Oops, it's December.

I've whiled away another month with infrequent postings. Not that I've gotten much else done. The lack of structure around here is killing me. I think I need an office manager. Or a strength coach. Something. Either way, I can account for last week: Thanksgiving preparations.

First, we cleaned the place up. Then, we bought a ton of groceries. Two birds, a root cellar full of vegetables, and a lot of whipping cream. For the pie, not the celeriac. We then put the groceries away by shoving the bags into the corner of the sunroom and kept cleaning. It became clear that if Thanksgiving were every weekend then we would have a house where you could safely eat dinner off the bathroom floor.

We then moved to put together our fun new bookcase from a store at which we will never shop again: Hold Everything. One, nothing can hold everything and if you think of the name as a sort of double-entendre then it just doesn't make any sense. How does suddenly telling someone to wait relate at all to buying furniture? And two, the stupid thing didn't fit together, which is the least I expect of expensive furniture that I have to assemble myself. Since we were putting the finishing touches on it at 8 o'clock on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, no tradesmen were available to help us. Let this be a lesson to you: if you need either custom glass shelves or to rent a router for Thanksgiving, do it before 3 in the afternoon. Also, don't call Home Depot at any time to solve these problems, because they do not rent routers ("liability reasons" - as if renting circular saws to Joe Home Handyman is safe) and they do not sell glass. Also, if you decide to rent a router, a tool you have not used since camp when you were 13, for the purpose of 'customizing' yor brand new bookcase, do not tell your wife about this plan. In the event you can find an outfit with sufficiently liberal risk-management policies to rent you one, your wife will most likely not allow you to 'work on' the new bookcase.

But the router (admittedly, a bad idea) was not necessary anyway, because someone is always available to help Leah. Though there were yams to cut up, she spent an hour on the phone with a very helpful customer service guy named Adam in Oklahoma City and convinced him to give us 50 bucks, just like that. And that was only the beginning. Over the course of the next three days, Adam in Oklahoma City called us three times to tell us about how they were going to refund our shipping and buy us new shelves from the glass cutters around the corner. Message to online retailers: you cannot hide from Leah if you make her angry. She will not give up until it costs you money.

The big day involved much less fighting. In fact, unless you count my 4-year old niece insisting that she be allowed to count chips and salsa as dinner (No, we did not include chips and salsa on the menu for grownups.) and move straight past turkey to dessert, harmony was the order of the day. I learned that if you host Thanksgiving then you will most likely miss all the football, which is too bad because I liked hosting. Oh, the power. I also learned that having three ovens, even if they are on three different floors, helps a lot.

So, to sum up: We cleaned and straightened for five hours, cooked for seven or so, washed dishes all along and then for another hour afterwards, and ate for roughly forty minutes. I plan to start looking at this holiday like a race and seeing if I can try to bring my split times closer together. Imagine cooking for four hours and then eating for four more. That would be something.

The rest of the weekend was spent mostly sitting still and trying to maintain the eerie level of cleanliness that the house had achieved in the prep for Turkey Day. I became a compulsive counter-sponging nut, having nightmares about rings staining my thirty-year old formica counters and things, in general, somehow becoming sticky. I do not like things to get sticky. I also acted weird about mopping and folding laundry. I will be trying to work on this so the house can once again descend into a pleasant state of entropy.

Now it is back to the grind, which is an easier thing to accept when you are essentially unemployed. My freelance clients do not care if I sleep until 10 and have an hour-long lunch of Thanksgiving leftovers. Or if I stop working right this second. Which is what I am going to do. Have a nice night.