On account of having used so much of my PTO for the Worldcon trip and needing to let it accumulate back up for Westercon and Worldcon next year and maybe a few other trips, we are not going to Loscon this year, so we'll miss the big Loscon 50 celebration. Neither Lisa nor I travel to family gatherings the way we did when we were younger, so once again we had Thanksgiving at home. Some of you who have followed me for as long time will recognize our little Thanksgiving Day feast. As usual, Kuma Bear was impatiently waiting for me to finish taking pictures so we could start our meal.

( Hamming It Up )

Not pictured was a pumpkin pie, which we had a few hours later after getting out for a walk in the clear-but-cold sunshine and then clearing the table and playing a game of Empire Builder. I bought my copy from Darwin Bromley, the designer of the game, many years ago. We definitely have gotten our money's worth, as we've now played it 157 times, with me leading our series by a single game.

We have a lot to be thankful for. We have a home that we own, and we are decently secure in it. So we're trying to be happy with things the way they are now, even though it does look like the next few years may be much more uncertain.

Tomorrow is not a direct holiday at my Day Jobbe, and I'm saving my floating holiday to use next weekend as part of my trip to SMOFCon, so I'll be working tomorrow. But more about that tomorrow, but it's likely to be behind a friends lock on DW for reasons that will be clear then.

I do have a lot to be thankful for. I have a house (the final mortgage payment for which will fall in just a couple of months, a decently good job, and a fair bit of security. And today, an excellent Thanksgiving dinner prepared by Lisa.

( Traditional Fernley House Thanksgiving )

We were very full. A duck is enough for us. This year, we managed to get so much meat off the carcass that we decided it wasn't worth the effort to try and boil the remains down for soup.

After an hour or so to let the dinner settle, we had a bit of pumpkin pie (not pictured) that Lisa had cooked last night. We're pretty well off. I think my grandparents would be pleased with me.

I de-boned the Thanksgiving duck after letting it simmer on the stove for several days (refrigerating it overnight and adding water so it wouldn't burn). Then I added rice and let that cook, and the result was duck soup with rice that was good for another dinner and three lunches, the last of which was today. Last night I ate the last slice of pumpkin pie. That finishes off the Thanksgiving leftovers. I remain thankful.

Those of you who have followed me for a while know that this isn't unusual for me since my grandfather passed away and we moved to Fernley, but Lisa and I having a quiet Thanksgiving at home has more significance this year than usual.

( Stay Home, Stay Safe, Get Stuffed )

As I mentioned, yesterday would have been my grandparents' wedding anniversary. They raised me from the age of five after my parents divorced, and with exception of a four-year period when I lived with my father in Milford, Challenge, and Bishop, California (the US Forest Service kept us on the move), they raised me from my formative years through my third year of college. They went through the Great Depression, when my grandfather's parents loaded the family (and it was a big one) into a Model T and fled unemployment and potential starvation in northern Arkansas to head to California to find work in the fields. (Forget reading The Grapes of Wrath — my grandparents and their siblings lived it.) Lisa reminded me yesterday that they would have been proud of me, and that I should be thankful for that. We have never gone hungry, nor are we in any danger of doing so. We have a comfortable home that is more than just a roof over our heads. We have enough reserves so that even if things go bad with my job, we won't lose our home and we'll probably do okay.

Lisa is right. We have a lot to be thankful for. Life is not perfect, but we're a lot better off than many people. I am no paragon of virtue, but in general I tried to do all of the right things. While I have had the advantage of the structural privilege that John Scalzi so aptly characterized as "Playing the Game on the Lowest Difficulty Setting," I still had to play the game and do the best that I could. And I don't make the mistake that many in my position have made of pretending that I'm a Self-Made Independent Strong Man who didn't need any government. My grandfather's living as a construction worker included working on a whole lot of public works projects like building dams and roads. My grandmother was the clerk in a two-person post office in Challenge; the postmaster there sold my grandparents the home in which they lived and which I recently was able to sell; I considered it my childhood home. My father was a career civil servant, albeit that people don't often think of forest rangers that way. I had a public education and was able to go to college first at a local community college and then at California State University, Chico. I had some scholarships, and I did work through college, but I also had public-funded student aid and government-guaranteed loans. I have the benefits of living in a civilized country (I hope more so than it has been these past four years) where my taxes help benefit everyone, not just me personally. There is no way I could possibly have been as successful as I have been without government programs that all too many people call now or have at some time called "socialism."

So color me grateful at my personal success and safety, but also grateful that I do live in a country that manages to have some of the blessings of democratic socialism, even if half of its population claims to reject such things. And I'm also grateful that an absolute majority of the voters of this country rejected the further expansion of a would-be populist white-supremacist dictatorship. I only hope that we'll be thankful in years to come that we managed to back away from the precipice in time.

Ever since Raley's bought Scolari's grocery store, we have been unable to get duck locally. For the first time in some years, we will not be celebrating Thanksgiving day at home. (We will in fact be driving from Bishop to Los Angeles on the first full day of our multi-week multi-convention road trip.) So today after I got off work, Lisa and I drove to Reno for multiple errands, including going to Butcher Boy specialty meats and getting a duck for an early Thanksgiving meal next week. We kept the frozen duck in an insulated bag (and we want it to thaw out anyway), so it was no big deal to keep it in the car while we did our other errands and went to dinner before driving home. Looking at how the traffic was backed up off I-80 eastbound as we headed to the restaurant, we were glad we stopped and had dinner first.

As we headed for home, leaving Sparks about 6:50 PM, we saw Amtrak train #5, the westbound California Zephyr, approaching Sparks. This means the train was running about eleven hours late, as it normally passes Fernley at 7:45 AM. I had seen they were behind this morning, and a broken rail on the Nevada Subdivision at Massie (which is apparently a tricky place to access for repairs to boot) probably didn't help. I felt sorry for the passengers and crew. The crew who were having to work what amounts to an extra day, and the passengers who will miss out on one of the trips most scenic parts, as they're traversing the Sierra Nevada at night. On top of that, based on my past experience, the dining car may not be able to serve dinner tonight (the last scheduled meal would have been lunch today) on account of not having any food left, and their likely arrival time in Emeryville is going to be about 2 AM tomorrow morning, a miserable time to be certain.

Since my grandfather passed away some years ago, and with my sister essentially permanently disabled and confined to a nursing home, my family has stopped gathering for Thanksgiving. Thus Lisa and I have been having what we now consider our traditional meal on Thanksgiving.

( Long Time Readers Will Have Seen This Before )

After setting the dishes to clean in the dishwasher, a long walk was indicated before we could eat the pumpkin pie that Lisa had baked. While we'd been eating, we heard booming sounds that had me asking, "Who's jumping on our roof?" It turned out that our neighbors, who are regular attendees of Burning Man, had invited many friends, and had set up a Flame Turkey (a metal sculpture of a turkey with flames fed by a small propane tank), and the booming we were hearing was a propane cannon built into the thing. We walked by and they set it off a couple of times. I would have taken pictures, but I don't think my camera phone would have resolved it properly in the dark.

Today the weather has dawned bright and sunny, but cold. I wish this was Sunday's weather! The latest forecast suggests that if Caltrans can work their usual magic over the summit that I may be able to sneak through mid-day on Sunday, but if not, I may not be able to get to the Bay Area until Tuesday night. I keep checking the forecast and re-evaluating my plans accordingly.

In general, we had no plans for engaging in Mass Consumerism Friday; however, Big R down the road is doing a one-day sale that would include a number of things we've been considering getting anyway, so we'll probably break down and go have a look.

Because I will be away for two weeks, we went to Reno again today so we could stock Lisa up with groceries so she doesn't need to come into town again if she doesn't want to do so. Before getting the groceries, we stopped at the Nugget and had dinner at John's Oyster Bar, then played the slots (giving back all we've won from them recently).

As promised, here's a picture of our Second Thanksgiving feast last night:

( Kuma Bear says, 'Hurry up and eats alreadys!' )

This meal served the two of us very well. There's also a duck carcass from which Lisa will attempt to make duck soup after I leave tomorrow.

Tonight I'm doing double packing: the new luggage gets the stuff that I know needs to go to Toronto, while everything else goes in my rolling duffel bag. I'll have to repack on Wednesday night after doing laundry so that I have only one bag going to SMOFCon with me. I'll have to carry my CPAP machine separately and hope that the carry-on exception for medical devices actually applies. (I know it's in the policies; I'm always worried about how policies are followed.)

My family no longer gathers for Thanksgiving since my grandfather died, for various reasons. So I'm spending the whole long weekend at home in Fernley. Lisa and I decided to go to Sparks and have the Thanksgiving Feast at Restaurante Orozko, first because it looked great, and second because due to the sale of the Nugget from the Ascuaga family to East Coast Interests, we have no idea what things will be like next year and the new owners may well decide to fire everyone and tear the place to bits.

The Nugget also does a huge feed in their main ballroom, for which you buy tickets in advance, but the Orozko menu looked better. What I didn't realize was that I could have reserved a time in advance by calling ahead, which I wish I had done, because when we arrived around 3:30, the first seating they had available was at 5:45. This left us with a lot of time to kill, and furthermore I was overdue for feeding already. We played slots, eventually ending up ahead a couple of dollars, and then I blew all of that and more killing time in the least-expensive way I know to do in a casino: sitting in the Keno lounge at $1/game. I timed it just right, too, as the last game ended three minutes before our seating time.

Dinner was superb. I never touched the turkey, as the many other things on the buffet were more tempting. I tried to restrain myself, but by the time we finished, I was overstuffed. We walked around the casino a little while to try and get the food to start digesting, and then headed home. My blood sugar was above normal, but below 200 (US scale), which is probably the best we can hope for.

We did vow not to do any shopping tomorrow, but it's possible that we will actually spend some money, as Lisa says we could due with filling up one of the propane bottles on the trailer. The oven uses propane rapidly. But rolling an empty bottle down to Hanneman's Service to refill it isn't the same thing as camping out at Target's doorstep to get those Doorbuster Savings that started this evening. Let those other people have it. I'm going to try and take the day off and write our Holiday Greeting letter and design our Christmas card.

Over the weekend, Lisa was able to boil up the leftover Thanksgiving Duck Dinner, add pasta, garlic, and mushrooms, and make, yes, Duck Soup. It was pretty good, too, and served for two more meals.

Lisa says she'd never had duck before this Thanksgiving. I've had it numerous times in my youth because my family hunted ducks, but it had been a long time.