Thursday, November 24, 2005

Ancodia's Berry Scary (pre-) Thanksgiving

About two years ago, a friend of mine moved here from Minnesota.  Well, in reality, she’s more Meg’s friend than mine, but whatever.  And even though she’s extremely religious, we get along ok enough.  My philosophy is that I ultimately don’t give a damn what anyone believes, and I think her philosophy is that, though she likes me—mostly—here on Earth, I’m annoying enough that the thought of All Eternity away from me isn’t all that heartbreaking.  :-)  She’s saving her vacation time and money to go back to MN in December, so this year we are doing Thanksgiving with her.  I think I’ll call her Amelia; it’s more amicable than Minnesota-Friend, and she’s an “Amelia” type—farm-girl looking, long hair, wears dresses that usually have flowers on them…you know.  I think she does not wear pants much because of some religion thing, but I dare not ask; the last time I was in Minneapolis, I got into a religion discussion with her at a pizza parlour downtown, and I regretted it about two minutes into the conversation.  But the food was great.  I can’t remember the name of the pizza parlour, but it was fantastic; it’s a big, two-storey one near the hospital, if I remember correctly.  Or it might be by the convention centre.  Or both.  Who the hell knows.  But sort of cafeteria-style, two-storey pizza parlours are probably hard to come by, so if you’re ever in Minneapolis and see one, try it out.  Just don’t talk about religion.

Butsoanyway.

I was going to go do Thanksgiving with Son-Friend (who maybe one day I will get around to naming also, but I have to re-name ‘Pants and RCG first), but a few weeks ago, gf of S-F’s daughter (who just had a child eight months ago, out of wedlock from a one-night stand with a biker she picked up in a bar, and no I am not kidding…I can’t make stuff like this up) moved back in with them, and she’ll be there, with child (she’s both frustratingly stupid and breeding…do I need to say more?), and gf of S-F also invited two people from where she works, one of whom I have met before and think is weird, and the other I don’t know, but is alone this Thanksgiving because her husband just left her.  As if I could deal with that for three or four hours.  Or would be able to handle Mom and That.  And she’s bringing her dog.  And Son-Friend has invited a friend of his (really more like “a guy he knows”) who is an alcoholic (albeit a peaceful, happy drunk), because the alkie wanted Son-Friend to spend Thanksgiving with him (which means probably at a bar, not that Son-Friend drinks) because no one else would, since the alkie’s divorced and his children hate him.  Not that I can blame them; they probably got tired of hearing him tell the same story three times an hour.  Every hour.  Whether you want to hear it, or not.  So I told Son-Friend that there’s only so much I can take without the cushioning afforded by a serious IV drug habit, and begged off.  He understands; at this point, he wants to beg off, too.  I don’t blame him.

Eh, I’ll wander over for leftovers in the next day or so, once I’m back to being not fed on a regular basis.  

Butsoanyway.

So Meg was the one who offered to spend Thanksgiving with Amelia and bring Mom, and asked me if I wanted to come.  We’re going to do it at Amelia’s place because she doesn’t know her way around the city very well (we’re talking someone who makes a triangle from home to work to church to home), and wanted to play hostess anyway.  Ok, fine.  I told Meg that I would come only under a couple of conditions:  (1) Meg has to go shopping with me today; (2) Meg has to not only make stuffed eggs for me, but she has to give me the recipe.  Mom’s recipe from my grandmother was lost, and Meg found one that is damn close if not exact, and I want it.  I’ve searched, I can’t find it, and Meg’s just being a bitch; (3) Meg has to go shopping with me on The Most Shoppingest Day Of The Year.  All day.  All of it.  

Ha-HA!  She agreed!  Woo-hoo!  Score!

I promise that I’ll post the recipe just as soon as I get it from her.  

So we went shopping today, and I found a *cool* PWP at the Elizabeth Arden counter.  It is a purple bag that you get for free with a $35 purchase and then you can buy the matching purple makeup bags and makeup for $40.  I bought their 3-in-1 cleanser (it works really well!) and a lipstick, and I made Meg buy Millennium Energist, ‘cos she needed a moisturiser, and I was happy with how ME held up in snowy weather…it feels greasy, but it isn’t, which is weird.  But whatever.  We both agreed that the bags and makeup would be useful for trips.  And then I bought a few presents, and made Meg buy some decent hair stuff.  I used to have to fight her, but now she gets All Soft on her own (she has very different hair from me), and I bought a yellow tube of Redken glop for tricoloured blondes like Meg that smoothes out her layers.  Let’s just hope she uses it, ‘cos she needs it.  Don’t tell her I said that.  :-)

So we stopped to pick up something to watch tomorrow if necessary, and then I had to come back home really quickly for an online class meeting.  God, I hate that class.  I hate group work.  Actually, hate isn’t really strong enough a word.  So I sat online chatting about something that’s due next Friday for an hour, and Meg ran to the store to get stuff for tomorrow.  At the end of my hour, I somehow ended up getting assigned all of the hard parts, just like I have for the last three projects, but who fucking cares.  It’s the god damned holiday season.  

Ok, well, I care, but I can’t fix it now, and I didn’t feel like arguing too much.  It just takes too much work.    

So then I get ready to go to do my part of the shopping; I am making the stuffing (which isn’t being stuffed as god intended it, in deference to Amelia’s belief that it isn’t clean to do and makes the bird harder to cook, so I guess it’s actually dressing, but whatever), and was going to make two vegetables, and some other stuff.  I am making two different stuffings; one regular, and one oyster.  Mom offered her help to me, but she likes to put weird crap in stuffing, and I can’t deal with that, plus I am enjoying my “away time” from her when I can get it.  Plus, I don’t want to find pieces of pear or whatever in there.  I can deal with oysters, chestnuts…*normal* stuff.  But nothing about Mummers is normal; she tries to make every kind of dressing, all at once.  Or she gets “creative”.  Sometimes it’s hard to tell which one she’s doing.  She’d make some sourdough-cornbread-brown bread stuffing with raisins, giblets, apples, eggs, mushrooms, celery, Jell-O, and pineapple, and then toss in a couple of tomatoes for variety.  Or make it out of mac and cheese.  With grapes.  That woman is dangerous in a kitchen.  So no nouvelle Mommy cuisine this year.  Nope.  

Butsoanyway.

So I jumped in my car, threw in a Horrorpops cd, and worked on getting into the Thanksgiving spirit.  Woo-hoo.

The shopping trip was horrible, and in reality the only thing that kept me from losing my crackers was composing a blog post in my mind (now how pathetic is that?  Kind of like I feel more removed if I’m narrating it?).  But I have no one to blame but myself, ‘cos I was late in getting off shopping from the stupidass online festival I had with our group’s feckless leader, and so I gave in and drove twenty minutes for my inaugural trip to the new frickin’ Welly-Mart instead of my regular supermarket because I figured Normal Grocer would be closing soon, whereas the new Welly-Mart is a 24-hr supermarket.  And I know I’m being nasty.  I don’t care.  

Oh…my…god.  First off, the place was a god damned disaster area.  It looked as if a bomb had gone off in there.  I want it noted—really attended to—that the produce section was virtually untouched, though.  Go figure.  Maybe none of them have ever seen Super Size Me.  So I made off with some pretty good green beans (I am *so* very looking forward to cleaning all of those tomorrow morning!), and some really nice yellow squash and zucchini.  I wanted to get baby potatoes and do them up in olive oil, salt, and rosemary, but Mom can’t eat that, so I did without.  Sniffle.  I am also doing without onion gravy, but we won’t address that.  So I had my produce, and was feeling all optimistic.  Silly me.  It took me forever to find decent stuffing, ‘cos they’d hidden it on the bottom shelf underneath shelves full of weird things, and the display they had set up had been decimated, and I wasn’t desperate enough to pick through thrown boxes just yet.  These poor Wal-Mart employees (Wal-Martians?)…I wonder if they have to clean up like that every night, or if Thanksgiving is just a special box-and-can-flinging festival.  Anyway, whatever.  

They have a huge—HUGE!—section of “ethnic” foods (only it is throughout the whole store), and for once, I’m not a targeted ethnicity.  I apparently don’t even register as a blip on their radar.  Oh, don’t give me that…this is not “white girl cries ‘boo-hoo’”; I used to have to pick my supermarkets carefully to make sure that they had my halvah, and my everything matzohs, and if I wanted anything more Ancodia-ethnic than Jewish, I had to go to Mom-n-Pop places, if there were any, or make it my damn self.  So I don’t want to hear it.  And I’m not being intolerant; I don’t care what stores carry, or people do, as long as I can get *my* stuff.  Which I couldn’t completely in this place, because apparently Eastern European Jew and dotty Canadian-descended white girls are a minority that can be ignored.  So I was pissed.  Just like any minority, I don’t like being blown off by merchants, and, just like any minority, I have the right to get my panties in a wad over it.  In addition to not giving a flip about Jews or Northerners, they also don’t give a flip about the Russians, the Poles, the Czechs, the Romanians…I could go on.  But whatever.  Back to the shopping.  

I tried to ask one of the employees where the Reynolds’ wrap/aluminum foil was, but she didn’t understand me.  No, I am not kidding.  So I kept looking on my own, and finally had to grab a pharmacy worker and ask him. Geez-o Pete.  Why, it’s right next to the dog food, of course.  Go figure.  So I get my crap, and get home, and Meg tells me (over the phone, so I can’t hit her) that she has picked up the squash and zucchinis, as well as a few other things I thought I was picking up.  Argh.  So I don’t even unbag them; I jump in my car crank up Walk Like A Zombie, and go straight back to return all of the duplicated items, ‘cos I don’t know what Wal-Mart’s policy is on that, and I want to give it a try before my register receipt’s ink dries.  

So I go to Customer Service, and have to stand and wait for a manager for ten minutes because the Customer Service girl thinks that the zucchini I am returning are cucumbers and wants to give me less than what I paid for them…until she notices that I didn’t buy any cucumbers on my receipt; then she says she can’t take them back at all (without a receipt).  She had to call a manager—even though I had the receipt that *said* ‘zucchini’!—and get him to explain to her what a zucchini is.  Oh, shoot me.

Perhaps she was confused because they aren’t normally found in cans.  That’s my working hypothesis, at least.  I have observed that Wal-Mart grocery shoppers shun fresh produce, and am speculating that it may extend to their workers, as well.

Butsoanyway.

So I got home and set everything to cooking and gelling and marinating and transmogrifying and everythinging that needs to be done tonight; I will finish the rest tomorrow morning.  And I will *maybe* try Wal-Mart supermarkets again.  Maybe.  Their regular stores are ok, but…I’m not sure about the whole adding-in food thing; I feel silly trying to pantomime an oyster to get help in finding where they hide the canned oysters because the employee I am speaking with doesn’t understand what I am asking for.  And I know (ideally) that I should not do canned, but I was stuck.  And lazy.  

And it will all be good.  Somehow—not that I have any clue how, but I have faith—it will all be good.  I believe that in my heart.  No, really.  And if it is not, I will just write about it here and deal.  

It really *is* funny.  And so is this.  

:-)  Happy Thanksgiving.  

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