Dinner, tabled.
Well, that could’ve gone better.
Thanksgiving 2019 proved something of a bust at El Rancho Pendejo. The mom-in-law was not feeling up to snuff after a poor night’s sleep and hardly any breakfast. A record-shattering snowfall and the subsequent need for shoveling same delayed dinner about 90 minutes. And Mama Kerr’s lemon meringue pie never came off the bench.
The paprika chicken with turnips and taters got in the game, though, as did the stir-fried succotash and baking powder biscuits.
By the time we had all the starters lined up on the field, alas, the MIL was not exactly eager to tie on the old feed bag. She nibbled a bit of this and that, and then asked to be taken back to assisted living. The abrupt changes she’s endured in the past couple of weeks — moving from sea level to altitude, trading a tropical climate for our semi-arid variety, and waking up to a historic Thanksgiving dumper — probably didn’t help matters.
But I got in a bit of upper-body work, shoveling the driveways here and at assisted living, so I got that going for me, which is nice. There are plenty of leftovers, which is nicer. And today Herself will take her mom out for a manicure and maybe a smallish bite of lunch somewhere.
Meanwhile, the merchants are pitching but I ain’t catching. Let ’em blacken someone else’s Friday, sez I.
Mad Blog Media 
November 29, 2019 at 10:11 am |
PO’G: Sounds to me like you got a great “do good” workout in! Good on ya!
Best to you, Herself, Herself The Elder, and The Menagerie! 🙂
November 29, 2019 at 10:21 am |
Back atcha, JD.
It reminded me of living in B-burg. A neighbor and I would tag-team shoveling the Caramillo Street sidewalks, as the ’hood was heavy on older women ill-equipped for snow removal. What the hell, once you’re out there you might as well do something, amirite?
I brought my own shovel for the second round of snow removal at assisted living. The shovel they have there sucks.
November 29, 2019 at 1:20 pm |
Yep. Shoveling is good work when the roads are suck. I did our house and both neighbors yesterday. At 65.9, I’m one of the young ones.
But you would never guess we had all that snow (probably six to eight inches up here) yesterday as it has melted. Raining cats and dogs right now with small hail and thunder. Santa Fe river is enjoying the surge, though.
November 29, 2019 at 1:48 pm |
O yeh. Same down here. We oscillated from full meltdown to raining sideways at 40 mph to snowing to … well, to nothing, right this second. But I am expecting locusts and/or toads pretty much any time now.
November 29, 2019 at 2:23 pm |
Hope Herself the Elder feels better soon. A move like that would knock most of us down, mentally and physically, for a week or two.
We have some real bullshit weather here right now. Steady rain and wind gusts to 60 mph all last night. At 0200 we had one long gust that woke me up. Tossed and turned and finally gave up and made coffee at 0330. Tucson had severe thunderstorm warnings most of the morning. It is currently raining with gusts to 40, although I see some patches of blue to the SW. And, snow shoveling is never good, period. I gave that up 38 years ago, and I never looked back. Rationalize all you want buddies. It’s still just grunt work. To bad the hail isn’t on fire to warm the damn place up.
November 29, 2019 at 4:18 pm |
Word from the front is that the manicure and lunch were a hit. And yeah, anyone going from independence to assisted living in a little over a year is going to have a bad moment or two. I wold have at least one a day and make sure everyone knew about it, too.
Weather has been godawful all day. Neither bad enough nor good enough to have any potential. Just plain miserable.
November 29, 2019 at 7:49 pm |
This is a hard transition. My mom had to put my grandmother (her mom, who got off the boat from Sicily as a child) into assisted living and then when the assisted living wasn’t enough, into a full care facility as Grandma got into her nineties and couldn’t remember if she had eaten or not and was falling down too much. Luckily, my mom worked in the West Seneca State School (not sure exactly who they cared for as I was a runt then) and made a name for herself in the social services fraternity, so when grandma went into the Erie County Home, there was plenty of moral and physical support.
That was important because Mom soon found herself with Stage IV cancer and pretty soon it was up to the staff to take care of grandma full time without mom’s help, as she checked out way too soon at…well, at my age. Those folks took good care of grandma. My brother Steve, who still lives in Buffalo, was there far more often than me and commented on how Grandma was treated like royalty. But those were good people in there and what went around came around. Someone once said that the Buffalo Bills circled the wagons when the chips were down. That was because Buffalo circled the wagons.
Old Hillary said it takes a village to raise a child. I’ve had my own sarcastic version. Also takes a village to handle the other side of the life journey. Some day it will be our turn and we don’t want to set a bad example.
November 30, 2019 at 8:22 am |
My mom was ruthless. I don’t recall the details of how she dealt with her stepdad when he developed what they called “hardening of the arteries” back then, but I suspect it was not pretty, because she hated him. Straight to the cheapest nursing home in Sioux City, is my guess.
Once Grandpa John was gone, she moved her mom to our house in Bibleburg. And when that didn’t pan out — seems the old gal didn’t want to leave her home and friends in Sioux City, and said so, often — she was relocated to a small apartment a mile or so away. Then it was the predictable Descent of Woman, which ended in a nursing home over near Templeton Gap and Fillmore. Grandma Maude finally got to go back to Sioux City, but not until she was dead.
Dad? First to ICU and then straight to the camposanto while Mom played the shell game with various checking and savings accounts, restructuring their finances to keep as much of the estate as possible out of probate. She favored liquidity and conservative investment strategies and was taking care of business while the old man was hooked up to this and that over to Penrose on North Academy.
It was a good thing, too. Because when her own time came she could afford the best, and she got it, at Namasté up by The Broadmoor. You could call that winning, I suppose.
December 1, 2019 at 8:23 am |
Seems the opposite happens with my clan. To quote the old Joni Mitchell song, “you don’t know what you got till its gone”. So when people were struggling with getting off on the far side of that Journey of Life, folks put down the cudgels and knives and took care of each other. So far, anyway.
November 30, 2019 at 12:07 am |
Our Thanksgiving feast will be Monday as our friends were unavailable on Thursday. The wife even had some cranberry sauce shipped in from gawd-knows-where and special-ordered a turkey. I scored a few bottles of the just-released “novello 2019” wine to go with the meal. Today we’re back on the road bikes for the first time in a week 🙂
November 30, 2019 at 8:41 am |
We have one meal, maybe two, left over from Thanksgiving. And then I gotta get back to cooking instead of reheating.
The sun’s back out and most of the snow seems to have disappeared, but it’s still brisk out there. I expect the trails are a mess and the roads are full of hungover bargain-hunters who are sick unto death of their relatives and eager to kill someone, anyone. I’m thinking a short run is indicated.
November 30, 2019 at 11:51 am |
The post-holiday turkey samitches for me are the best part of Thanksgiving – after enjoying the main meal with friends – this time with the couple who have helped us a LOT with our move to Sicily.
She’s the boss of the International school the wife uses for her study-abroad programs and academic conferences and he’s the unofficial mayor of the island – one of those “I know a guy…” types for whatever you need.
We can’t thank them enough for all the help they’ve given us but the US tradition of Thanksgiving dinner seems a good place to start. The Prof herself made a pumpkin pie this afternoon and we survived another meeting with the immigration folks yesterday 🙂