Thankful for Thanksgiving

Well, it’s the weekend after Thanksgiving (here in the US at least), and that’s typically a time for me to blow off blog posts.  If you’re lucky, you may get one of my infamous abbreviated posts, such I did in 2014, and in 2015, and in 2016.^*  But this year, the weekend is falling squarely on a “full post week,” according to my new blog schedule, so I have less of an excuse than usual.

If you actually read any of those abbreviated posts I just threw you links to, you will have picked up some of our Thanksgiving traditions: enjoying the sides more than the turkey, watching Mystery Science Theater 3000, and coming up with 3 things (each) that we’re thankful for and sharing them with each other.  Other than that, we don’t do a whole lot on Thanksgiving.  In particular, we do not travel for it, and we very rarely have anyone over for it.  Our lovely family (for those keeping score at home, current count is: 5 humans, 2 canines, 2 felines, 1 rodent, and a tank full of piscines, arthropods, gastropods, and an amphibian who still refuses to die) is quite large enough, thank-you-very-much, and just managing to get all of us to the table, with the food, enough clothes on everyone that some pictures can be taken, while also trying not to kill each other because cooking large holiday meals is stressful enough without even considering that our kitchen is basically the size of a sardine tin ... just managing all that is challenging enough as it is.  Hell, even getting the dining room table completely cleared off (which we pretty much do exactly twice a year) is a chore.  If we had to add to that the extra work of cleaning house enough to be presentable to friends and relatives, and the extra food it would require, and so on and so forth, I don’t think we’d survive.

But, as it is, it’s pretty much exactly the right amount of work and it pays off very nicely.  The 5 of us humans share pretty much the same feelings on politics and religion, and, if any of the fuzzy children are pro-Trump or anything along those lines, they at least keep it to themselves.  None of us are huge drinkers—I think my single glass of wine was the only alcohol consumed throughout the entire meal—so there’s no drunken ranting either.  So we don’t have the stereotypical issues that you hear office mates and late-night comedians go on about.  The smallies will occasionally fight over the last buttered roll, and The Mother may yell at the eldest for sneaking food under the table to the dogs, and maybe we quibble over who took much of that and they’ll never eat it all and why didn’t you pass the so-and-so to me, I mean you had it right there in your hand and you knew I wanted some ... and that’s about as contentious as it ever gets.  Which is, you know ... nice.

This year, the lists of things we were thankful for were dominated by having a heart surgery survivor in our midst, as might be expected.  I was also bold enough to be thankful for MST3K for the second year (not in a row), since we actually got the premiere of a brand new season for our Turkey Day marathon: six movies designed to be watched in one marathon sitting.  Sure, we only made it through three of them, but it was pretty glorious nonetheless.  And we were thankful for each other, and for our friends, and for the fact that none of us or our friends had their houses burned down or suffered so much smoke damage as to be unlivable, and for my excellent job that pays me very well and yet that I still enjoy going to work every day even after five years, all of which is a long-winded way to say, we’re thankful for our life.  It’s a nice life, and we quite enjoy it, and, in general, we’re not just living it.  We’re experiencing it, and relishing it, and thriving because of it.  And it’s good to appreciate that.  And I think that’s what Thanksgiving should be about.

Thanksgiving gets a lot of shit these days.  It has a serious image problem: many people like to trot out Thanksgiving as a way to whitewash the relationship between us white Europeans and the Native Americans.  But, you know, Thanksgiving didn’t actually start with that whole Pilgrims-and-Indians feast.  Wikipedia tells us that:

Before 1536 there were 95 Church holidays, plus 52 Sundays, when people were required to attend church and forego work and sometimes pay for expensive celebrations.  The 1536 reforms reduced the number of Church holidays to 27, but some Puritans wished to completely eliminate all Church holidays, including Christmas and Easter.  The holidays were to be replaced by specially called Days of Fasting or Days of Thanksgiving, in response to events that the Puritans viewed as acts of special providence.  Unexpected disasters or threats of judgement from on high called for Days of Fasting.  Special blessings, viewed as coming from God, called for Days of Thanksgiving.

Of course, we don’t talk about that, because Thanksgiving is supposed to be a secular holiday: something we can all enjoy regardless of our religious affiliations.  But of course even in its religious roots, it has a bit of anti-establishment in its history—the whole concept of days of thanksgiving was to replace the froufrou high Church holidays.  But even so it was still a Christian celebration; who you were supposed to be giving thanks to was never really in question.  Recasting it as a coming together of disparate cultures—regardless of how accurate or how fictional—seems to me like a desperate attempt to secularize the holiday (because of course the Native Americans wouldn’t have been giving thanks to the Christian God).  But I’m not sure that’s really necessary.  If you’re religiously inclined (and I don’t really think it matters what type of religion), you know who you’re giving thanks to.  And, supposing you’re not, who would you be giving thanks to anyway?  Now, me, I’m more inclined toward the agnostic, so I’m perfectly happy to throw some thanks out into the greater universe without particularly needing to know if there’s anyone on the receiving end.  But I’m at a loss to explain how a proper atheist can celebrate Thanksgiving: if everything happens according to random chance, there certainly doesn’t seem to be any point in thanking anyone for it.  But we seem to have all agreed that we can be thankful once a year without requiring deity, destiny, or doctrine, and I think we can continue that trend without needing to drag the Native Americans into it.

So I don’t need any Pilgrims^** to celebrate Thanksgiving, and I don’t need any attempts to rewrite history to pretend that our ancestors got along better than they actually did.  I personally think Thanksgiving is more about what’s happening right now.  It’s a chance to set all the bad stuff aside—and, let’s face it, there’s always going to be some bad stuff.  But on Thanksgiving, you ignore all that—you focus on the good stuff, and you get to say, hey, maybe my life is pretty damned good after all.  I think that’s the value of listing things to be thankful for: it reminds us that there really are a lot of things to put on that list.  And some of them are little things, and some of them are big things, but they all count.  They all contribute to that feeling that life is pretty sweet after all.  And so we get together with our family, and perhaps a few friends, and we celebrate that with some good food and maybe a beer or a glass of wine or a fine single-malt whiskey, and we eat too much and we drink too much and we watch too much television, and then we fall asleep on the couch, because, hey: life is good.

And I’m happy to be reminded of that, once a year at least.  Honestly, we should probably have Thanksgiving more often.  We’d probably be happier if we did.

Although we’d probably get sick of the turkey leftovers eventually.

__________

* Last year you didn’t even get one of those.  I plead heart surgery.

** And, anyway, as a native Virginian, I’m educated to believe that those Massachusetts Johnny-come-latelies are hogging all the glory despite the fact that we did everything first.

This is not the blog post you're looking for

Since last week was a big post week, this week is a light post week.  So, you know: this is all you get.  Try again next week.

A stressful few weeks

This has been a challenging few weeks for the family.  I’ll give you a few more details so you can get an idea of what I’m talking about.

Things began, of course, with the foot disaster, which I’ve already talked about a bit (twice, even).  Although there’s still a decent chance that our middle child have to have some sort of surgery to deal with that, there’s also a possibility that he won’t.  Apparently.  There’s been a lot of doctors’ appointments and talking to doctors on the phone and running around.  This complicates things, because there’s also ...

Our annual Heroscape tournament was a week ago, and it was a great success.  So in general this was a happy thing during this time period (which, as it turns out, is somewhat of a rarity).  But it also required a lot of preparation from yours truly.  I had already planned on taking 4 days off work during the 2 weeks leading up to the tourney, but, with all the extra medical stuff going on, I ended up taking 6 days instead.  I was actually really excited about the format, because we did some something radically different this year: we went to a team format, where we try to pair the better players with the more experienced ones.  When you play as a team, your and your partner’s fate are tied—for that one game.  Next game you get a different partner, and, at the end, we can still do an overall ranking, as is proper for anything you want to call a “tournament.”  But the great thing about this format is that it’s now in the best interests of the good players—who also tend to be the more competitive players—to make sure their partners do well also.  And the end result is that they start passing on their winning strategies to some of the folks who rarely win, except if they happen to end up playing each other.  This year, there were folks who got a taste of victory for the first time in a tourney setting, someone who placed fourth overall instead of being one of those at the bottom of the rankings, and my own Smaller Animal, the same kid with the giant piece of graphite embedded in his foot (see above), actually won a prize.  Now, understand: the way we do prizes is, we divvy up the entrance fees into a few piles, so there’s some cash on the table, and we tell people they can bring something for the table if they want to, so some people do, and occasionally someone will bring more than one thing (this year I personally brought 3 things), so the number of prizes always varies wildly.  There was even one wacky year where everyone got at least one prize, and some people got two, because we had to start over letting everyone choose which prize they wanted.  But usually we manage to have just enough prizes for about half the participants to get something, which is where we came out this year.  My kid got the last (or maybe the next-to-last) prize on the table, and it was one of the big Heroscape dragons.  A dragon that we already own, I might add, so he’s seen it dozes of times, and of course he could have been using it any time he liked.  But this one is his: he won it.  He was so happy ... it’s hard to describe what that meant to me.  Normally I have to be consoling him and telling him that he’ll do better next year and that he’s still learning.  This year I had to explain to him how his new dragon’s powers worked, and what sort of army he might use her in, and how he could figure out a way to play Heroscape with his friends at his homeschool park days.  It made a huge difference, and I have to thank our newest group member for casually suggesting a team format, which suggestion I then went crazy with, working out the exact details and how to keep team games individually competitive, and so forth.  So I’m very glad we did it.  But it was a huge amount of work, and I got very little sleep those last few nights (culminating in what I think was about 3 hours for the night before the tourney), and that was really a mistake because ...

I’ve been sick for about a week now.  So, after only putting in 2 days’ worth of work for two weeks in a row (and only physically making it into the office for half of those days), I was suddenly saying I still wouldn’t be coming in because I was likely to infect all my co-workers.  I did continue to work from home, but it’s been hard: this week was supposed to be the week I finally wrapped up my work project.  You see, I’ve been working on this big project at work (I believe I’ve mentioned it here at least once), and it’s been going on for a while now.  A few weeks back, I turned a corner and polished off the last truly difficult part.  I figured it was all downhill from there: just wrap up a few things, dot a few i’s, cross a few t’s, that sort of thing.  But then the foot, and the time off for the tourney prep, and now the sick?  I’m taking a month (of calendar time, granted, but still) to polish off what really should have taken a week or so.  Also, being sick is not fun.  I smoked for many years, and, while I like to believe that I quit in time for my lungs to heal before I get truly old, there’s no doubt that I can hold on to a cough like nobody’s business.  You’re sucking on cough drops all day and popping Nyquil in order to sleep at night, waking up with cough drop hangovers where your tongue is coated with that sickly-sweet mediciney taste ... I mean, come on.  It’s already hard enough to concentrate on work.  But it gets worse because of ...

You may have heard of something in the news called the “Borderline shooting,” which happened this past Wednesday night.  This was actually very close to my house, relatively speaking ... I’m not saying it’s within walking distance or anything, but it’s just a town or two over.  It’s the town where we used to live before we bought this house.  My eldest son still works in that town.  It’s right next door in our eyes.  And we knew one of the victims ... not well, but she was in our homeschool group.  She was close to the same age as our eldest.  The Mother and the kids would see her on park days sometimes.  Note also that many of the same folks who were present at this mass murder were survivors of the Las Vegas shooting last year, where The Mother also knew someone who was killed.  This was a lot for us to process, but there wasn’t really time to do so, because ...

Thursday afternoon my phone made that harsh noise it does when you get an emergency alert, and we had to start worrying about something called the Hill Fire.  Now, if you haven’t spent any signficant amount of time in southern California, you may not know what the Santa Ana winds are.  We get them every autumn, and they’re kind of scary: on bad years they can approach 100mph, with gusts going over 150mph.  Even on “good” years they’re no picnic, as every loose thing imaginable is suddenly in your yard, in the middle of the road, and, of course, clogging up your pool.  This year the Santa Anas are about average, I’d say: we’ve fished 2 heavy pool chairs out of the pool (one of them twice), not to mention countless other small debris.  I’ve given up trying to keep the intakes clear.  But, really, the inconvenience of dealing with the pool is only the tip of a very large (and much scarier) iceberg, because a fire that would normally be put out pretty much instantaneously can be caught up by the Santa Ana winds, and fanned, and carried, and spread, until it becomes declared a state of emergency by the governor.  This happens with disturbing frequency this time of year.  If you live in Florida, you worry about hurricanes; if you live in Missouri, you worry about floods; if you live in Kansas, you worry about tornadoes; and, if you live in California, you worry about wildfires.  And also earthquakes.  And sometimes mudslides ... actually, why does anyone ever live in California?  Oh, yeah: the beautiful beaches and year-round summer.  But there’s always a price to pay, I suppose.  The point is, when you get an alert on your phone telling you there’s a fire, you sit up and pay attention.  On the Ventura County website, they tell me about the Hill Fire and that it may be headed my way, but it’s still a ways out.  Don’t get me wrong: we knew people impacted by this as well.  CSU-Channel Islands had a mandatory evacuation, and our eldest has a close friend there, so we were trying to get in touch with him and make sure he was able to get out okay.  But it didn’t seem like we needed to be personally worried.  The Mother was taking the eldest to work at the time; I sent her a message saying I didn’t think we needed to worry yet.  She told me she could see the helicopters dropping the fire retardant.  I said, that’s crazy, the Hill Fire is all the way in the next valley.  She said you’re looking at the wrong fire.

The Woolsey Fire started in the open space of Liberty Canyon, which is just south of us.  It quickly grew out of control and in fact become a much bigger threat than the Hill Fire.  Perhaps the quick response of the California firefighters (who are, let’s face it, insanely amazing individuals) kept that one from getting out of control; I can’t say for sure.  But I’ve read that it’s at least possible that the quick committing of all available resources to battle the Hill Fire may have kept the Woolsey Fire from receiving immediate attention.  I don’t say that to blame anyone; it’s just a terrible coincidence that caused some dominoes to start to fall.  By Thursday evening, we could easily see the glow of the massive fire over the ridge out our window.  We had packed our “go” bags, gathered all our animals into the house, and were sitting around praying for the wind not to shift.  It did not, and that’s excellent new for us.  However, we have many close friends to the south of us, and the fact the winds stayed steady, blowing south and southeast, put them right in the path of the fire.  Just to give you a taste of the weird combination of tension and worry that we were all experiencing:  Friday afternoon, our middle child came into the room where I was trying to fix some issues with my big work project.  “It’s park day,” he announced.  “And it’s 2:30 ... why are we not at the park?”  I gently reminded him about the “big fire.”  His face went slack and he nearly burst into tears.  “Oh, right, I’m sorry, I’m an idiot, just forget I said anything.”  And then he ran out crying.  Becuase, you see, he had been excited all week about playing Heroscape on park day (see above), and for a moment he forgot about the danger and was just focussed on doing something normal, and then I had to go and remind him that there was a very real possibility that his two best friends were now homeless, and he felt sad, and guilty, and worried, all at once.

Currently, the fire has left our area and has gone on to burn down Malibu, which is exceedinly tragic, especially considering it wasn’t that many years ago that a decent chunk of it burned in another wildfire (also fanned by the Santa Ana winds).  As far as we know, both the families of the Smaller Animal’s friends still have homes to go back to: in one case, the fire went high up on the ridge and their house is in the neighborhood below; in the other, the fire came so close as to singe the lawn of their next-door neighbors.  But we still don’t know what sort of smoke damage they’ll have to deal with, and that can be devastating all on its own, even when your property never sees a single flame.  As far as I’ve heard, neither family has been able to get back to their homes yet.  So while we are very thankful that our house was spared, we’re still very concerned (but hopeful) for our friends.  And of course there were many who were not so lucky as that.

So it’s been a pretty stressful week, coming off a fairly stressful few weeks prior.  We’re safe, and we’re grateful to whatever forces run the universe, and hopefully we continue to appreciate each other and what we have.  But we’re also sad, and worried, and trying to remain hopeful that things get better for everyone.  And we send out our condolences and our deepest regrets for those who lost loved ones in the Borderline shooting, or either of the two wilfires.  Next week will be easier, I’m feel sure.


Please help support the mother of our friend who was killed at Borderline by contributing to the memorial fund set up for her by our homeschool group.

Nothing to see here ... keep it moving, people ...

Too much foot drama and preparation for NHSD this week.  I’ll have a fuller post next week, hopefully.