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Thanksgiving, 2017
Thursday, November 23 2017
At some point I broke away from building things on my computer so I could dedicate a concentrated hour or so into a cleaning jihad. We'd be hosting six additional people for Thanksgiving, and cleaning the house is always my job. As for preparing the food, Gretchen had been doing that for days, though at least one of the main courses (a tray of lasagna) would be brought by Eva and Sandor. I'd started drinking kratom tea at around noon, since (at least in its early effects) it tends to make me more social and less aspergery. I was still drinking it as I vacuumed and cleaned crusty old cat wetfood off the dining room table (which serves as an additional cat feeding table for the two newest cats, Charles and Janet).
People started showing up a little after 3:00pm. The first to arrive were Sarah the Vegan and Ellen, a friend she'd met back in Missouri who now lives near Washington, DC (she'd been to a Thanksgiving we'd all shared at Gretchen's parents' house in 2012). I forget what all they'd brought, but there was one item Sarah had made that called for plum wine and she'd made the mistake of instead using plum vinegar.
The last group to arrive was Eva and Sandor with Eva's brother Tadeusz (aka "Thad") and Tadeusz's wife Jessica.
[REDACTED]
As always, we drank our first drinks over in the living room near the woodstove. Gretchen had made little "cutlets" (for lack of a better word) from a mash of lentils, faux bacon, and other things, and they were so delicious that I would've been happy had that been the only thing served at this Thanksgiving. Anticipating a dickish question I'd once asked, she'd even made a dipping sauce.
I've come to realize that I am not much of a fan of anything about Thanksgiving. The food is reliably meh, and usually expressed in a bland, overcooked register. An early highlight was festive little wine glasses of vegan ceviche Gretchen had made, though it was a bit sour for my tastes. There was also a very nice chestnut & mushroom soup. Some sort of bread-covered "wellington roast" served as perhaps the main attraction, but for my money it contained far too many cubes of sweet potato, a vegetable I will never like. The best thing at the table was probably Eva & Sandor's lasagna, but I didn't have any until much later, after everyone left and the kitchen was totally clean. The fact it, I ate fairly modestly and did not suffer from the glutony most people associate with this holiday.
Dinner conversation lingered for a long time on the first names given in Eva's family. Evidently her mother, who is of Polish extraction but very American, nevertheless insisted on giving everyone in the large Catholic family very Polish-sounding names. One of the results of this is that everyone ended up having multiple first names, some added later for the benefit of English-speakers who couldn't pronounce the legal names.
[REDACTED]
After dinner, we eventually returned to the living room, though I took three of us upstairs at one point to smoke marijuana.
I made a point of doing low-key dish washing between courses, which kept the sink mostly empty for the entire afternoon and evening. This mean that by the end of night, when the last people left, there was almost no cleanup to do.
Considering how early the evening had started, people stayed surprisingly late. But by 10:00pm, everyone was gone.
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