Thanksgiving Eve, 11/26/08

10:08 a.m.

The tapioca experiment left much room for improvement. Apparently there are different ways of making it, so I'll make some adjustments next time. Let's just say that the first effort tasted not unlike ass, but had potential.

Wes came over for dinner last night, which turned out to be turkey burgers, ironically. It didn't occur to me until we'd decided on the menu and I'd bought ingredients that it was a week where I might be having an excess of turkey already. But my stomach has been a little funky all week and I just didn't know what I wanted to eat. He suggested steak... no. Pork... no. I'm not that big on those meats even when I feel fine. Turkey burgers seemed palatable, especially since I found some gluten free bread crumbs the other day. I like to add a bunch of things to the ground turkey, herbs and sauteed onions and garlic, bread crumbs and maybe an egg. They came out GREAT, I must say, piled with sliced tomatoes and pickles and vegenaise and ketchup and sliced avocado. Delicious.

Later my stomach reverted to its now-typical state of slight, undefinable ache. I wonder if a new supplement might be bothering me, though it's purported to have no side effects whatsoever. Still, I'll lay off a couple of days and see if tummy reverts back to a happy state.

Wes has spent the last 9 months dealing with odd digestive anomalies, too, so we talked at great length about our GI function, pooing history, and favorite supplements. He's taking something like 10 different supplements individually as opposed to a multivitamin, and wondered if they were bothering his stomach. I suggested laying off gluten for a couple of weeks as an experiment. We laughed about the turn of our conversation. He's 61 now, I'll be 50 next month. "We're getting old!" he said. I brought out all my probiotics to show him how many different good bacteria are in the gut. He's been taking acidophilus (which he calls "aphidophilus") but might want to explore others. He came to the right place to talk about it!

He's funny about words sometimes. The aphidophilus thing, plus when he was cooking the green beans I asked him to poke them to see if they were done, and he said, "They're El Dante now; is that the way you like them?" I suggested he might mean "al dente," and we laughed about the beans residing somewhere in Dante's seven levels of Hell. They actually turned out quite heavenly, with a little toasted sesame oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper. Yum.

I put the tree up yesterday and my landlady's boyfriend had come up and caulked the drafty baseboard, so I could put everything back in place. The living room is glorious!! I love being in there now. I could just about hold a dance in there, it's so open in the middle.

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When I opened the box from the basement that hold my Christmas ornaments, I first extracted this rectangular thing that my mother made, oh, maybe in the late 60s or around 1970, which somehow came down to me. Imagine a rectangular piece of styrofoam, about 11" x 15" and a couple of inches thick, covered in green felt. On top of this is a swath of white stuff that looks like asbestos (but isn't), representing snow. (Think fake Santa beard, only not curly.) Around the perimeter are 10 little angels made of pipe cleaners, little white balls for heads with faces painted on, and dresses and wings made of pink sheer stocking-like material stretched over gold wire shaped like said dresses and wings. Little sparkly stars and dots of glitter here and there. Now. The "body" of each angel, under the dress, is just a pipe cleaner that is wrapped around a toothpick. The toothpicks are then stuck into the foam base around the perimeter, and a clever little set of white twinkly fairy lights is arranged so that each angel hugs a bulb. Then there's an extra special angel (a little larger, and with an actual, plastic formed head with 3-D features and better hair) in the middle with no bulb.

Pretty much looks like a Good Housekeeping craft project from 1970. This thing has been a staple of my Christmas decor for as long as I can remember. The lights have continued to light (with a little wiggling here and there) and the angels have continued to sing. Well, silently, in my head, with my mom joining in.

This time when I plugged it in I noticed the lights were flickery. The cord was shorting out a little where it went into the plug. I thought per-haps it had reached the end of its incarnation in this life. A long and good life, filled with cheer.

However, I couldn't just toss it. My mum worked her fingers to the bone assembling this collage of joy, this miniature noel of good tidings and light. I looked at the angels on their field of white and green... and I looked at my tree...

And I gently unwrapped every little pipe cleaner arm from every little blinky fairy light, and proceeded to attach each angel to my tree, so that each was sitting upon one of the colored lights that would then shine through the little stocking dresses and illuminate its new resident in an extremely angel-like way. They look like little butterflies.

I'm going to upload a pic, but this is the day that Diaryland doesn't let me know that my gold membership has expired, so I had to send a sniffing hound into my echo-y bank vault to come up with $32 to reinstate it. As soon as it goes through you'll get an angel picture. (Later note: All my other pics were still showing up. Renewal went through, but still can't upload pics? Anyone else having this problem?)

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And now I think my stomach is ready, finally, for some gentle food.