Day After Thanksgiving Report

We fed the coots!

We took a hike!

We went to the Mystery Spot!

We started collecting bumper stickers so we could create this look!




We went to the ocean!

Tonight: Pizza and TV!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Hello Betty Fans!

Evan, HOB and I arrived at Sonny Boy's place last night. This morning I arose and made the Tofurky feast. The weather here was so wonderful, we moved a table out on the patio and ate there. We also had our traditional Monopoly game in the warm sunlight.

Want to take a ride on the Reading? That's going to cost you. Pay the Betty.

You want Electricity or Water? Pay the Betty.

Let's get rid of the trashy looking houses and go into the Hotel business. You may stay and play, but you must pay...the Betty.

Needless to say, Betty won! Betty won BIG!

Oh yeah. Don't worry--the gloating only lasts for a year.

Hope you all had a great Thanksgivings!

Why Yes, I AM a Maniac. Thanks for Noticing.

Today the English faculty at our college gathers for a mandatory meeting for an "Alignment Activity."

When I read the subject heading on the e-mail announcing this event, I thought it was finally an opportunity to work out the kinks in my neck caused from marking 1543 papers in a typical week. I had visions of a spa-like environment in the conference room, with all of us in big white fluffy bathrobes and slippers, taking our turns on the massage tables. There were pretty people to attend to us. There was chanting. There were candles, and soft music filled the air as we let the stress of the semester melt away while eating little dainty candies.

Ah, alignment at last.

Then I actually read the e-mail and found out we were meeting to discuss grading standards.

For four hours.

Oh.

So yesterday, I taught my 9:30-10:30 class, my 11:30-12:30 class, my 12:30-2:50 class, and then came home, and went into a baking frenzy to produce sixteen small loaves of pumpkin-cranberry bread for my fellow English teachers.

Because English teachers don't live by alignment alone. (Yes, that IS a sentence fragment and I ain't going to mark it either.)

Then I made a pumpkin pie.

Then I made dinner.

Then I collapsed into a heap on the floor.

It was a good night.


We are going up to celebrate Thanksgiving with our very own Sonny Boy and when since he is the vegan we love, I made this Tofu Pumpkin Pie. It's been our favorite for years. It's so yummy, I wouldn't go back to regular pumpkin pie now.

You heard me.

Here's the recipe:

Tofu Pumpkin Pie

Ingredients (use vegan versions):

1 (16-ounce) can pureed pumpkin
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1 teaspoon ground allspice, optional
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg, optional
1 package (10-12 ounces) silken/soft tofu
1 9-in unbaked vegan pie shell

Directions:

Preheat oven to 425 F. Blend the pumpkin and sugar. Add salt, spices, and tofu, mix thoroughly. Pour mixture into pie shell and bake for 15 minutes. Lower heat to 350 F and bake for another 60 minutes. Chill and serve.

Don't use low fat tofu. Go crazy.

Align yourself with pie, even a fragment of pie, and you'll never go wrong.

Poetry Tuesday: "Thanks" by W.S. Merwin

Thanks

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
smiling by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

-- W.S. Merwin

Your Monday Morning Flower and Quote Delivery for Thanksgiving Week.

Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.

~William Arthur Ward

The Final Crow Down. Part Three of The Betty vs Rooster Trilogy

(If you haven't been with us for the last couple of days, we've missed you! More importantly, you've missed out on the first two parts of this exciting trilogy. Since you've been out, you know, doing those Very Important Things you've been doing, you'll need to catch up with our story by going back and reading Parts One and Two. Hopefully you can do that without straining yourself. We want you to be in good shape for this final installment. Pace yourself.)

Part Three

Finally, one day I had to make a trip to the barn. I surveyed the terrain. All clear.

Halfway to the barn door, I heard the spiny footsteps behind me. I turned and saw him, his laser-like eyes locked on target. Any thoughts of my standing up to the rooster left my head when I saw his determination, made clear by the forward tilt of his upper body. I sped up, listening to the talons hit the dirt with increasing speed. I jumped behind the plow but he was waiting for me on the other side. I took off across the yard, ran for the barn door and there, one second later, my father appeared, pitchfork in hand. It was too late for the rooster to switch into innocent poultry mode. Finally, I had a witness and better yet, a witness whose role on the farm included swinging an axe.

And so I stood the next day and watch axe come down. I thought it was Independence Day for me. The terror of the barn yard was going to our Sunday dinner. My mother took the body to the house and boiled the water to pour over it. (The hot water made it easier to pluck the feathers out--my job.) As she was carrying the water from the stove, she stumbled and the boiling water spilled on her upper legs. I watched as the pan bounced off the kitchen floor and my mother fell to the linoleum, crying out in pain and grabbing at her flowered house dress as though it were on fire. My sister screamed at me to go get my father as she knelt at my mother's side. As I ran down the barn, I felt the urgency of the moment. I had never seen my mother cry before. When my father helped her in the car to go to the doctor, I feared she would never return.

Our neighbor Mary came to take the rooster away to pluck and cook it for us and the next day my father and my sisters and I sat at the dinner table, the rooster, in pieces in Mary's casserole dish before us. Instead my our usual busy, bustling Sunday dinner, we were quiet, downcast and subdued. My mother was in bed and in pain from the burns and my older sisters had done the best they could, but the dishes were spare, burnt, and unfamiliar. I looked at the meat on my plate. When Mary had brought the cooked rooster up to our house, she had apologized, saying she had boiled the bird for a long time, but could never get it tender.

I looked at the steaming mound of flesh on my plate, understanding the sense of victory I had expected to feel was fleeting and inconsequential because it wasn't true victory at all. If instead of having my father kill him, I had faced this rooster down, if I had had the nerve to stand up to it, to give it one swift kick when it came racing toward me, it might have left me alone. Instead, it had ruled my life for five weeks and had resulted in my mother being burned, the overwhelming feeling of sadness at the table, the feeling of failure clinging to the inside of my stomach.

I forgive that little girl on the farm, but I keep her, and the sadness she felt in mind when I face a rooster in my life. The price of avoidance is high and I am still learning that it's merely temporary respite from the rooster who waits around the corner. Those roosters of self-doubt and fear get big fast and can shadow all else in our lives. When we run from them, they match us step for step. Convinced by their well-rehearsed show of bravado and authority, we forget we have power over them. Procrastination is powerful food for the rooster and makes it stronger. I wish I could say I always face my roosters head-on these days, but sometimes I let them dominate my landscape for much longer than I should.

Years ago I came across the skeleton of a rooster on display at a natural history museum. I stopped and looked at a skeleton of a rooster there strung up with fishing line, suspended in the air. I saw the small airy, fragile bones. The tiny head, the bony spine, the thin ribs, the twig-like legs--this had made up the foundation of the rooster who had terrorized me? I knew I could take just one of those bones and snap it between my fingers. What effect small muscles and a pretentious showing of feathers can produce on so small of a base! And we ourselves contribute additional muscle upon this flimsy architecture by giving the roosters in our lives more power than they deserve.

I stood for awhile, looking at the rooster skeleton.

I could see right through it.

Roosters, Roosters, Everywhere. Part Two of the Betty vs Rooster Trilogy

If you are just joining us on the Rooster Trilogy today, go back and read yesterday's post first! You'll be thrilled to read the tale of Betty vs Rooster and you'll just have better overall self-esteem knowing you've started at the beginning.

Part Two.

My days on the farm are finished, but roosters still appear on the landscape around me. They come in various shapes, forms, and degrees of intensity.

We all deal with the usual ones and they are manageable. We accept them as part of our lives: Drive into a car dealership and get out of your car. From all corners, the roosters lock their eyes on you, slowly rising to their feet, stretching. The begin to strut towards you.

There are the people we hope to avoid because of their rooster-like qualities--the ability to hunt us down and barrage us with conversations filled with relentless details, a neverending carnival ride of minutia. Try as we like to break away, the sheer centrifugal force of their whirlwind of words, knocks us back, suctioned to whatever surface is nearby.

Years ago, I was paired up with a co-worker on a prolonged teaching project. She and I were supposed to be equals, but she had definitely decided she was the boss and I would be the secretary. She was big, built low to the ground, wore colorful outfits and her neck jutted back and forth as she picked her way across campus throughout the day. I found myself scanning the quad thoroughly before leaving my office, but more often than not she'd be out there, see me emerge and stand stock still. Extending her neck, she would turn her eyes upon me, then bustle over at increasing speed, beak full of commands. As I stood there, watching her approach, the six-year-old mind came to the surface immediately. It was all I could do not to take off at a dead run.

In addition to these human roosters, we all deal with inanimate roosters as well. There are the roosters of Christmas shopping and housecleaning. Every April 15th when a rooster badly disguised as an eagle shows up on our yards, we all nod and exchange knowing glances. We share these roosters and commiserate with one another about them.

However, the roosters that are the hardest to deal with are the roosters no one else can see. One small incident can release roosters of shame, disappointment, sadness from the cages in which we had thought we had locked them so securely. The rooster of self-doubt sabotages our dreams. There are the twin roosters of skepticism and anxiety that strut into our lives as we are making major decisions. The rooster of depression paralyzes his victims for days, weeks, months at a time, trapping them in their homes, afraid to come out. Sometimes, the rooster of grief shows up on the anniversary date of a death, to crow his shrill cry, taking us back breathtakingly fast to a pit of mourning out of which we had fought hard to climb.

When I was six one of my sister said, "It's just a stupid rooster. I'll show you." We went outside and the rooster, thinking I was alone, appeared immediately. My sister took off, chasing the rooster across the barnyard, running so fast he was forced to make an effort at flying. "See?" she said, coming back to me. "Just chase him off when we comes at you."

Since we spend a good deal of our lives dealing with roosters I would like to believe that my sister was right--that is really is as simply as shooing them off. Well-meaning friends give us well-worn advice about the problems in our lives, but in their eyes it's just a pesky chicken in the yard, not the dominate and powerful rooster we see. The fact that my sister could chase off the rooster was not surprising to me; it wasn't her rooster. That rooster was not coming after her. But in mind, the rooster remained ten feet tall. The rooster had convinced me that he was stronger than I was.

So it is with all the roosters we face in our lives.

(Tomorrow: Rooster vs Axe. Who will win? Tune in!)