11-27-2011

            Thanksgiving has come and gone and that once again reminds me how much I loathe shopping.  We have chosen to live in a place so far removed from shopping that we don’t even have a store in our village.  We are 500 miles away from the nearest Wal-Mart or Costco.  Being this far away one could rest assured that the crazy ‘black Friday’ thing could go unnoticed here.  But no, we had to watch it on the news, over and over.  This has become an event, with people choreographing their moves from store to store.  Some people wait in line for days in order to get in the door first.  This is the equivalent of me camping out in front of my dentist’s office so I can be the first root canal of the day.  People do this willfully, without getting paid.

           

            If it seems like I’m cantankerous about this, there is a perfectly good reason: I am.  I don’t understand it.  I must be in the minority, because after watching two days worth of news coverage, I see that most of the country is willing to stand in line in order to spend their hard earned money.  Additionally, holiday cheer is abundant.  Nothing says Merry Christmas like shoving an old woman to the ground in order to get the last 22” flat screen TV.

Thanksgiving with the gang.

            Ok, I’ll quit being so negative.  We did have a very nice Thanksgiving Day.  We spent the morning on the computer, talking with family on Skype.  Skype allows us to see and hear what others are doing without us.  What we’ve found is that they’re all having lots of fun and food without us.  After we spent some time on Skype with our families, we went back home to have our dinner.  We had all the fixens, cranberries included.  We also had very good company.  Essie, Brittnay, and Grover came over for the afternoon.  They are all teachers here too, so they did know us and willingly came over.  We all contributed to the menu and had way more than we needed.  I ate until I couldn’t eat any more, then I had pie.  I did wait for a few hours until I ate my second piece of pie.  Out of consideration to our guests, I had to try both the apple and pumpkin pies.  Also out of consideration to our guests, I kept my pants on after the meal even though both me and my pants agreed it would have been much more comfortable to shed them.

Sunset

             We did have a very nice and relaxing break from work.  Monica has been working much more than we had anticipated.  She also will be teaching the preschool after the first of the year.  It has just been funded through a grant and we have been without a preschool for a few years here.  She will be setting it up also so that will keep her busy.  That and going to college full time.  She barely has time to wait on me hand and foot.  We have three more weeks of school until winter break begins.  We are staying here for Christmas, as it is so expensive to fly south for the two and a half weeks.  Hopefully we’ll have our snowmobile so we’ll have plenty to do.  Now, I have to get ready for ‘cyber Monday’.  I really hope it’s about shopping.