11/29/99

I know, I'm a very bad person for not writing while I was at home. It was just laziness. I spent most of my free time watching crappy stuff on cable and trying to overcome my jet lag.

I took the redeye home on Tuesday night. I didn't sleep. I can never sleep on planes. I did get a lot of reading done, though. I finished off my book (Ethan Canin's For Kings and Planets, which I thought was excellent) on my first flight, so I bought some magazines at O'Hare for my flight to Hartford. One of the magazines I bought was People which my whole family turned their noses up at when I brought it home, but when I left it on the end table in the TV room, they all read it eventually. Everybody reads People sometimes, but only a few of us are brave enough to admit it.

My dad picked me up at the airport on Wednesday morning, and then dropped me at home. He had to go back to work, so I decided to try to catch up on sleep.

But first, I decided to drop in on the dog, as I was curious to see exactly how big he had gotten. He's big. He now weighs about 80 pounds, and my parents think he'll eventually reach his father's weight: 150 pounds. I can't even imagine what a dog twice his current size would look like. He actually looks even bigger than he is right now, because he's very furry. Anyway, I decided to let him out of his house for a little while (Baxter has quite the elegant doghouse. My parents converted half of their two-car garage into a dog living space, and he's got a doggie door which opens into a fenced-in outdoor pen which is partially covered with tarp so the poor baby doesn't have to get wet when it rains or too hot when it's sunny).

So, Baxter and I ran around the yard for a little while. His favorite game seemed to be chasing me and then biting me on the rear end when he got close enough. After a few minutes, my entire outfit was covered in dog slobber, so I decided to lock him back up and take a nap.

That evening, I helped my mother in her advance preparation for the following day's Thanksgiving dinner. My mother wanted to start early in case she had to send my father out to the grocery store to pick up any ingredients she'd forgotten, as usually happens every year. I peeled and sliced apples for pie. I combined cranberries, oranges, apples, walnuts and sugar to make cranberry relish. Things actually seemed to be going pretty well.

However, I knew that my mother must have forgotten something, so I asked her what else she was planning to make. "Oh, just the usual things," she replied casually, "turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing..."

"How about green beans?"
"Yup, green beans."
"And onions?"

My mother then gasped loudly, and admitted that she'd forgotten to buy the ingredients for my favorite Thanksgiving dish: pearl onions in white sauce. So, my dad very grudgingly agreed to go look for onions, which are apparently rather difficult to find.

We went back to cooking. I mercilessly taunted my mother about her forgetfulness. She attempted to defend herself by saying that she remembered all the ingredients for all the other dishes "I bought stuffing, turkey, sweet potatoes..."

My mother makes sweet potatoes by cooking them with apples. "Um, mom...we just used up all the apples making the pies and cranberry sauce."

Another loud gasp from my mother. Then she decided to go to the store to get more apples (my dad still wasn't back yet from fetching onions, and he was probably not in the mood to be amused by the prospect of making a second trip anyway).

That second trip to the store actually was the last that had to be made, but it wasn't the last thing my mother forgot that evening. A couple of hours later, after I'd retired from the kitchen to go watch TV, my mother summoned me into the kitchen, claiming that there'd been a "catastrophe." Nothing was in flames, so I had to ask her what was wrong. She pointed to the pumpkin pie filling she'd been making.

"I was making this pie, and it just seemed like it wasn't coming out like it usually did. It just wasn't right...it was like I'd left out an ingredient or something..."

While she was saying this, I was looking at the pie filling. She was right, it didn't look the same. The pie filling is usually orange, and this filling was sort of a cinnamon-brown color. I started to laugh.

"You forgot to add the pumpkin, huh?"

"Yes...what do you think I should do?"

She ended up adding the pumpkin in at the end, and I guess it came out OK (I didn't actually have any, because I don't like pumpkin pie).

Later, I was telling this story to my sister's boyfriend Brad, who spent Thanksgiving with us. "So, what would you call that, then?" he asked "you know, pumpkin pie without any pumpkin in it?"

"Um, just 'pie,' I guess..."

I still have plenty more to write about this weekend, but for now, I'll just upload this part. Tune in next time to hear all about my high school reunion...