2019 Life Logs, Day 330: Thanksgiving Food Shopping
2019 Life Logs, Day 330: Thanksgiving Food Shopping
Date: Tuesday, November 26, 2019
Weather: Sunny Day; High 61, Low 41 degrees F
Location: At Home in The Cottage, East Falmouth, MA
There was a special holiday Farmers Market today, so late morning I headed to town to go to the Market and to finish up my food shopping for Thanksgiving. Heather and Jed ordered the turkey and Jed picked it up at the Farmers Market today. I bought butternut squash, cranberries, and Brussels sprouts to add to the dinner, garlic to plant, and green tomatoes and turnips just because they were there. I will make fried green tomatoes, but not for Thanksgiving. I then headed to other stores to buy items, none of which were all available at the same store. Oysters from the fish market, sparkling wine from another market for a Thanksgiving toast, other some items from the grocery. Then there was a stop at the Vet’s office, a stop at the hardware store, and a stop to get my hair trimmed. Three hours later I returned home and spent a great deal of the afternoon playing outside with Shadow. I put together his outside exercise pen and actually ate lunch outside while Shadow played in the pen. Then we went for our first long walk through the neighborhood. Tonight, I talked with my friend Lynne Kirwin who is flying to New Zealand for the winter on Friday. We talked about the 10 inches of snow and cold weather she has been experiencing in Michigan and she promised not to rub reports of lovely weather in New Zealand once she arrives there and cold weather hits here. It was beautiful here today with a high temp in the low 60’s. But if the forecast is correct, it won’t be this warm again in the next ten days, and maybe not until spring. I also talked to Heather and to Jonah tonight. Jonah and Ollie have recently taken an interest in playing the piano. Last week I arrived at the Goldstones and got to hear Ollie composing a beautiful song on the piano. This evening Jonah figured out how to play “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”. He recorded this on his tablet and spent quite a bit of time talking to me on the phone while trying to figure out how to send me the recording. He doesn’t have email or messaging capability on his tablet, so he had to send it to Heather’s phone via Blue Tooth and was trying to share it with me that way. We had technical difficulties, so I will have to see the recording when I visit tomorrow, but it was fun being on the phone with Jonah while he was trying to figure this out. Heather was in the middle of a “bountiful crisis”. Jed had brought home lots of veggies from the Farmers Market and they got a Misfits Market organic fruit and veggie delivery this week as well, so she had way more produce than she had room to store. Misfits delivers certified organic produce to your door for less than grocery store prices. It is called Misfits because it is produce that doesn’t meet the appearance test needed for supermarkets, but it is still tastes great. Hopefully Heather was able to figure out ways to store al of the produce. Tomorrow morning, I have an 8 am appointment with my primary care physician to follow up on reflux issues and then I will spend the rest of the day getting a head start on preparing all the food I bought today ready for Thanksgiving dinner.
It will be months before Shadow will be able to take long walks with me, so I’ll give the stroller a try. After the friend left, I rearranged the living/dining area of the cottage to make room for a card table for tonight’s Mah Jongg lesson. We rotate between homes, and tonight was my turn.
It is almost as big as him, and the kids enjoyed seeing him at play. At some point in the conversation, Coco was talking about having only two and a half weeks of school after Thanksgiving and that gave me a little jolt. I have been so preoccupied with thinking about getting a puppy and then getting one, that I honestly have not thought about the holidays. So, I spent some of today doing that and then went grocery shopping. And who greeted me at the door of the store but Ollie. He was dressed in his Cub Scout uniform and was passing out donation flyers to shoppers.
The flyer was a list of what could be bought while in the store and then given to the Scouts to be donated to the Falmouth Service Center. As Heather noted on her Facebook page, this is one of her favorite days of the year. Watching the young Scouts working so hard to get donations for people who wouldn’t have a turkey for Thanksgiving without their help. Jonah was taking a bathroom break when I arrived, but he returned just as I entered the store. Heather was with Ollie and Jonah and Jed was with Sam at the Service Center receiving and storing all of the donations. Sam said there were so many frozen turkeys donated that the freezers were overflowing. How wonderful! Heather and gang come over for dinner this evening and the boys got their puppy time. Unfortunately, Shadow had been quiet most of the day, so he was a wild one while they were here. But the boys are learning to deal with him when he has too much energy. They take him outside. Of course, it was dark by this time and one boy would run around the perimeter of the house with a flashlight and another would follow with Shadow leading him on his leash. When the boy have too much energy, we often tell them to go outside and run laps around the house. So they are using that same strategy. Fun to watch!
We sat and talked and he and Shadow had a good time playing together. Jane arrived just as Bruce was leaving and she stayed for tea and to get her play time with the puppy. I spent some time reading while cuddling Shadow and that was my day. Heather spent her day in Boston at WGBH helping moderate TedX Talks and Jed took the boys to New Haven to see the Yale-Harvard football game. I read that the game was delayed by a climate change protest during the half-time. Hundreds of students and alumni entered the field to demand “that both universities clear their combined, $71 billion endowments of investments in corporations tied to oil, gas and coal. They also protested the schools’ holdings in Puerto Rico debt, seen as exploitation of a poor, besieged nation.” The 40-minute delay in the game caused the game to end as dark was descending. I’ll be most interested in hearing about this event first hand from Jed and the boys.
