Ravings of a Textual Deviant

Next year, I am going to stay home and cook.

The good news is that we didn’t have any of the sort of trouble I’d expected. Travel went very smoothly, and I am ever so glad that we didn’t try to fly on either the Wednesday before Thanksgiving or the Sunday afterwards. The airports were pretty slow on Thursday and Saturday. We had no trouble at all with the rental car, and only minimal navigational difficulties. All of my aunt’s cooking experiments came out well, and the trip to the storage unit was not just uneventful, but anticlimactic.

On the other hand…

My aunt—the one who did all the hosting, cooking, and organizing—developed appendicitis on Thursday night and spent all day Friday waiting to find out whether her appendix had to come out (it did), whether it could be done laprascopically (it could), and then waiting to have the operation.

Later that night—technically Saturday morning, about a quarter to four—the fire alarm went off at the retirement community where my grandmother lives. We were staying in one of the guest rooms, and as far as I know, we were the only ones who actually evacuated. The firemen were in no hurry at all when they arrived; it turns out that there was an electrical fault in the system.

Did I mention that it was darned cold in upstate New York that morning?

Anyway, I digress. My aunt then spent most of Saturday trying to find a doctor who could release her. Apparently, this took several hours; probably longer than the surgery itself. During which time, one of the toilets at her house overflowed. (As her 4-year-old grandson told us “there’s water all over the bathroom floor—it’s so cool!”)

I’m so glad we didn’t stick around to see what happened on Sunday.

And apparently it isn’t just my family that did not have the best Thanksgiving ever. One of my coworkers was almost shot by someone hunting illegally on his land (his hat was hit); two friends lost family members that week, and another coworker was in Paris on business during the transit strike and had a truly miserable time of trying to get to the hospital there.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 26th, 2007 at 5:48 am and is filed under Daze in the Life of.... You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.