Happy Thanksgiving

To all! And I do hope that those who were able to watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade did so. Me, I just read the NYT article about how dangerous the balloons are.

In college and beyond, I went through this period where I sat down every Thanksgiving and made a list of everything for which I was thankful (ex. puppies, trees, Robert Frost, ice cream, and, oh, yeah, my family). I haven’t done that in a few years, but I may tomorrow. Too embarrassing to publish the list, though, so I’ll just have to leave you with the teaser above.

Tomorrow I am also going to try to make a pumpkin pie. Well, a kabocha squash pie. With a graham cracker crust. I am also going to try to make an apple pie (also with a graham cracker crust, since we have neither a pastry blender nor a food processor). Both of these pies may fail because, well, we still don’t really understand the oven.

We are invited to a Thanksgiving party at the house of one of my friends from my morning Japanese class (the one who is/was a teacher in Seattle). The other guest (in addition to the husband of the hostess) will be another friend (from Switzerland) from our class. So that should be fun. And then on Saturday we are going hiking with our Japanese friends – and after the hike we will get to go pick oranges!

Here’s a small thing for which to be thankful: the mystery picture from a few weeks ago (the bright spiny round things in the plastic bag) is a picture of . . . . sugar! Who knew?

p.s. I will post my version of the Toilet Honda story soon. First, I just needed a few days to forget it. And now I don’t want to post it on Thanksgiving, since that hardly seems very nice. Anyway, it was pretty scary for me – hopefully it will get less scary in the re-telling.