Letters From Home

Still working a week behind!

Thanksgiving was a lot of fun even though I did get rather harried before all was said and done.

For some reason, I have never been able to get a turkey cooked in the time it’s supposed to.  It almost always ends up cooking too fast, even though I check the temperature of the oven and follow the recipe to the letter.  This year was no exception.

I was using a new recipe that I got from “The Week” magazine, that was supposed to include basting the turkey with an orange or tangerine glaze during the last half hour or so of cooking.  Unfortunately, when I went to baste the turkey about 90 minutes before it was supposed to be done, I poked it with my instant-read thermometer… and it was done.

Yeeow!

We had guests coming and they hadn’t arrived yet.  None of the vegetables were cooked.  I had not finished the mushroom pie that was our vegetarian entree.  The stuffing was only partially done.

So I went into Warp Speed Cooking mode.  First I turned down the oven to “warm” and left the turkey in it.  Then I dealt with the sweet potatoes.  I was just getting going on slicing up the squash when our first contingent of guests arrived.  Phew.  At least, I thought, someone will be here to eat the turkey before it all dries up!

I scurried and hurried and got everything all done, and then took the turkey out and set it on its platter to rest while I made gravy and mashed the sweet potatoes.  Our guests had a good time talking (and, in the case of their 5-year-old son, checking out the coloring book and crayons I bought him) and then everyone helped carry stuff to the picnic table outside.

Hooray for California weather in November, when you don’t have enough space to feed everybody inside!

Our other guests had a snarl-up with LA public transit, and didn’t arrive till the rest of us were winding down, but the turkey was still good and there was plenty of everything else left, too.  After they ate, we all had pecan pie together.

Afterwards, of course, the kitchen looked like a bomb went off in it…  but who cared?  I had a lot to be thankful for!

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I know, I know. I haven’t posted for way too long. An eternity in cyberspace years.

Life intervenes, sometimes.

A couple weeks ago, I met one of my cousins for the very first time. See, my dad was very boy-centric, so his interest in his family focused mostly on his father’s relatives. And his father didn’t have very many relatives. Not close ones, anyway. There’d been only one boy per family per generation since 1860. My dad had only one first cousin and we didn’t hear about him much because he was the son of my grandfather’s sister. And my brothers and I only met his children, our second cousins, once in our lives.

Yeah. Boy centric. Don’t get me started.

Anyway, there’s this whole other side of the family. I didn’t find out till just a couple years ago that my dad’s mother was one of six siblings, and she and all her brothers and sisters had multiple children each, and thus my dad had plenty of first cousins on his mother’s side and my brothers and I therefore have plenty of second cousins (all but one of my dad’s generation, and of course all their parents, are gone now).

It was one of these second cousins who came to visit. She found me through a family tree I’d posted on one of the genealogy web sites. I had rather plaintively asked for information, not expecting to hear anything, because my grandmother’s maiden name was one of those extremely common ones. Not quite as common as Smith, or Miller, but pretty close. So it was really a wonder that she recognized me for who I was and was kind enough to email me and say so.

And she was going to be traveling, and her travels were going to bring her to our area, so I invited her to come to our house and meet me and my family and my youngest brother and his family (my second brother, who also lives in California, is back east caring for our mother).

My cousin turned out to be just the most delightful, down-to-earth person anyone could imagine. I felt like we were old friends already. We had a big cookout in the back yard and got to know each other a bit, and she stayed overnight and then I dropped her off at Union Station the next day (via a bit of sightseeing in Chinatown) to catch the Flyaway bus to the airport to continue her travels.

I hope she can come back again sometime, or we can visit her in New Jersey. She’s a person definitely worth knowing. Being part of the family is just frosting on the cake.

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Don’t mind me.  I’m always on the lookout for good WordPress plugins and I’m experimenting with some new ones today.  We now return you to your regularly scheduled eccentricities.

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I just heard the annual fly-over of the WWII era planes, on their way to Forest Lawn.

Today is Armistice Day.  Yes, I know it’s been renamed Veterans Day, but it seems to me that we ought to consider the real reason this holiday got its start.  It was to celebrate the treaty that ended WWI.  A day to be thankful for the day the world had, for however short a time, the illusion of peace.

In those days, war was not sanitized.  There were no John Wayne movies to make combat look bloodless and glorious.  The expected life span of a soldier in the trenches (or in the air) was a matter of weeks.  The specialty of plastic surgery was pretty much invented to deal with the aftermath of horrific wounds.  A lot of people in the USA knew, or knew of, someone who’d been gassed, wounded, frozen or “shell shocked.”  People came home irrevocably changed, or not at all.

Today, it’s all too easy to think that all one nation has to do to straighten up another nation is to invade, bomb the crap out of everything, blow things up and kill people.  The hawks sneer at history that clearly tells us what kinds of leaders follow that philosophy–and what so often happens to their grand delusions.

It’s also all too easy for a lot of people to sit back and mouth platitudes about “supporting the troops” while they still vote for the politicians who have cut VA services and the GI bill every chance they got.  And, no doubt, who plan to keep doing the same till enough people out here in Constituent Land get enough education, brains and backbone to vote them out.

No, this isn’t a new phenomenon.  Take a minute and look up what Woodrow Wilson did to the veterans of WWI.  It’s a shameful legacy.

Instead of slapping a sticker on your bumper and considering your job done, put your money and/or time where your mouth is.   Go volunteer at a nearby VA hospital.  Go down to Skid Row and help out, and not just one day a year when you can feel good about being charitable.   According to the VA, there are 300,000 homeless American veterans.  Another 250,000 are in jail.  Do you think those people are going to get their lives together if you just get one of those loopy yellow plastic stickers for your car or dish out turkey roll one holiday per year?

Like John Prine said, your flag decal won’t get you into heaven any more.

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We just got back from an internet-free vacation. Didn’t plan it that way, but did have to go cold turkey for a week. Yeeow.

Here are some of the neat places we visited:

Tubac, Arizona (arts and crafts)
ASARCO copper mine & discovery center
Kartchner Caverns
Tombstone
Titan 2 missile silo
and of course the Green Valley Pecan Store

If we ever decide to move into a retirement community, Green Valley is at the top of our list.   The designers really knew what they were doing, and the complete lack of California style McMansions is downright delightful.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled kvetching. 

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