My Thanksgiving Holiday So Far

My four-day weekend is nearly over, and of course I haven’t done most of what I planned to do.

Thanksgiving was nicely low-key. I got up late, went for a run, then did a little writing over coffee. Dan and I bought most of our food on Tuesday night from Central Market’s deli, so other than cooking the sweet potatoes, dinner was a simple matter of heating things up. It’s not that we’re too lazy to cook a turkey dinner—it’s just that with only two of us, it would only lead to waste. The few leftovers we have from our deli meal will go into recipes for this week. Turkey should go just fine with chickpeas and curry, right?

I ran a few errands on Friday, enjoying the light traffic and lack of long lines at the post office and grocery store. Everyone was either sleeping off their turkey dinner or fighting each other for bargains at Wal-Mart, and good riddance to them. I also dropped off some magazines at Half-Price Books and donated a bag of paperbacks at the new paperback drop-off at Central Market. The books go to the MD Anderson Cancer Center’s patient library, which is cool.

Today I did a long run under overcast skies that threatened rain but thankfully never delivered. I saw some old friends out for a run by the zoo, I saw early tailgaters at the Rice University stadium (what were they grilling at 8:00 am?), and I observed that Rice has two types of squirrels: the ordinary red kind, and a gray kind with light almost-white fur on the backs of their ears. I ran the Buffalo Bayou trails for the first time since the hurricane and noticed there’s still a lot of silt covering the trails at their low points. And I noticed that there are a lot of new trees (magnolia, oak and pine) being planted along the bayou near my house. These aren’t replacement trees from hurricane damage because they’re in places where there weren’t trees before. I figure it’s part of the entire revitalization project they’ve had going on for the last couple of years along that bayou, re-doing the trails and things like that.

After lunch today, Dan and I went to 10,000 Villages to get a birthday gift for one of his sisters. We got her one of these boxes and some bracelets and other little things to put inside. The store is just a block away from where we go for Indian food in the Rice Village and it's a neat little place to go for reasonably priced gifts that you know won't be what everyone else is giving.

That’s about all the news from around here. I can’t believe I have only one more day off, and it’s pretty well spoken for, since Sunday is for cooking. Oh well. I’ve enjoyed my little break, I’ve gotten some writing done, and Cadbury has enjoyed the extra time hanging out in the chair with me.