Seated workout

It's not a good thing to start off the annual holiday eat-a-thon by discovering that you are woefully out of practice. I thought I paced myself well and the food wasn't outrageously rich: in addition to the regular fare, there was butternut squash soup, endive salad (with a lovely vinaigrette made from onion oil), brussels sprouts with bacon and chestnuts, and honeyed apples and nuts baked inside a pumpkin. I didn't even touch the sweet potatoes, and we waited at least an hour before breaking into the three homemade pies--pumpkin, Concord grape, and monshu's homemade mincemeat which constituted our sole contribution to the meal.

Yet the next day I woke up feeling so ill that I could barely stand to eat toast. The hangover was more readily explained: starting out with brut champagne spiked with orange vodka and ginger eau-de-vie, moving on to both red and white wines with dinner, and then finishing up with Buffalo Trace bourbon in which figs had been steeped was bound to take some sort of toll. Aspirin and rehydration eventually solved that problem, but I spent the whole day wondering if I'd be in shape for the Old Man's Thanksgiving Redux last night.

I know a lot of people who love Thanksgiving. But monshu is the only one I've met who loves it so much that on the rare occasions when he accepts someone's invitation he spends the next day cooking his own complete Thanksgiving meal. I was explaining all this on the phone to Turtle earlier, how most people would be relieved not to have to do all that work; but our GWO was literally glowing with happiness after a day spent chopping, boiling, basting, roasting, simmering, and serving.

At my suggestion, we did away with the mash. I figured monshu's choice of a vegetable, Jerusalem artichokes with leeks, would fill that gap admirably and it did. Besides, there was plenty of stuffing (old school, with stale white bread and celery) and our hosts had sent us home with a full pieplate. I wasn't sure I'd get to eat from it, but after making it successfully through two servings of turkey, I took my chances. (Needless to say, I had nothing stronger to drink than a little bitters dissolved in tonic.)

After all, this is only the halfway mark. Tonight Nuphy and I have Boris Godunov to look forward to and we're indulging ourselves with dinner at Russian Tea Time, which means too much of everything, including vodka. And then tomorrow we celebrate the recovery of Turtle's wife from gastric bypass surgery with dinner at Tanoshii, although in that crowd we're usually very good at keeping our sushi orders reasonable.

I'm also woefully out of practice when it comes to buying things. Today I went online to buy a couple of gifts for family and book passage to St Louis and the experience was so uncomfortable I practically had to have a little lie-down afterwards. I hope this isn't a sign I'm getting worse at this sort of thing in my old age.