaking about changing seasons….

Halloween is behind us and Thanksgiving is ahead of us. Just this morning, blogger Lou Carreras wrote, in this post, that “…the long retail slog towards Christmas has started.” Then he added, “Oh, Lord! Do I have the stamina to withstand two months of Chestnuts Roasting in an Open fire, Here Comes Santa Clause, and Silent Night? Can I do this without becoming a grouch or, worse, a grinch?”

Yeah, Lou, I can relate. Christmas is two months away and its commercialization is already well underway. I saw this cartoon below from Ali Solomon in the New Yorker magazine that I think perfectly illustrates what one commenter on Lou’s post quite accurately called “premature holiday ejaculature.”

Now, for those of you turning your own heat on, here’s my gift to you.

Happy Thanksgiving

Fandango16 Comments

For those of you who live where Thanksgiving is celebrated today, I hope you have a great Thanksgiving dinner and gathering with friends and family.

Maybe this year it will be different than last year’s Thanksgiving, when Uncle Henry got drunk and became abusive after Aunt Mary kept hitting him with those thinly veiled digs about what a failure he is.

And maybe Grandpa won’t keep bringing up all of his nutty conspiracy theories that he heard on Fox News and will stop complaining about how the American culture is going down the tubes thanks to all of those “goddam woke libtards.” And perhaps this year Mom won’t be standing there all akimbo when Dad inevitably screws up carving the turkey that she slaved over for hours.

Yes, maybe at this year’s Thanksgiving get together, everyone will be on their best behavior and will be thankful for everything they have. Maybe then it will be a perfect, Norman Rockwell-like Thanksgiving.

Yeah, right! It will probably be more like this:

Written for these daily prompts: The Daily Spur (uncle), Your Daily Word prompt (veiled), Ragtag Daily Prompt (conspiracy/akimbo), Word of the Day Challenge (culture), My Vivid Blog (thankful), and Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (everything).