Week of Thanks - Day Five

I would like to express fervent gratitude for the people who came out on Black Friday and bought cars from my husband, especially the ones who came with $33,000 in cash. Yes, cash.

With so many years of experience in the car business, my husband -- like many other salesmen -- has learned to recognize the true buyers from the casual shoppers or wishers and dreamers. Men by themselves? Depends. Salesmen look for wedding rings on men's fingers. If the man is wearing a wedding ring but is at the dealership by himself, he's most likely a wisher and dreamer who's there to look at a new Camaro and tell anyone who will listen about the Z-28 he bought with the money he saved up by mowing lawns from birth to seventeen years old.

But a man who is there with his wife? He is a serious buyer. A couple of those couples came out yesterday and helped turn a really sucky and scary month into a slightly less stomach-churning period for us. One cute couple called their daughter, a freshman at Butler, to come look at the car before they made their decision: The girl arrived, said she loved it, and mom and dad got out the checkbook. I thought that was really sweet and funny.

What was particularly nice about the people my husband worked with yesterday is that both couples, he said, were lovely people. Easy to work with. Pleasant and kind. Friendly. There are so many of the other sort, he says, that you tend to remember the ones who were great.

Here's hoping for a few more magnanimous folks to be grateful for before the month ends on Monday. Baby needs a new pair of shoes. And Mommy needs to buy groceries for Christmas dinner. And for all the other days in December that aren't Christmas. We're in the clutch here, people. Go buy a Chevy from my husband, the Prince of Salesmen and make me even more thankful than I am right now.

Black Friday has not traditionally been a day when there are lots of car sales. For the past thirteen years that my husband has been selling cars, it's mostly been a day when the salesmen sit in the showroom next to the phones that are not ringing, eating the pralines that someone's wife sent in and working crossword puzzles as they scan the lot. Who ever would have guessed that there would be serious car buyers out on this particular day in this particular economy?

For that, all levity aside, I am truly grateful.

RECIPE: Thanksgiving dressings - Cornbread & Sausage, Cranberry-Walnut and Oyster (ew)

I literally cannot believe that I made dressing this good that was so simple. And cheaty. And a total secret, so shush before everyone finds out. We can't ALL have rock-star reputations for making good dressing at Thanksgiving, so keep this on the down low.

My delicious, steamy-in-the-middle, crispy-on-the-top-and-edges dressing yesterday had one basic secret ingredient.

Are you ready for it?

Stove-Top Stuffing. That's the secret ingredient. It comes in a box and is made by Kraft Foods and if I could get my arms around their corporate headquarters? I would so be hugging them all right now. Because after three years -- three long, purgatorial years of producing one vomit-inducing pan of dressing after another at the family Thanksgiving dinner -- I have finally found a winning recipe that won compliments from everyone.

And let me tell you: the leftovers? Even better than yesterday. No more tearing up loaves of bread and baking them dry and not having a bowl big enough to keep from slopping eggy, brothy bits of wet bread onto the kitchen floor; no, it was a simple enterprise from first to last. So without further ado, the dressing, with many thanks to my friend Amy, whose granny-in-law cracked the dressing code and paved the way for all busy holiday cooks to have a little more time and a little less stress.

CORNBREAD DRESSING

Ingredients:

1 pound sage sausage, browned and chopped into small pieces

4 boxes Stove-Top Stuffing Cornbread mix

2 sticks butter

2 medium stalks celery, diced

1 medium onion, diced

4 eggs, beaten

approximately 5 cups of chicken or turkey broth/stock

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees and generously butter a 9"x13" casserole dish. In a large mixing bowl, empty the four packets of Stove-Top Stuffing and set aside. In a small bowl, beat the eggs until well mixed. Melt the two sticks of butter in a small saucepan; simmer the celery and onion until both are translucent. Combine all ingredients with the contents of the STS packets in the large mixing bowl: about four cups of the broth, the eggs, the butter/celery/onion. Stir thoroughly to combine. Add more broth if mixture seems dry (it should be a bit wet; not VERY wet, but slightly wet.)

Empty the stuffing into the prepared casserole dish; cover with foil shiny side down and bake for thirty-five minutes. Remove foil and bake for twenty-five more minutes or until the top is slightly brown and crispy. Serve hot with slices of turkey and enough gravy to fill a bathtub.

CRANBERRY-WALNUT DRESSING

Ingredients:

4 boxes of chicken or turkey Stove Top Stuffing

2 sticks butter

2 medium stalks celery, minced

1 medium onion, minced

1 1/2 teaspoons dried sage

2 cups chopped walnuts

1 cup dried cranberries

approximately five cups chicken or turkey broth

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees and generously butter a 9"x13" casserole dish. Empty the packets of Stove Top Stuffing into a large mixing bowl and add the cranberries and walnuts; set aside. Beat the eggs in a small bowl, set aside. Melt the butter in a small saucepan; add the sage, celery and onion and cook until translucent. Combine all ingredients in the large mixing bowl: stuffing packets/cranberries/walnuts, eggs, butter mixture. Add broth, stirring thoroughly to combine. The dressing should be a bit wet.

Turn out into buttered casserole dish, cover with foil (shiny side down) and bake in oven for 35 minutes. Remove foil and bake for twenty-five more minutes, or until the top is browned and crispy at the edges. Serve with great fanfare, because this is a truly lovely, delicious and festive-looking holiday dish.

OYSTER DRESSING (ew)

Ingredients:

1 box of chicken or turkey Stove Top Stuffing

1 egg

1/2 stick butter

1 small rib of celery, minced

1/2 medium onion, minced

1/4 teaspoon ground pepper

1/2 pint fresh oysters, minced, liquid strained and reserved in a small bowl

approximately 1 or 2 cups chicken or turkey broth

Directions:

Only if you have to, preheat oven to 350 degrees and generously butter a small casserole plate (mine is about a six-inch diameter dish); set aside. If you're absolutely certain that you must, empty the STS packet into a medium mixing bowl. Reluctantly beat the egg and add to STS mixture. In firm denial of your nameless fear, melt the butter and add the pepper, celery and onion; cook until vegetables are translucent. With a sense of impending doom, add to STS mixture in bowl. Cringing in dread, add minced oysters and the strained liquid; stir. Add more chicken or turkey broth as needed until the stuffing is slightly wet.

Fighting back nausea, cover casserole dish with foil, shiny side down, and bake in the oven for twenty minutes; remove foil and bake for another twenty-five minutes, until stuffing is golden on top and slightly crispy around the edges. Serve hot with love for your relatives who actually eat that stuff. Sit slumped in a chair with a medicinal glass of brandy. Weep.

Week of Thanks - Day Four

Today I am giving thanks for books. Books on the shelves and books on the table tops; books on the staircase, books in the public library, books in book stores and at Amazon....my love affair with books has been going on since I was a toddler staggering up to various adult relatives with a pile of Dr. Seuss books clutched in my arms and one demand upon my baby lips: "Wead to me."

My mother taught me how to read when I was four, not because she was convinced I was some kind of genius (I wasn't), but because I kept pestering her to just explain to me, all these words. I don't know how long it took her, but I can remember the feeling of triumph I had when I opened some little book and realized that all those black squiggles had meaning: I could look at C-A-T and a picture of my grandma's cat, Fluff, leapt into my mind.

I have had a love affair with books ever since then. When I go to the library, it isn't just to get a book or two - it's more like twelve or twenty. It's been like that since I was a kid and discovered From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and A Wrinkle in Time. Also the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books, which I still think are the funniest and smartest children's books I've ever read. And what girl hasn't sat and wept over Sara Crewe or Francie Dolan?

Although I do read some non-fiction, reading has always primarily been a way of escape for me. Fiction is my favorite, and I'll read just about anything, although I find romance novels hard to stomach. There's just something about the love affairs of fictional characters that just leaves me cold, especially the affair in a book that I picked up entirely by accident where the author began describing someone's "member," and it was pretty clear that the author wasn't referring to an associate in a country club or a PTA group or a fraternity. Ish.

If I get to the point where I'm near the end of my library book and I know that there are no others in my bag, I start feeling a little uneasy. Likewise, nothing makes me feel better than knowing that there is a big stack of fat books waiting for me up in my room.

Book. Books and books and books. I'm thankful for all the good ones I've come across in my life, and thankful for all the ones I haven't read yet. Books that other people have raved about (well, except for that one) and books that I've been able to share with others.

Books have been good friends to me.

Happy Thanksgiving! And....

...it's even happier because THE DRESSING TURNED OUT TO BE DELICIOUS! I am so relieved. Many compliments came my way for the sausage/cornbread and cranberry/walnut combinations, with additional kudos offered from my Uncle Mike and Poppy, both of whom enjoyed the oyster dressing, which, eewwwww. They were both very sweet, but I'm still of the mind that they should have offered me a medal, because I did have to cut those slimy, ugly things up.


We went to Pat and Angie's house along with Kieren, Dayden and Kiersi, my parents, my Uncle Mike and Aunt Jackie, Mary Elizabeth, my step-gran, her son Doug (who is my....step-uncle? Very confusing), Angie's aunt and uncle, Debbie and Steve (who are our age) and my young cousin Emily, who was introducing a serious new beau to the family, Manny.


I went over to meet him and took the girls with me. Manny looked at me shyly in the manner of a person who is not a natural extrovert being plopped down in the middle of a family that contains just two kinds of people: Extreme extroverts who will try to be your best friend within ten minutes of meeting you and extreme introverts who will sit and look out the window....at the television....at a picture hanging on the wall....at a speck of dust on a tabletop....ANYTHING other than talk to you so that the silences stretch out like rubber bands and threaten to go zinging off into space where they'll likely put somebody's eye out.


"Hi, Manny," I said, taking the hand he offered. "I'm Shelley, Emily's ancient cousin, and these are my daughters Meelyn and Aisling who are just a couple of years younger than Emily, so they're not ancient, they're just cousins."


Meelyn and Aisling looked mortified, Emily beamed and Manny managed a slightly strangled, "Hinicetomeetyou," before he sank gratefully back onto the couch. Emily squeezed his hand, her face alight, and I was reminded vividly of the first time my husband met my family, which was two months before we got married and about three weeks after we met. Good times. Gooooood times. There were LOTS of conversations going on then, you betcha.


Dinner was served and everything was delicious and fattening and full of butter. I sat at the same table as Pat, where he informed me that he had been reading here on InsomniMom and that he wished to inform me that he does not pour a can of Sprite into the turkey's body cavity; it is a can of COKE, thank you very much. I told him I would add a retraction, so here it is, Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky.


After lunch, we all idled around talking and eating pie, watching a little football, sneaking a piece of turkey here and there. The kids went down to the basement playroom to play Wii. Several people felt inclined to take naps and they were left to their peaceful dreams. I sat at the dining table with my father and my uncle and Pat and Poppy and Uncle Mike scandalized us with stories of their youth, many of which involved driving over the Ohio state line where the drinking age was nineteen, only they were sixteen.

"I don't think all the stories of our checkered youth are ready to be shared yet," I said to Pat, who gave me a brief, sidelong look that clearly said shutupshutupshutup. "I think they need to age for another twenty years or so before we share them."

Maybe at another Thanksgiving.

Week of Thanks - Day Three

My greatest gratitude today goes to my husband, a person for whom I am thankful every single day, even though he wears white socks with sandals against my fervently expressed wishes, even though he doesn't like popcorn.

This month has been an awful month for car sales, which figures, since next month is Christmas. Back in the good old days, we knew that November would be rocky, so we did this thing, this amazing thing that really helped us out a lot: We put a whole bunch of money in the bank back in June, July and August so that when November came along, we could just pay all our bills out of that savings account and use whatever amount he earned in commission to buy Christmas gifts and the like. But those days? They are gone with the wind, Miss Scarlett.

This morning, my husband came upstairs, smelling of fresh clothes and soap and toothpaste, and looked at me, where I was admittedly still yawning in the bed, having not yet summoned the energy to get up on a cool, rainy morning. "Scoot over," he said.

I obligingly scooted and he climbed in under the covers next to me. We stayed there face to face for a moment, our noses practically touching. "You know," he said, "when we met, I thought it was so great that you were a teacher, because I knew you'd always have steady work that paid well, with insurance and everything. I figured that with what I made -- and I planned to do well -- we'd have a pretty decent life, with a nice house, cars, money in the bank...."

"We do have a pretty decent life," I said stoutly.

"Not really what I thought it would be," he said ruefully. "But when the kids came along, I just couldn't see you working. You know, outside the home. I wanted to be able to shoulder the whole deal. I was proud that I could do that, you know? The men in my family, they've always been the kind who saw it as a point of honor that their wives didn't have to work unless they just wanted to."

"I know," I said. "And you do a great job, you really do. We always squeeze by, no matter what. And the recession won't last forever."

"I hope not. God, I pray not," he sighed. "I'd sure like to think that someday we'll look back on this whole one income life with our decision to home school the girls and say, 'Geeez, that was pretty frikken scary during that recession, but we made it. We always made it, no matter what."

"Well, you know that's how our great-great-grandparents got through the Great Depression. They made it and we will, too." I smoothed out a worried line between his eyes. "I wonder if I'll end up being one of those ladies who's saved a drawer full of string or thumbtacks or something?"

"If you're going to save something crazy, then I'd prefer it if you'd save something useful, like stamps or safety pins," he said, flinging back the bedcovers and getting out of the bed. He leaned over and smooched me on the forehead. "Love you. Call me. What's for dinner?"

"Velveeta Shells and Cheese."

"Are you TRYING to kill me?"

"Look, I've already had this same discussion with your kids. You are going to be FEASTING on Thursday, so I think you can manage with macaroni and cheese on Wednesday. Besides, I have a bunch of Thanksgiving cooking to do and I don't want to have to put together a big dinner on top of all that."

"Macaroni and cheese is just basic nourishment, kid food," he grumbled.

"I told the girls that if they didn't quit complaining, I wasn't going to cook the pasta before I served it," I warned.

"Whatever," he sighed. "Well, anyway, talk to you later."

He went out of the room, shutting the door quietly behind him, mindful of the sleeping girls, and went off to slay some dragons.

He can take a licking

You see this dog, Hershey? You see how ashamed and guilty he looks? You want to know why he looks that way?

It's because every evening as the four of us sit down at the dining room table to eat dinner, he develops an urge to sprawl on the floor with one leg pointed gracefully at the ceiling like the world's hairiest ballerina and lovingly slurp away at his, er-....male appendage, devoting as much care and avid attention to this activity as mothers do when giving their little babies a bath.

Last night, I had a particularly succulent meal, I thought: Roast beef, potatoes, carrots and homemade biscuits. It was a lovely warm meal for a cold and rainy evening and as we sat down with the candles in the autumn centerpiece gleaming, I gave everyone my customary dirty look until they all unfolded their napkins and placed them in their laps and we crossed ourselves and said the blessing. Hershey came shambling into the room, yawning and obviously hoping that the entire roast would somehow fall off the platter and into his mouth.

He picked my husband as the Person Most Likely to Drop Food and settled himself down comfortably, waiting for whatever tidbit came his way. To pass the time, he lifted his leg and began going SLUUUUUUURRRP sluuuuuuuuurrrp SLUUUUUURRRRRRP, punctuating the slurps with little snuffles and snorts of pleasure.

My husband cast Hershey a quick, irritated glance and then decided to ignore the lapping sounds going on right next to him. "So! How was everyone's day? And Meelyn, will you pass the salt and pepper?"

LAPPP...sluuuurrrrp...LAPPPPP

"I baked four dozen molasses cookies, cleaned the kitchen, went to the grocery, folded a basket of laundry and did some vacumming," I offered virtuously, buttering a biscuit.

"Don't forget the six hours you spent on the computer," said Aisling, cutting a chunk of carrot into three thousand little pieces and spearing one bit on a fork tine. She guided the infinitesimal piece of carrot to the tip of her tongue and chewed daintily. I glared at her.

"I finished up the Spanish program and I'm ready for the next software," Meelyn offered.

My husband looked over at me with a pained expression on his face. "How much does the next software cost?" he asked. "Please tell me it's under fifty dollars."

"It's under fifty dollars," I said kindly.

"Are you lying?"

"Oh, heavens, yes."

SLUUUUUURRRRP....*snort*.....SLUUUUUUURRRPPP

"That is sooo gross," said Meelyn, putting down her fork and looking under the table. Hershey broke off from his absorption with his Man Part long enough to look back, ascertain that he was not being offered so much as a carrot, and returned his licking, snuffling, slurping and snorting.

"Daddy, make him stop!" Aisling pleaded. "I can't eat with him doing that. It sounds disgusting."

"Repulsive," Meelyn rejoined.

"Nauseating."

"Revolting."

"OKAY!" my husband yelled. "Enough with the adjectives, already! HERSHEY! Knock it off."

Hershey peered up at my husband with his beady eyes and went in for another lick. Slllluuuuurrrrrppp. The juiciness of that sound cannot be stressed strongly enough. It was the wettest, slimiest, lickiest sound, ever. Hershey uttered a happy little sigh of contentment. My husband turned the color of key lime pie.

"Okay. Hershey needs to go to his bed before I hurl," he declared. I frowned at him; that kind of talk is not allowed at the table. He caught my look and said, exasperated, "Look, it's not exactly refined and elegant, trying to eat dinner like civilized people while the dog sits over there and licks his...."

"STOP RIGHT THERE," I interrupted. "Do not say another word, especially that one. Aisling, go put Hershey in his crate. Meelyn, would you please pass the potatoes? Hershey, you are a bad dog."

Aisling hauled a protesting Hershey off by his collar and we ate the rest of our dinner in peace.

After the girls did the dishes, we were ready to sit down and watch So You Think You Can Dance and I told Meelyn to let Hershey out of his crate. He came prancing into the living room, eyes bright, tail high. My husband pressed the play button on the DVR remote and Aisling invited Hershey up to sit on the couch with us.

"Come on, boy," she cooed invitingly, patting the cushion beside her.

But Hershey ignored her. Instead, he went front and center before the television, plunked himself down and pointed a bold foot ceiling-ward.

"Oh, no," groaned my husband.

SLUUUURRRP.....slurrrrrrrrrp......SSSLUUUURRRRRPPPPP....

Week of Thanks - Day Two

Today, I am really thankful for the opportunity that my family has to just sit down after dinner in the evenings and watch television together, laughing, talking, arguing and enjoying one another's company. We're getting ready to watch So You Think You Can Dance as I type this post; it's a chilly night with the rain splashing down on the street outside the living room windows, the perfect cozy night for us three girls to pile onto the couch with the fleece throw blankets, the squooshy pillows and the dogs while Dad reigns supreme in his big recliner with a beer in one hand and the remote in the other.

It's so much fun, our favorite way to bond as a family, and whoops! Meelyn and Aisling just finished with the dishes and my husband has the show all cued up on the DVR, so I'd better grab my tea and go get settled.

Love the lovely family.

PRODUCT REVIEW: Wright's Silver Cream

I haven't done a product review for quite a while, but last night I used something that completely took the torture out of a job I really hate: Polishing the silver.

My grandpa and step-gran gave my husband and me eight place settings plus serving pieces of silver flatware as a wedding gift. For years, the big wooden chest lived under our bed and we hauled it out over the holidays until we moved into this house. Once here, I decided that life needed more beauty, plus I'd ground up about six spoons from my set of Oneida stainless in the garbage disposal. And some salad forks.

So now we use the silver frequently and since it's out in the open instead of huddled up inside that chest, it has to be polished. Which is better than cleaning the toilets, you know? But less fun than watching Top Chef or playing in Webkinz World. And time-consuming, leaving less hours in the day to watch Top Chef or play-....well, you get my drift.

I had a bottle of somebody's silver polish that accidentally got thrown out when I paid Aisling $5 to tidy up that scary area under the kitchen sink, and you know why I can't remember the brand name? Because it didn't work very well, that's why. You had to kind of paint it onto the piece of silver you wished to de-tarnish, wait for it to dry and then rub and rub and rub and rub and rub and you'd think with ALL THAT RUBBING, there'd be a genie appearing to grant you your three most heartfelt wishes, wouldn't you? But no. A fairly clean dessert spoon and cramping fingers was the meager reward for all that effort.

So I didn't really miss that bottle of polish, you dig? But I needed more, so I picked up an eight ounce tub of Wright's Silver Polish at the grocery, sighed, and brought it home to get started on the silver.

The directions for use invited me to:

1. Dampen the enclosed sponge
2. Polish the silver piece with Wright's cream smeared on the sponge, adding water as needed
3. Rinse silver and dry with a clean, soft cloth

"That's all?" I said in scornful disbelief. "Where's the part about the carpal tunnel syndrome? And the bushel basket of clean, soft cloths to run through the washer because of having to repeat the instructions fifty times to get the tarnish off the butter knife? Where? Tell me where!"

Lip curled, I opened the little tub, dampened the sponge and spread the soft lavender goo on a fork. I still had ideas in my head about setting it aside to let it dry, but to my surprise, the thick layer of tarnish started coming off right then. I found that I liked using an old tea towel to apply the polish more than I liked the sponge, so the tea towel and I, with a minimum of effort between the two of us, polished that fork up like nobody's business. Easy-peasy!

You'd want to see my silver right now, you really would. It is gorgeous, I had only two cloths to run through the washer with the small load of kitchen towels I did today, and I am not wearing a sling. If you have silver flatware or serving pieces you're going to be using over the holidays, I highly recommend this polish.

I give up

Every Monday since September, I've been calling our doctor, one of four in a small family practice, and hearing the same apologetic answer to my question: "I'm sorry, but we're out - we get so little of it in." Sometimes that reply is changed to, "I'm sorry, we didn't get any at all this week."

I'm talking, of course, about the H1N1 vaccine. There's just none to be had. I went back and forth, back and forth in August, trying to decide whether or not I wanted to have myself and the girls innoculated with this new vaccine. The three of us have risk factors: I have Type 2 diabetes and they, of course, are teenagers. We do have two young cousins, twenty-six year old Nicole and eighteen year old Heidi, who have both had H1N1 and recovered just fine, although Heidi was hospitalized because of her high fever, but still....

At the end of August, the triage nurse at the office told me that I should call on Mondays to "check for availability." That didn't sound a warning knell in my mind, but evidently the office staff already suspected that there were going to be shortages.

Every Monday through September, October and early November, I called the office on Monday to check for availability, happy that it didn't require an appointment to get a shot; we could just pop in at our convenience. That's not the way it worked out, however. There were simply no vials of the vaccine anywhere on the premises. What little was shipped to the office was immediately snapped up by people who were a little more quick on the draw than I was.

After a particularly horrible bout of the regular seasonal flu Aisling and I shared three years ago, I have made DARNED SURE to get a vaccine and it has been lovely to not be sick. I was particularly torqued about getting so dog-sick three years back because Aisling and I had to miss the performance of Twelfth Night at the Indiana Repertory Theater, a performance which my entire Shakespeare class had to attend without me, one which we had tickets for something like three months in advance. Never again, I thought grimly. I am getting a shot always from now on.

But H1N1 is scary to me, probably because of all the media hype surrounding it. I know lots of people who've had it; several kids in my religious ed class, the children of internet friends and home school group students. I don't personally know anyone who's died; that's more like a friend's sister's brother-in-law sort of thing, and just this morning the news came out that Indianapolis radio talk show host Greg Garrison (93.1 WIBC) lost his son-in-law to complications from H1N1. Greg's daughter is expecting the couple's third child in January.

"My daughter had been exposed. We knew her husband was in critical condition with the bug. She's eight months pregnant and we can't find a shot for her and we cast about until we finally found one and she got it," Greg was quoted in the article I linked to above. He says that it took the family a week to find vaccine, in time to help her, but too late for her husband, who was thirty-seven years old.

This is really upsetting. I mean, really. There are lots of folks out there comparing the Obama administration's ham-handed fumbling of the vaccine ball to the Bush administration's foot-dragging response in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and I can see how they're drawing that parallel. And what this means about the competence of our government to handle the entire health care system for a big country with lots of people is something I find I don't want to even contemplate; the ramifications are too appalling.

With supplies so low and few vaccines to be had, I suppose millions of us out here are left with nothing more to do than pray for God's mercy and protection. Which is, of course, always a good thing to do, but something one would somehow feel better about if one could at least take the precautions that seem sensible.

Week of Thanks - Day One

I am kind of a naturally grumpy person, so I don't think that gratitude -- thankfulness -- is something that comes to me easily. Sometimes I have to make myself think, "You should be thankful for this; you have been blessed by [add specific situation/name of person]." Not a very charming thing to admit.

It particularly bothers me that right now, with our U.S. economy in such turmoil, I have an extra hard time feeling gratitude, mostly because it seems that everything is so difficult. I get tired of not having money, of constantly worrying about bills and making sure my husband has some new boots before snow falls because his old boots are about five years old and have holes in the soles, and are we going to have to have a pre-emptive strike on the money my parents and grandparents give us for Christmas so that we can pay the utilities and the gas bill....it's just wearing. I feel like all this has changed me into a different kind of person, one who is warier and less hopeful and much less convinced that the future will be bright. Ugh.

But there are blessings that I definitely recognize. I'm not a total curmudgeon, after all. And the thing I feel the most gratitude for on this week leading up to Thanksgiving is the privilege of being Catholic. Knowing Jesus in the depth and breadth of His Church -- spiritually and historically -- has changed my entire life. Despite my many flaws and failings, I have loved Jesus since I was a child and it has been my greatest joy to be able to become closer to Him in the sacraments, the birthright of Christians everywhere.

"Better one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere."

-Psalm 84:10

In with the new

Remember using these things, the old-fashioned card catalogs? They were nice, weren't they? For one thing, they didn't crash right before telling you the call number of the anthology of medieval drama or massive cooking tome you were looking up. Plus, they were homey looking, those big, polished cabinets that smelled like furniture polish, paper and ink. Of course, it was always a bit annoying if someone else was looking something up in the very drawer you needed to get into, but then again, there aren't always a lot of extra computer terminals at the public library either.

I kind of miss the card catalogs.

But I'll tell you one innovation that I am behind 1001% and that is the automatic renew feature, where you can just click to the public library's website, key in your library card number to access your account, and then renew your books from the comfort of your own desk.

I estimate that this has saved me probably a million dollars in fines, but has inhibited the library in its ability to buy multiple copies of The Gilmore Girls, seasons one through seven. Because every time I access the library's computerized catalog from my desk -- admittedly another great feature -- Lorelei and Rory are simply nowhere to be found.

Keeping my fingers crossed....

I have not acquitted myself well in my past two years of dressing-making at Thanksgiving dinner. Wait, no.... Make that three years.

1) Three years ago, my dressing tasted okay, but it came out of the baking dish crumbly instead of in the slab-like texture preferred by my family.

2) Two years ago, I used a Martha Stewart recipe, and let me just say that if there's a bullet that could bring down Martha Stewart Omnimedia like a fragile clay pigeon tracked by a high-powered rifle with a scope, that dressing recipe could do it. In a word, hoooouuuurrrrrppp. If that's a word. Maybe it's more of a sound. Only splashier. With chunks.

3) Last year, the recipe wasn't so bad, but the texture was terrible, still with the crumbly instead of the slabby. But worse, it was wet. Wet and smooshy, like something Gollum would serve at Thanksgiving dinner.

It's been a critical disappointment, because a plate of turkey and dressing is really all I want at Thanksgiving. We have mashed potatoes often because my husband is terrible partial to them and potatoes are cheap. We have green bean casserole for Sunday dinner several times a year; sweet potatoes are okay, and corn pudding I could never eat again. I am not a fan of dinner rolls, and I keep myself away from the pies because of my blood sugar. The only other Thanksgiving food I really pine for is the multi-layered Jell-O salad my aunt always brings. I adore Jell-O.

I'm not sure why it's been such a hard thing to get right. I mean, bread crumbs. Onion. Celery, sage, salt, broth, a couple of eggs... What's so hard about that? If you want to get really fancy, you throw in some dried cranberries and some walnuts. I've heard of people using sausage, too. So WHY CAN'T I GET IT RIGHT?!

Pat and Angie have been making fabulous turkeys for the past few years, and I think turkeys are much harder than dressing. Pat says it's easy, though. His fail-proof recipe is to roast it (in a bag? I think one of those bags is involved), using more butter than you ever thought possible, some salt and pepper and one can of Sprite poured into the cavity.

Maybe I should use a can of Sprite on my dressing instead of broth? Hmm.

Well. Anyway, I do have a recipe. In fact, I have two: One for cornbread dressing and the other for sage & onion dressing. I don't want to post either one for fear that they'll turn out awful and that I'll be exposed to the ridicule of the seventeen people who read this blog, most of whom are related to me.

I went to the store today and bought all my ingredients, which totaled something utterly ridiculous like $34.17. Until Thursday, then. Pray for me.