Giving Thanks

Top 3.5 Things I am Thankful For

1. A roof over my head
2. Having Reggie as a friend
3. School vacations
3.5 Nice hair

At dinner on Thursday, Reggie’s mom asked us to all name one thing we were thankful for before we said grace. Reggie said her family. Billy said his Xbox. Lucie said plenty of delicious food. And I sort of mumbled, good friends or something stupid like that.

This was a hard category for me. Not because I don’t have things to be grateful for but because mine are not the traditional home/hearth/family type things. I suppose if Lucie and I were closer or if we were just sisters and not the only family we’ve ever had to rely on (that’s a lot of pressure, believe me), I might be able to say “a nice house,” or “a family who loves me,” or some nonsense like that. Instead, I have things more like this to appreciate:

A roof over my head…this I am sincerely grateful for. There have been times in our lives, dark times, when Lucie and I have been very close to not having a place to live. We have made it from one cheapo apartment to another by the skin of our teeth, just a couple hours from sleeping in our car. I can remember Lucie near tears when we were trying to get into a single in Lancaster and the landlord was out of town for the weekend and couldn’t formally approve our lease. She pleaded with the building manager to make an exception for us. We had money for the rent but not to spend on two nights in a hotel. She told her we wouldn’t move in officially, we’d just throw down pillows and blankets - just until the landlord got back and the lease could be final. The woman relented after she saw me (I was about 6 at the time) and we had a camp-out for a couple of days. We ate out of paper cartons and sat on the floor and told stories until we fell asleep. It was a lot of fun, actually. When the landlord came back on Monday morning, he told us Lucie didn’t have enough income to qualify for the apartment so we had to leave but the building manager felt sorry for us and gave us the name of another building we could go where we did get a place. So it all worked out in the end.

Having Reggie as a friend…I have never had many of these. Friends are hard to keep when you move all the time. Reggie has been a godsend, someone who immediately accepted me as a friend when I met her after school one day when I was thinking, foolishly, that I might try out for the basketball team. I was pretty tall, I thought, and figured basketball could be fun. I could meet people and learn some team skills, blah, blah, blah. Reggie, who actually IS tall, helped me with my lay-up but I could never get the timing right. I was cut the very first day. And rightfully so. I sucked. I have absolutely no sports skills at all. But I got to meet Reggie who became my friend so that worked out, too.

School vacations…what can I say? Some schools in other countries, like Japan, have school all year round. Here we have a whole 3 months in the summer and 2 weeks at Christmas and another week in Spring and lots of holidays in between. Not that Lucie and I go anywhere but it’s good to not have to go to school for a little while.

And honorable mention goes to my hair. I think I have pretty nice hair. It’s blonde and has strawberry highlights and it’s naturally straight., like Lucie’s, so I don’t have to use a flat iron or anything. I like to keep it long, past my shoulders, and all one length, no layers, no bangs. I had bangs when I was a kid and I hated it. They kept getting in my eyes and I had to use bobby pins or barrettes to clip them out of my face. Lucie has great hair too: a really pretty light red. People would kill to have her hair. It’s shiny and smooth and longer than mine and it looks good in a ponytail or in a braid or whatever.

We have nice hair, I have to say. Shanley hair.

Turkey Day Without the Turkey

Top 3.5 Side Dishes for Thanksgiving

1. Crescent Rolls with Walnuts
2. Cranberry Nut Bread
3. Mashed Potatoes with Garlic
3.5 Butternut Squash

I should preface this by saying these are Lucie’s and my favorite side dishes, period, regardless of the holiday, which, honestly, is not that big a deal to us. We don’t get excited by the prospect of cooking and eating a gigantic bird and scarfing down a dozen different pies until we’re sick to our stomachs. We don’t care about football. We don’t even celebrate Thanksgiving as a national holiday. (Did the Pilgrims really have dinner with the Indians? Doubtful.) In fact, we pretty much ignore it every year.

What we do like are the side dishes. And this year, we have been invited to bring a couple of our faves to the Heffernans. Yay! Thanksgiving at Reggie’s! I think this is our first Turkey Day dinner at someone else’s house…is that right? Wow, I think it is. A huge milestone in our lives and it will be honored with buttloads of food.

Okay, so the first dish: Crescent rolls with Walnuts (and you’ll notice we have 2 dishes with walnuts in them which is just because Lucie and I hardly ever have walnuts in the house so when we do, we have to use them up since it’s it just the two of us). You need a roll of refrigerated dough that comes out in triangles. Walnuts. Cinnamon. Sugar. Heat the oven to what the package says. Then unwrap the dough and put the triangles on a cookie sheet. Mix the sugar and cinnamon together in a little bowl then sprinkle some of the mixture on the long end of the triangle. Add a few walnuts. Then roll from the long end to the shorty end and bend in a half moon shape. Bake for the time specified on the package. Voila! Yummy!

Second dish: Cranberry Nut Bread. All right, here’s where you cheat. You buy a package at the store and use that but! Add your own walnuts to the mix and then sprinkle them on top. I’m sure there are lots of recipes out there where you use flour and sugar and baking soda and stuff but if you’re making a whole lot of side dishes, you don’t have the time. Save yourself the trouble here so you can spend time on other things like…

Mashed Potatoes with Garlic. You’ll need potatoes, garlic powder (or real garlic if you’re ambitious), and butter. Microwave the potatoes until they’re soft. Get a huge bowl and start mashing them up in there – with the skins on! If you have an electric mixer, you can use that so they will get smooth – but don’t get them too smooth like they came from a box. Keep them a little lumpy so people know you made them from scratch. Then while they’re still warm, add pats of butter. Mix them in so they melt. Add garlic powder or fresh crushed garlic and stir until it’s all mixed in. A little salt and pepper to taste and you’re done. Hint: refrigerate the potatoes after you make them and then reheat, adding more butter. When they’re stiff like that, they get nice and lumpy.

Getting honorable mention today is the Butternut Squash. You, and by “you,” I mean “I,” really should eat more vegetables and potatoes don’t count, since they are technically legumes and just a yummy load of delicious starch. But this veggie is easy. Grab a few butternut squashes and slice them in half. Then place them upside down on a baking sheet. Bake them at around 300 degrees until they’re soft enough you can stick a fork in them easily. Take them out. Turn them right side up and serve with butter. Easy peasy. And seriously, just about any vegetable is better with butter on it.

Now which two to bring to Reggie’s? I’m thinking the crescent rolls and mashed potatoes since they’re easiest and I can make a whole lot of them for the family. I know they’ll have other things but I want there to be enough for everyone to try and this includes Reg’s big family (and big brothers!) and any other relatives they’re having. Lucie said she would help me but her help is, well, limited. At first she’ll say she’ll buy the stuff for me but then she’ll call me from work and say, “what kind of walnuts should I get,” or “how many potatoes do you need,” even though I will have written the exact amounts of everything on a piece of paper so I will eventually end up meeting her at the grocery store and picking everything out myself while she samples the trail mixes. Then she’ll say she’ll get up early and help me put everything together but she’ll hit the snooze on her alarm a million times and by the time she gets up, pretty much everything will be done except to add the garlic to the potatoes or to maybe drizzle some honey on the rolls, which she will do very reluctantly and only under my direct guidance, and then when we’re at dinner, someone will compliment our dishes and she will wrap her arm around my shoulder like it was a team effort and smile and say, “thank you so much, it was a lot of hard work.”

So…I’m thinking crescent rolls and mashed potatoes.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Musical Selections for a Sunny Afternoon

Top 3.5 Songs to Listen to When You’re Pissed Off

1. I Do Not Want This
2. Terrible Lie
3. The Hand That Feeds
3.5 Gone Daddy Gone

The first three are Nine Inch Nails songs because there’s nothing like listening to Trent Reznor when you’re pissed off. He expresses all your rage far more effectively than you ever could and by “you,” I mean, “I.” Trent does this thing I call “scringing,” a combination of screaming and singing. I tried it once when I was in the shower and dude, it hurt my head. I don’t know how he does it but it’s the best scringing in rock.

Lucie hates NIN. She says there’s too much profanity, everything is F this and F that which is like, such a joke coming from her foul mouth. The music she listens to is all mellow, easygoing, alterna-rock (no offense, Aaron). She says it’s poetry but I think poetry can be just about anything. It doesn’t have to be soft and simple (again, no offense, Aaron).

Number 3.5 is a Gnarls Barkley song which I love LOVE these days. It’s upbeat and fun because when you’re done with all your rage, you have to have something to lift your spirits.

And don’t confuse being pissed off with being profoundly sad. You need Depeche Mode sort of music when you’re sad. That’s when you want empathy, when you want angst and vulnerability, when you want your music to hurt for you so you don’t have to.

Normally, I’m a White Stripes-Killers-Green Day sort of person. I like music that’s meaningful without being depressing and fun without being too pop. Like, I can do Nirvana if I’m in the right mood but never Jessica Simpson. But once in a while, I have a week like I had last week and it sucks and it was just a bunch of little things that got me all pissed off. It was a NIN week from start-to-finish.

Monday: grades in from my French and Geometry mid-terms. Um, what’s French for “mediocre”? And what’s the hypotenuse of C+? I couldn’t believe it! I actually studied hard for those tests. Vraiment! Which means “truly” in French. See? Not C!

Tuesday: forgot my gym bag and had to wear my pink-flowered flippy skirt playing basketball. Stupid gym teacher wouldn’t let me sit on the sidelines and keep score with Rayna, who’s in a wheelchair for her palsy. And did I mention gym class is second period of the day? Yeah. And did I mention no deodorant? Nice.

Wednesday: Roger, this jerk in my homeroom who has like, a negative IQ, threw a fat, wet spitball into my hair right at my neck where I couldn’t feel it and it stuck there and no one told me about it until hours later when I went to the girls’ room and saw it. I was mortified! And this stupid girl, Dana (who pronounces her name “Danna” like she’s something special), was there and she said, Oh yeah, Roger threw that at you in homeroom and I was like, well, why didn’t you say something, you idiot? And she said, we thought it was pretty amazing that it stuck there as long as it did.

Thursday: Lucie offered to do the laundry because I had mounds of homework and she shrank my favorite long-sleeved t-shirt. Argh. It was a really nice light pink one that had an M on the left front. It was really soft and I never put it in the dryer so the color would stay pretty and – AND! – so it wouldn’t shrink!

Friday: everyone was invited to a party for Saturday night except me. Yes, every single person I have ever met in RC. Who was throwing it? Dana, the one I called an idiot in the girls’ room. Sigh. Now, who’s the idiot? This was probably the low point of my week. Reggie said she wouldn’t go so we could hang out instead which made me feel a little better.

So far, I’ve listened to “Terrible Lie” three times. I expect to move on to “Hand That Feeds” soon and by the end of the weekend, maybe I’ll get to Gnarls Barkley. I don’t know, though. It was a pretty sucky week.

Coffee is a girl's best friend

Top 3.5 Drinks at Starbucks

1. Latte
2. Cappuccino
3. Java Chip Frappuccino
3.5 Americano

Let me start out by saying I’m a relative newbie to the Buck. I’ve only been drinking coffee for about a year, ever since we moved to RC where there are like, a hundred Starbucks. And Peet’s. And Coffee Bean. And every other mom-n-pop café. RC is like a giant caffeinated dreamland. I read somewhere that Starbucks has a goal of opening 40,000 shops all over the world. Reggie said she wanted to visit them all and compare but first of all, we couldn’t possibly accomplish that in our lifetime and two, this guy is doing it already.

A latte is my fave, hands down. Espresso and hot milk with a little bit of foam. Reg likes extra foam but that’s like a fluffy drink to me. Scones go great with lattes, preferably blueberry or cranberry. Not a fan of the chocolate chip. That’s like a fake cookie or something.

Cappuccino is second best, only because you have to sweeten it up. Again espresso and milk but there isn’t as much milk in it as a latte. It is pretty creamy and I guess if you asked for no foam, it might be more like a latte. Hmmm. Biscotti are good with cappuccinos. Since they’re hard sweet biscuits, they need to soak in the coffee a bit but you have to grab them before bits of them fall to the bottom of your cup. That’s just gross.

I order the Java Chip Frappuccino only when I’m hungry because it’s like a thick milkshake with bits of chips. It’s expensive too (these drinks are all trop chere) but it’s dessert so it’s like a two-fer. I don’t order any food with these for obvious reasons. My sister Lucie gets the mocha frap at the Buck and the blended at Coffee Bean. She says she likes the Bean better than the Buck but she really doesn’t have much taste in coffee so I wouldn’t trust that opinion.

Americanos are for when you need coffee, don’t have a lot of money, and want something better than regular brewed coffee. This is why they get honorable mention only. Certainly not my preference. An Americano is espresso with hot water which seems like it would be pretty boring but it’s actually delicious compared to regular brew (especially at the Buck where they burn their own coffee) and if you get a good barista, you will get a nice foamy crema on top. Yum. But you do have to get a muffin or slice of cake to go with your Americano because you need something to jazz it up.

This is completely making me want coffee now. Maybe I can convince Reggie to drive us out to the Buck near Best Buy so we can grab lattes and look at the big screen TVs.