It’s back to work on Monday, but only for two weeks and then mid-term exams kick in. For the most part, my vacation was lovely; the weather was perfection until Saturday afternoon, when the sky turned wet and gray and things have been gloomy ever since. A fairly apt wrap-up to the end of a vacation, but a bummer nonetheless.

My sis and her new grandbaby, Gabriella

I was asked to bring my camera to my sister’s house on Thursday, where we celebrate Thanksgiving each year (the day after Thanksgiving Doug and I go visit his father). I did so, but did not take many photos; my father wanted to get some of those look-at-all-the-generations-together photos that family always wants to take, so I did my part in orchestrating those but didn’t put much effort into processing any of them except the few that, in my opinion, had some artistic value. Not that I don’t care about the family pictures or anything – it’s just that I know by now that those sorts of photographs do not need a lot of fancy editing or lighting or anything like that. They’re for posterity only, so I just convert them to JPEG straight out of the camera, post them on Facebook, and email copies to whomever wants them and call it a day. Easier and faster, plus there’s no reason to go through all of that work when no one is even going to notice it’s been done. The ones I’m sharing here, though, are the ones I felt were nice enough to process and doctor up a bit.

My only grandparent still alive; she’s 92 now. 

Thanksgiving is always a chaotic affair at my sister’s house; she’s an amazing cook and loves to spend days preparing for the event, but her house is quite small and our family, as you can see in the photo below, is quite large (that wasn’t even everyone who was at the house that day in the picture) – we took it before some people showed up). This year in particular several relatives came in from out of town, which is unusual, so there were even more folks crammed into the house than usual. On top of that, my family likes to drink. A lot. In fact, there were twenty-nine people total at my sister’s house, and there were TWENTY-SEVEN bottles of wine on-hand for the festivities. Not to mention the beer and mixers. You take that much booze, that many people, and that small of a space and put it all together and you end up with barely-contained chaos. And that chaos – is INCREDIBLY LOUD.

Can you tell? This isn’t even nearly everyone who was there that day.

When you’re one of the only people not drinking amidst all of that madness, it gets old quickly. I ended up sitting on that leather sofa watching football with the die-hard fans just to get away from it. Not to mention my typical screw-up the title of this post refers to – here’s how it went down: I knew we needed to be at my sister’s house around 1:00, so at noon my husband and I crated up the pups and took off. When we got to her house, we weren’t too surprised to find we were the first ones there, as my family is terrible about following directions relating to start and end times of celebratory events. In fact, the usual response to the question “What time should we get there?” is whenever. But I really didn’t want to be one of the late ones, so I made sure we were prompt, and, as I am afflicted with the same can’t-get-there-on-time-itis that the rest of my family has, I was quite proud of myself for pulling this off.

Except that after we’d been there about 30 minutes I started to notice things, like how my sister wasn’t dressed for company yet, and there were foil-covered pans laid out all over the kitchen counters, but none of them had made it into the oven. I finally pulled her aside and asked what time we were supposed to arrive, and she said she’d told everyone 3 PM, not 1 as I’d imagined. For the life of me, I do not know where I got the one o’clock arrival time, as after she told me this I actually went and looked at the Facebook event she created at the beginning of November and, sure enough, it clearly said 3 PM. So okay, we showed up two hours early – it’s further evidence of how bad my family is about time that neither my sister nor her husband were phased by us showing up when we did in the least. They just kept on trucking and set out a cheese ball for us to snack on without another word about it.

Happy Thanksgiving

But that whole “bad about showing up at the right time” thing ended up getting us in the end, even if no one was ticked off about us showing up so early, because when my sister requested people show up at three everyone else knew that to mean “show up sometime after three,” which is exactly what everyone else did. At five-thirty, new faces were still appearing, and the turkey had not even been carved. Since Doug and I are quite conscientious fur-parents (we have no kids, so our pets are our babies), we started to worry around four when they’d already been in their kennels for four hours – we really don’t like to crate them for more than that, and five hours is pretty much our limit for it, even if the dogs could survive for longer. By 5:30 we were resigned to the fact that we’d be doing no eating this Thanksgiving, and we ended up leaving at 5:45 without eating anything other than a cheese ball to show for it. It sucked, but it had to be done – my sister lives about 45 minutes away, and we knew if we sat down to eat at 6 PM it would just be way too late by the time we got home (sitting down to eat  is laughable, though – my family Thanksgivings are more of a grab-a-paper-plate-and-find-a-space-to-gobble-it-down affair than a formal sit-down one with the good china. People even eat standing up).

Oh well – This was really the main course anyway.

So yeah – no food on Thanksgiving day. We came home, fed the dogs and took them out, then ate frozen chicken nuggets for dinner. The end. But on the plus side, I did take pictures on Tuesday, with full-face makeup and everything. I’ll share some of those photos later.