Pre-thanks

I’m feeling a little lost right now, but I felt some obligation, as always, to write. The trip ahead of me is long and complicated—spiritually and physically—and then I have to think about Thanksgiving and my family. Dinner attendance is projected to be almost twenty, and Hope, Brooke, and I are planning to tackle Dad when all of this is over and insist that next year’s dinner be just the seven of us.

There should be some kind of wisdom or insight to spout forth about the first end-of-year holiday season without Mom, but there isn’t. It’s going to be different. It might suck a little. It might suck a lot. I’ll get through it and so will everyone else. Things are going to be different in other ways, not just because Mom won’t be there. There will be new quasi-step-cousins there, and the step-cousins will continue to be there. These are people I resent for no apparent reason.

We're in the middle of painting our living room, so that means that the living room has been completely stripped of everything except dropcloths, tools, lamps, and a CD player. All of the living room furniture and plants have been shoved into the guest room with the exception of the couch which I couldn't fit through the doorway on my own. That's been shoved into the dining room, but the dining room table is so big and heavy that I couldn't move it, only turn it slightly. This table is a former cafeteria table with a large, round base. The top has been tiled and then framed with wood, so it’s ungodly heavy.

In light of that and the fact that we left the cats home alone this past weekend, we’re taking them with us on the Great Thanksgiving Road Trip of 2004. Quid does well in the car. Muggle doesn’t. When Muggle gets stressed, Quid gets angry with him for whining. When Quid is angry, he swats at his brother who is generally sitting on the passenger’s shoulders. That means he swats at the passenger’s face. Over 12 hours of car travel are ahead of me in the next two days. No good can come of this.