Happy Thanksgiving!

I got up before the newspaper made it to my doorstep - that's a first!  It was late today - usually it's here by 6 a.m.  The pile of advertisements from retailers was at least 2 inches thick (I am not kidding) and I spent a couple happy hours sipping coffee, listening to smooth jazz on my laptop (since the local smooth jazz station went the way of the dinosaur, the only way to listen to the music I like now is online) while paging through all the super-sales.

But I've done most of my shopping already.  This morning online I scored a perfect for me 15.6" laptop for $230 plus $14.99 shipping and an all-in-one wireless printer/fax/scanner with a high page per minute print rate and cheap ink refills for $69.99 with free shipping.  My desktop will go into retirement in the spare room, or perhaps I will donate it to a local charity.  It's 5 years old and not a thing wrong with it, just a little slower than I like and even the cheapest laptops these days have 2x as much storage and speed.  And I didn't shop at Walmart either - I refuse to do so, on principle.  My purchases will ship tomorrow and they should be here Monday.

So, I am a very happy camper and am just about to lug the artificial tree in from the garage and turn the Lions game on.  It's cold today, but the rain has stopped.  The winds are picking up and the temperature is dropping.  By Black Friday morning the windchills will approach zero, brrrrrr!  I'm staying inside!  It was so lovely to not have to get up in the dark this morning.  I popped out of bed about 7:15 - there is a certain level of daylight I respond to and wake up naturally.  And to think I have tomorrow, Saturday and Sunday to do the same thing!  Ahhhh, I'm in Heaven.  Now I've got to toss some more nuts out for the converging squirrels who have been swarming since daybreak now that they realize I'm home past my usual 7:25 a.m., LOL! 

Later -

It is now later - 1:10 p.m. to be exact.  I posted the above at 11:33 a.m.



Christmas, 2009.  Gifts are scattered about, including
those wine bottles, new gloves for Mr. Don, new
exhibit catalogs to read - and there's the tree!

 Ohmygoddess!  Every year I forget that wrestling that very heavy artificial tree from the garage into the front room is a 2-person job in a 1-person household. And every year I somehow manage to get it done, but usually not without knocking over a lamp or the tree stand falling apart or being attacked by bugs that did not make it into the vacuum cleaner.  Or all three at once.  This year, fortunately, I moved the lamps and furniture well out of the path of the wayward tree, and there were only two bugs. The stand did fall apart, and I noticed somehow I lost a part of it where the plastic cracked and a chunk disappeared.  I jerry rigged the two stand "legs" that kept falling out of their slots with scotch tape, LOL!  Not duct tape, that would show :)  I also used scotch tape to "tie up" a sagging branch - the prong it sits in must have gotten dented out of shape last season as I was wrestling the tree back to the garage. 

The tree seems to have a lot more "holes" this year.  Hmmmm.  I swear the tree does it to itself just to drive me crazy trying to bend the branches this way and that to "fill" them in.  Of course, I never get them filled in, no matter how hard I try!  I walk around and around that tree, bending this, pushing that, the lights are on, it's against the front window so I can see the holes quite clearly, and yet somehow, they seem to show up in other spots that do not reveal themselves until the tree is entirely decorated!  Argggghhhhh.

Decorated it is not, at the moment!  I'm taking a break before I lug the boxes of decorations and ornaments down from the spare closet.  Detroit is leading the Patriots by 7 at the half - good for them!  I listened to the Kid Rock presentation and there was a brief interview with "The Rock" Dwayne Johnson who is so - ummphh! - and has come out with a new shoot-em-up/smash-em-up revenge movie just in time for Christmas.  Nothing like peace to men of goodwill on earth, heh?  LOL!  Well, I love a good revenge movie as well as the next chess femme, and The Rock is easy on the eyes, I must say. 

It's dark here - it's nice having the light on the tree turned on, sort of brightens things up.  The clouds are really scudding low across the sky.  The squirrels are eating me out of house and home.  There can be no squirrels in sight and the second I appear at the patio door POOF, there they are, with one little paw tucked under in their "begging" pose, LOL!  How can I resist?  That's the problem, I can't.  Oh well.  There is one little fellow who has a slightly deformed mouth. He has developed a taste for Brazil nuts and won't go for the almonds.  He also loves pecans, but they are very expensive!  Anyway, he'll come right up to the patio door and stand up and look in, with his little paws pressed against the glass.  If that doesn't get my attention, he'll jump a few times - thump thump - and if that doesn't work he'll scramble up the side of the door making a goddess-awful racket with his nails on the aluminum siding!  That never fails to get my attention no matter how intent I am on the task at hand.  He is one smart little squirrel.

Okay - time to haul the boxes of decorations and ornaments downstairs.  This year I want to go for a somewhat different look on the tree.  Somehow, I am thinking it will end up looking pretty much the same but - we'll see...  Second half has started and the Lions have scored again --

Happy Thanksgiving!

The Packers come on at noon, they're playing the annual Shriners Game in Detroit against the Lions. I'll be having dinner at 3 p.m. with some of the family at one of my sister's. She's a great cook and I stuff myself unrepentantly and always bring home leftovers! Yum! The office is closed tomorrow, so I have a 4-day weekend, yippee! Kevin the incredible handyman whom my friend Ann told me about, is wrapping up various projects around the house and will be back on the job tomorrow morning. Right now I am battling drywall dust (he's doing replacement/patching of the drywall on the basement stairwell and patching settlement cracks and the hole in the living room ceiling left by the plumber's March visit to fix a leaking toilet). I will be glad when THAT is finished - I'm tired of cleaning every single day and I don't know if I'll ever get rid of all the dust - I hate dusting! I discovered I need an industrial strength shop vac. Maybe I can talk my sister into going shopping tomorrow after all... Normally I don't pay much attention to those emails one always gets that are circulated to 50,000 other people, but these Turkey-day cartoons made me laugh out loud, something we could all use more of in these dark days. Happy Thanksgiving to you!

A Modern Thanksgiving Story

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. Today is USA's T-day. There is horror and terror in India, Somalia and elsewhere in the world, but today we Americans sit down with our families and loved ones, enjoying the best meals that we can afford, be it at our own tables or in church halls and homeless shelters where free meals of turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, vegetables and gravy with stuffing and cranberry sauce are served by volunteers. I'll be leaving in a little while to go to one of my sisters' houses for dinner, along with my super whipped sweet potatoes, a family favorite. Here is a story I found at the New York Times about sudden, unexpected bounty that is allowing thousands of people in New York City to purchase extra food and special food treats that they normally would never be able to afford, just in time for the holidays, because they had been illegally cut off from the Federal food stamp program years before. Many of the beneficiaries of the pay-out from settlement of the law suit are sharing their good fortune with those around them. Stories like this one remind me forcefully that I am very fortunate - I have a lot of equity in a beautiful home, I have employment I deem fairly secure, I can afford meat and potatoes whenever I want and can splurge on feeding $2.99 a pound nuts to the squirrels this time of year, I have adequate fresh water, heat, and light. I'm trying to shed excess fat off my body, I am not chronically malnourished. I have enough "discretionary" funds to be able to buy many items and do other things that some people probably cannot even fathom. I am American middle-class, by no means wealthy, but by the standards of more than 50% of the world, I am a millionaire. I am very blessed. A Surprise Bounty From a Food Stamp Lawsuit By LESLIE KAUFMAN Published: November 26, 2008 Class-action lawsuits, especially the type that drag on for years, are rarely synonymous with sudden joy, serendipitous generosity, or an unexpected Thanksgiving turkey. But this month Harris v. Eggleston, a lawsuit with its roots in 1990s welfare reform under Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, is the unlikely vehicle for spreading holiday cheer to thousands of the poorest households in the city. The lawsuit, which charged that thousands of people were illegally denied food stamps after they moved to receive Social Security disability payments instead of welfare benefits, was settled at the end of 2006. Yet only now are the roughly $12 million in awards being distributed to nearly 9,500 households in the five boroughs in the form of credits to electronic benefit cards. The payback does not quite amount to winning the lottery — the 18 largest reimbursements top $5,000, and most average far less. And all of the credits can be used only for food. Still, to many who had given up on or forgotten what they were owed, the money in their accounts, some of which arrived before any notice from the government to explain it, has been a rare moment of bounty at an otherwise dismal economic moment. Monica Ryan learned of her good fortune when she went to her corner bodega in northern Manhattan to buy bread and milk. She was picking up just the necessities because she was conscious of having less than $5 in her account. But when the clerk swiped her card, it appeared that she had hundreds left. Hundreds? At first, Ms. Ryan, who says that she has been barely getting by with a monthly benefit of $107, thought it was impossible. In shock, she called the automated food stamp line, which confirmed that $888 had just been placed in her account. “I didn’t believe it,” she said. “They make so many mistakes.” It was not until days later, when a government letter arrived confirming that the money was part of the settlement, that she finally relaxed and went out and bought a steak. “It was so delicious,” she said. Now she is planning on buying a turkey to share with her son, something she had not done in two years because, she said, “it takes half the monthly allowance to buy the groceries for that one meal.” Ms. Ryan said she once knew about the lawsuit but had completely forgotten about it. The origin of her ample holiday meal has it roots in federal welfare policy changes that were approved in 1996, when the federal government set five-year limits on its willingness to contribute to welfare payments for the country’s poor. The city, in response, pushed to move the poor who were mentally or physically disabled to the federal Social Security program, which has no time limit. Many of those transferred, however, were automatically cut off by the city from food stamps, even though the federal law explicitly allowed people to receive both benefits. City and state officials said the problem was caused by computer errors that they were working to fix, yet it persisted for years despite repeated reprimands from the federal government. So in 2002, the Urban Justice Center, a Manhattan-based nonprofit group that had been working to resolve the issue, sued the city on behalf of one recipient, Barbara Harris, and thousands of others. In 2006, the parties agreed on a settlement that would involve reimbursement to those tossed out of the food stamp program going back to 1999. The reimbursements were capped at 21 months of lost benefits. It took a year for the settlement to be approved by both the court and the United States Department of Agriculture, which is in charge of the food stamp program and is providing the funds. The benefits started arriving at the end of October. As important as the payouts is the fact that the city finally began changing the system to prevent disabled people from being removed from the program in the first place, said Bill Lienhard, who was the lead lawyer for the plaintiffs. “This lawsuit actually helped maximize federal benefits in a time of economic downturn,” he said, “and prevented disruptions in benefits to those who needed them the most.” Food stamp use in the city is up 65 percent since 2002, according to city officials, and as of September neared 1.3 million recipients. The state under Gov. David A. Paterson has found new ways to maximize what the state and its residents can receive from the federal government program. Such successes, however, have escaped the notice of Ms. Harris, who still lives in a one-bedroom apartment in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Her food stamp allotment has long been restored, but she says she must be very careful to ration her $176 monthly allowance. She began crying a bit when she described finally receiving the first half of the $444 she was owed from 1999. “I just went out and got a ham,” she said, “and cooked it with cloves, apple juice and raisins. It was very sweet.” Others who received the money in the last several weeks said they delayed gratification a bit to make the holidays more festive in a year that has otherwise been very tough. Luis Rosario, 52, who lives in the Bronx with his mother, received $2,333, because he was cut off in 1999 and was just put back in the program. He said he would use the money to make a Thanksgiving meal of roast pork and turkey for his sister, daughters and grandchildren. And, he said, he would also take care of Christmas, too. “We usually go to my sister in New Jersey, but she was laid off,” Mr. Rosario said, “so this year we are going to take care of everyone.” It is a sentiment that would sit well with Abdelkader Louali, who also lives in the Bronx and got a payout of $550. With that money Mr. Louali, who lives alone, purchased some shrimp as a treat, and he also bought $64 in food for neighbors who were in need. It was a special pleasure to him, he said, to finally be the one who had enough to share with others. “I have $100 left,” he said, “but it is the holidays and I would give it away. You see, my refrigerator is already full.”

T'was the Night Before Thanksgiving...

and outside the house, the snow is roaring, burying a mouse... Okay, so I'm not a poet. Hey, the Packers are on tomorrow, we're 9 and 1, life is good. We're playing the Lions - in their den. I don't expect it to be easy, but at the end of the day, I expect a Packers victory. It's a blizzard out there, folks, with the wind howling like a banshee out of the northwest and rattling the windows, tearing branches off the trees, 1 to 3 inches of the wet sticky stuff are expected by morning, so shortly I'm going to head downstairs and settle down in front of the fireplace with a good book. Ahhhhh. I don't know if I'll be online tomorrow. In the morning I'll be making my whipped sweet potatoes for a get-together with some of the family later in the afternoon, and settling in to watch the Packers on t.v. at 11:30 a.m. In the afternoon at my sister Debbie's place I'll be circulating among kitchen, living room and rec room, helping get the meal together, socializing with relatives, and watching whatever football game is on at 2:30 p.m. and yelling and screaming at the big screen TV with assorted nephews and brothers-in-law. So, I'll say it now. I truly appreciating how much I have to be thankful for. A snug roof over my head with central heat (and central air in the summer) that turns on automatically, a fireplace that works and uncensored books that I can buy for myself - or borrow for free from the local public library. A warm blanket to snuggle in as I settle in before the fire on a plush sofa. Electricity upon demand to provide my reading light - by a compact fluorescent bulb. Later tonight, a cushy bed with featherbed beneath and ultra-plush blankets above. Hot and cold running water to scrub up in and, hey, clean water to drink and cook in that won't give me dysentery. A refrigerator full of non-spoiled, edible food. Money in the bank. A beautiful complexion that is 15 years younger than my chronological age. And who cares about that anyway? All those old rules from the time of my grandmothers - and even my mother - have been overturned. Today, 60 is the new 40 - hmmm, actually, today I think 60 is the new 30... Tomorrow I'll meet with family and enjoy love, warmth, companionship, comfort, comradery. Ohmygoddess, I'm really blessed. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.