Quick updates from an emptier house…

Happy Thanksgiving to my American friends who celebrate it! And may everyone else have a pleasant and harmonious Thursday. 🙂

Thanksgiving this year is just Dad, me and the New England Patriots, who are playing at 12:15 p.m. If they don’t win, it’s going to be a very gloomy day. *sigh* We’re really scaling back the food this year. Neither of us wants a big meal, so I’m making meatloaf, mashed potatoes and gravy (from a jar), which are Dad’s favorites. I’m having asparagus with cheese, and I’ve made a fancy dish of sauteed veggies–fresh string beans, carrots from my garden, onions and bell pepper–with parmesan cheese that has left my whole house simply redolent and which I doubt I’ll be able to coax Dad to eat. I got fancy, $6/pound all natural Black Angus ground beef for the meatloaf. Hey, it’s Thanksgiving. 🙂

I’ve done as much as possible ahead, so all I’ll need to do at Dad’s is put the meatloaf in the oven, boil and mash the potatoes, steam my asparagus and heat everything else. Dad always has milk and I never do, that’s why I’m not making the mashed potatoes ahead. They’re all peeled and diced and in a jar of cold water ready to go in the saucepan, though. I made two itty-bitty individual apple-blueberry pies for dessert.

It’s been a disorienting three weeks, and I want to say more about it, but I haven’t been able to get my verbal mind around it. I’m still in the middle of the whole purging and reorganizing process, although I don’t think I’m going to get rid of any more large furniture–just a lot of small stuff. But it’s more than that, I’m doing all kinds of little (and not so little) repair jobs and projects that I’ve wanted to get to, in most cases, for years, literally, and suddenly they’re all getting done. It feels really good, but my work patterns and daily routines are being flung into the air and shuffled, and that leaves me feeling out of synch. Ultimately, it will be a huge improvement. I’m already feeling the benefits of my whole new “office” arrangement. It’s a thousand-percent improvement and then some!

But more about all that later–possibly. I’m on a Sherlock Holmes bender this week. I dug out some ancient VHS tapes of the 1980s BBC/Jeremy Britt Holmes series for workout one night, and last night did workout to Steven Spielberg’s Young Sherlock Holmes. On Monday I was trying to think of a video that would get me through cycling, and realized that I still hadn’t watched the new BBC series Sherlock, which can be seen for free online through December 27. So I’m cycling my way through those and enjoying them a lot. Time to do that now, in fact!