The Plan A Thanksgiving involved getting up early on Thanksgiving morning, packing up the car to ride five hours to central Pennsylvania. That’s five hours of driving time. With a not-yet-two year old, one should calculate at least two stops.
Lydia would get to see her grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins with whom she’d get to play. Perhaps on Friday someone would watch Lydia so that Carol and I could go to the movies. It certainly would involve board games such as Scrabble.
On Saturday, we would be driving back the five hours plus back to Albany.
But Lydia was under the weather, and so was I (although I didn’t want to press this point, since it was Carol’s family that she’d want to see). But those factors plus a dodgy forecast of snow, not so much for where we are as much as where we were going, killed the deal.
The Plan B Thanksgiving: Roger goes to the store to buy a 10-12 pound fresh turkey on Thursday morning. There are NO 10-12 pound turkeys; there are only 15-16 pound turkeys at $1.69 a pound and a 20 lb. turkey at 89 cents a pound. (If you do the math, the bigger bird is cheaper.) Plus buy cranberry sauce, stuffing (Stove Top, in honor of its inventor, who died recently), and various other accouterments; Carol makes most of the meal, while I watch Lydia. I manage to see the entire first half of the Dallas/Denver football game while Lydia napped, and saw most of the fourth quarter and the OT after dinner. (Dallas lost! Yay!) I clean up/put away/take out the garbage.
Friday, I manage to catch up on newspaper reading, much of my television viewing. While we trade off watching Lydia.
Saturday: I watched enough recorded TV so that the DVR which was at 98% full two weeks ago, and over 70% even last week, is down to zero by the end of Saturday. Likewise, I read the Thursday through Saturday newspapers on the actual day they came out.
So, all in all, it wasn’t a bad Thanksgiving, not what he had envisioned. Lydia likes pickles and cranberry sauce, but would not eat beans and turkey, which she had previously liked. That was Lydia’s second Thanksgiving.
