November 30, 2014
Sometimes you get what you get when you get the internet
Well, it happens to the best and the worst of us. The mechanical hard drive on my trusty reliable ten year old Macbook Pro started making horrible noises, and now The Wife is talking about taking it to a specialist for data recovery. On my laptop is the oh so brilliant and excruciatingly long blog essay explaining the current political situation which I now can’t access and bring to a stunning conclusion for your reading enjoyment and edification. To tell the truth it kinda sucked anyway.
So here I’ll show you some photos I’ve recently taken, with a bit of narrative. I might’ve had more pictures to show but of course they’re all on my laptop. But I have a few available. This photo is the best one I’ve taken recently, it’s very nice.
Hornet’s Nest In Front Of My House
This sucker is hanging from the maple tree in front of my house. The Wife noticed it in passing like last week, but on early Thanksgiving afternoon a friend who had come by to help eat our turkey was all ecstatic about it. She had tried to take a photo with her phone but the nest came out as a dark blob because of the light behind it.
So I went outside with my camera and stood in a snow bank with the sun behind me to get this photo. It’s funny that we didn’t have a hornet problem during the warm months, I guess the inhabitants of the nest knew enough to stay away from the house and the humans. The Wife wanted me to take it down and bring it into the house, but she had no plans for it. We don’t need any more lovely works of natural beauty decaying in the corners of the house so it stays on the tree.
That snowy Thanksgiving morning The Wife had gone off to run in the Troy Turkey Trot 5K. Despite the not particularly severe snowstorm, which the corporate media shrilly hyped as “snowpocolypse,” the various Turkey Trot races attracted about four billion people and went off smoothly with no snow or ice obstructions on the roadways. Not a speck, according to The Wife. Indeed, the Turkey Trot authorities announced that the race would run as planned even before the snow started falling the night before.
Some Of The Wife’s Turkey Trot Medals
Most years that she runs The Wife gets a t-shirt and a medal. It’s like a non-confrontational alternative kindergarten, nobody loses and everybody is a winner. She’s collected a bunch of these medals over the years, which she hangs proudly on a mirror, and she wears the current one for a few days. Some of her collected medals are quite stately, but this year’s medal is about the silliest looking award for anything I’ve ever seen.
I usually go with her to the 5Ks to lend support as she plods. This race I let her go by herself because I wanted to get the turkey into the oven early and certainly didn’t want to put it in and let it burn down the house while I was standing on the side of the road in Troy freezing my sweet butt for the better part of an hour waiting for The Wife to trudge into view. I look forward to cooking and eating this turkey every year, it was 25.8 pounds and no way was it going to be ruined.
Every year we special order this bird in the summer from Homestead Farms out on Route 2 across the river on the other side of Brunswick, climbing the hill toward the Vermont border. Despite buying the best quality poultry from them for like forever, for some reason I can never remember the name of the poultry farm so I always call it The Chicken Ladies because it is mostly run by women. This turkey, like all their birds, had a short but happy hormone-less and antibiotic-less free-range life, and then the bird had one very bad day which was last Saturday. We went out to the farm to pick up the prepared bird late afternoon this past Sunday.
It’s Big, But Last Year’s Bird Was More Than 29 Pounds And Almost Didn’t Fit In The Oven
The reason I had abandoned The Running Wife that morning to cook a turkey was because my friend, who is a fine upstanding person who deserves better, earlier this year was forced to take a job with a certain large corporate retailer. If I mentioned on this blog which one she works for and what she does there she would probably come after me with an iron pipe. Despite hating every second of it she needs the job, which, as everyone ought to know, are in short supply.
So the corporate retailer decreed that she had to come in to work at 6 PM on Thanksgiving and work straight through to 6 AM without overtime. Usually on Thanksgiving she drives down to New Jersey for her annual visit to her elderly relatives who are not getting any younger or any healthier, and she was much distressed about that. So I hoped to ease her pain a bit by inviting her to share our meal, but that meant the bird had to go in the oven at 9 AM right after The Wife had to leave for Troy.
There should be a law that no one except a few essential service people should be forced to work on Thanksgiving, and any corporate executive who insists otherwise should simply be shot on sight. Anyone who shops for non-essential items on Thanksgiving should be thrown into solitary until after Christmas. My friend who had to work all night later reported that a fair number of customers showed up at her job in the evening while the snow was falling heavily, but between midnight and 6 AM almost no one showed up. I mean, what do people purchase at 5 AM other than coffee and maybe breakfast.
She showed up at our house on Thanksgiving about 1 PM shortly after The Wife got back, with her two teenage sons and a migraine headache. The 15 year old: “So when do we eat?” She was not looking forward to going to work at 6 PM, but I made sure that at least she wouldn’t descend to retail hell that evening with an empty stomach.
The Ornamental Apple Tree I Planted At The Corner Of Morton Avenue And South Swan Street Like 20 Years Ago,
Thanksgiving Morning
We always hear ad nauseam that “Black Friday” is the biggest shopping day of the year, but actually by sales it’s the fifth biggest shopping day and for the last few years the numbers have been declining. You wouldn’t know that from the corporate media, which pushes this falsehood because of the advertising sales bonanza that it gets. I strongly suspect that my friend and all the other grunt retail employees are forced to work overnight and on Thanksgiving so as to artificially boost the Black Friday sales numbers (which are usually calculated as “the weekend.”)
I shared this thought with my friend, she was not in the least bit comforted by it. By the next day she was pretty much shot through and gibbering. At the end of her rope and probably drooling into her lap she emailed me the following:
$10 Door busters. They don’t even really care what it is. Oh my God, I need that $10 door buster. What the f–k is it? Who cares? It’s $10! I need five