Happy thanksgiving from Dragon-Eye

Whew. It's been a whirlwind around here.

We haven't done a family Thanksgiving in years- I usually volunteer to work the Friday after Turkey Day because it's quiet and uneventful and I can get a lot of important crap done like cleaning my office without interruptions. My mom was thankful (pun intended) because it turns out that she hates Thanksgiving- a lot of work for a quick payoff, is how she describes it. When I was a kid, she and her sisters split up the holidays amongst themselves and we always ended up in Binghamton at my Aunt Mary Margaret's for Thanksgiving with all my cousins. The women would ship us kids and all the men off to Ross Park Zoo for the day to keep us out of the kitchen and underfoot. One year, we got to pet a wolf pup who was out for a walk on a leash! His name was Ivan.

This year, I didn't have a choice to work or not. One of the main people at work retired and they haven't filled her position yet, which means the rest of us had to take her tasks on in the interim. Apparently, in senior living communities like where I work, the day after Thanksgiving is an enormously popular day for getting info and touring. I have begun calling it Gray Friday. It turns out that when people are visiting for the holidays, they notice Mom and/or Dad isn't handling things as well as they used to- difficulty getting around, misplacing things (shoes in the freezer, that sort of thing) and they immediately want to check out living options. So not only did I work my tail off on Gray Friday, I was also the Administrator On-Call, which sucks donkeys.

Fortunately, my friend Dan who is an aspiring chef, decided to cook Thanksgiving dinner for all of us who couldn't make it home with our families and my friend Eric agreed to host, as he just bought a new house and had been dying to have a get-together. So Dan prepared a turducken for us with sausage stuffing made from local meats, along with delicious roasted root vegetables, asparagus with asiago cheese, sweet potato pudding, and nice garlicky chunky smashed potatoes.

asparagus w/asiago cheese & roasted root veggies

sweet potato pudding in the foreground

appetizers! Brie en croute with cranberry relish

my one contribution- white chocolate cherry shortbread cookies

It was a doggiepalooza! Rhea, Frances and Kylie beg for scraps.

Then Eric decided that he wanted to celebrate his birthday a little early and do a pub-crawl on Friday night. It's 5:40pm on Saturday and I'm still hurting. We didn't get home until 3:30am. I'm too old for this kind of sh!t.

Me & Polly. I was wearing one of Eric's hats as a b'day tribute. And 'cause I liked it.

We made new friends at the diner. Is that Steven Tyler?

Our friend Mark was nicknamed "Dragon Eye" all night because of his tshirt.
He's very excited to wish you a Happy Thanksgiving.

And I'm behind on my NaNoWriMo wordcount, dammit.