So saturday was thanksgiving in out household. i cooked up all the traditional fixin’s: turkey and stuffing, gravy and biscuits, sweet potatoes and mashed potatoes, butternut squash, pumpkin and apple pie. for the veggies in the group, there was quorn roast with meatless stuffing and gravy. there were meant to be some greenbeans along with all that, but in all the running back and forth between our kitchen and the neighbours’ (where the squash was roasting due to a severe oven space shortage), somehow the beans got overlooked! oh well. kerryn, tracey, penny, kim, andy, alex, chris, tonia, jude, jonno and myself, all gorged ourselves silly, and imbibed quite a bit of tipple to wash it down with. friends, food, conversation – a wonderful, warm evening, and really just the essence of what the holiday should be all about.

however getting up bright and early on sunday to head out to bicester for our quarterly visit with aunt muriel was a bit of a chore. i was feeling a little rough around the edges, and it was a long drive out. as usual, we had a formal sunday dinner with muriel and her son andrew, with lots of travel talk, family photos and sherry to round out the afternoon. all very pleasantly civilised, until the drive home, where the bicester shopping outlets congestion combined with traffic lights at a major roundabout to produce a solid hour of chockablock traffic. and also, as usual, we missed a turnoff on the route home, which required some quick map-work by myself to get us back on track. i love my husband dearly, but the running joke between us is that i have a broken internal thermometer and he has a broken internal compass. the poor boy hasn’t the foggiest sense of direction, and despite travelling the same route dozens of times previous, would be unable to remember how to get from point a to point b if his life depended on it. i am, therefore, the designated navigator – which also means that whenever i take my eyes off the road (or, as in the case this evening, unintentionally fall asleep) we are bound to go astray. j is a highly intelligent and skilled man, but if left to his own devices, couldn’t navigate his way out of a paper sack, bless him. but perhaps that’s why we’re such a good pairing. i cook, he cleans. i navigate, he drives.

as far as my internal thermometer goes – what can i say, except that i’m just naturally cold-blooded. i spend more time whinging about being cold… and it’s a constant battle in the house over just what, objectively speaking, constitutes an optimal temperature. growing up in new england, in a house which was heated almost exclusively by wood-burning stove, the prevailing message was always “put on a sweater”. I swear, I was born cold. J is incredulous at just how cold I am, amazed that *I* ever survived winters in Montreal. hell, i can be cold in the dog days of august, if a breeze catches me in the shade. and i am constantly cold here, because it’s always a damp cold – the kind that seeps into your bones. yet the other day, it was 0c, but crisp and sunny – and i was running around saying how lovely it was. dry and brisk and everything looks a bit sharper, more defined. that kind of cold doesn’t bother me in the slightest. and ordinarily, j is continually trying to open windows to get “fresh air”, while i’m yelling about seeing my breath indoors. yet the past week, when it’s been nearly freezing, i’m happy as a clam and he’s been complaining of chill, bundled to the ears. he swears i just do it to be contrary. and maybe i do.

in any case, he’s just gone to put the heating on.

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