Saturday, November

I skipped my exercises this morning, so we could be ready to head to another town by 9 a.m. to join Hubbie's family in a Thanksgiving feast on this sunny, warm day.

We arrived in the other town early enough to shop at a couple of stores, before going to Daughter's house. First we went to a clothing store, where we spent a 15 percent off coupon to purchase a new electric fry pan, because the temperature gauge on our old one doesn't work correctly, forcing us to have to guess at temperatures. The new appliance came with a 10 percent discount on top of the 15 percent coupon.

Then we went to the warehouse store to shop for bulk groceries and paper products. Here, we bought fresh fruits like strawberries, grapes, apples, oranges, and a cantaloupe (which the checker dropped and split, so that a clerk had to fetch us a new one), as well grape tomatoes, cereals, walnuts and pecans, and canned pineapple for making fruit salad for Christmas.

We got to Daughter's house around 11:30 a.m. Since there were several women performing kitchen duties, Mother and I stayed out of the way in the den and visited other family. Lunch was served, buffet style, around 1 p.m. Dishes included turkey, of course, and smoked pork, along with baked russet or sweet potatoes, a couple of vegetable casseroles, black eyed peas, corn-on-the-cob, canned cranberry sauce, and homemade cranberry relish, along with homemade crescent rolls. Desserts included an Italian cream cheese cake, a pumpkin coconut cake, and two kinds of fudge. Mother and I chose carefully from both the lunch items and the desserts (we sampled only very small portions of the desserts).

Fourteen of us gathered today. We stayed and visited until around 4 p.m., and then left to go to a hobby store to check out the sale on a craft cutting machine to use in creating greeting cards and scrapbook pages. The price of the small machine was good, but after checking out the cost of the individual cartridges, even on sale, I realized that this would be a major investment. So I decided my old-fashioned scissors and templates will have to do.

It was dark by the time we got back home, of course. Since we'd eaten a hearty lunch, we waited until around 7 p.m. to have a supper of cold cereal, slices of yeast bread with margarine, and fresh oranges. I had a cup of hot tea with mine.

Tonight's TV fare included a movie..."P2,"a 2007 mystery. A young woman is stranded in a locked parking garage on Christmas Eve, where she becomes the captive of the young security guard, who chains her to a chair at a table set for Christmas dinner. She escapes, and...well, stuff happens. The movie is rated "R" for language and violence.

After that, we watched our favorite college football team play to a very, very disappointing loss. Rats!