Three dinners in three days

Thanksgiving is over and it is now time to Get Our Figgy On. Oh good people of the Internet, there’s still time to donate! Better yet, get yourself down to Westlake Center this Friday night, 6:30-7:30 pm, and be one of my adoring groupies. Get your Figgy FAQ here and here and email me to find out where to mail your check. The old people will send you grateful sloppy kisses.

I don’t know about you, but three Thanksgiving dinners in three days was more than enough for me. Not that I don’t love turkey. Mmm, turkey. With mashed potatoes. And gravy. Lots of gravy.

Besides the food (turkey turkey everywhere!) and family (fabulous cousins who cut hair for free! Reminiscing with the Snide and Snarky Pincus Sisters! a father-in-law who does the dishes so we can lazily lounge about watching a movie!), my favorite part of Thanksgiving was the hour's worth of girltalk Saturday night with a 15-year-old and a 13-year-old who moved here from Hong Kong about a year ago. With all the "totallys" and "likes" in the conversation, you wouldn't have known it. All three of us were bored to pieces at the dinner table (we are way too cool for conversations about computers, okay?), and I felt bad because there weren't many kids and the well-intentioned grownups kept hammering them with Important Grownup Advice about school and extra-curricular activities and what college they planned to attend (she was THIRTEEN!) and the necessity of being Well Rounded. Once they ran out of steam, I excused the three of us and we escaped to a far-from-everyone-else couch where the girls could talk about the things that really matter: clothes and boyfriends. All I had to do was ask one question: So how is school different here? and they were off on a long sparkly aqua-blue streak of classes and friends and boys, about how American girls look and sound so much older than girls in other countries, about the amount of schoolwork a typical Hong Kong student takes home, and why you might learn English faster if you have an American boyfriend. They were super fun and I would totally, like, love to take them shopping sometime.

But I went to the gym on Sunday. The GYM. I don't go to the gym, the gym being an intimidating and stinky place involving machines that require an engineering degree to operate, surly employees in track suits, and entirely too much armpit hair. However, there is only so much turkey, gravy and pie a girl can consume before the immensity of her derriere begins to impede her ability to climb the single flight of stairs to her front door. So I read the December InStyle on an exercise bike until my butt got numb and then I transferred over to the treadmills. (You know what could get me to work out a little more, now that I think about it? The treadmill makers of the world need to start installing TV screens in place of the indignant little control board that emits those frantic little beeps the second your hands leave the heart rate monitor handles. And, if those little TV screens were somehow attached to my TiVo, I would totally put a treadmill on my Christmas list. Attention all you Treadmill Manufacturers- this idea is GOLD.)

Anyway, Phillip lifted actual weights and operated actual machines and checked up on me every five minutes or so because he kept worrying about me falling comedically off the treadmill due to my innate klutziness and/or the propensity of disturbing armpit hair flashing itself around everywhere.

The trip to the gym was put in perspective by the trip home, which took an hour and a half because the Seattle Marathon thought it completely acceptable to block off two of the three available bridges. And at first we were all, "Oh, it's a lovely day! We'd so enjoy a slow meandering detour through old moneyed historic Seattle to enjoy the gargantuan houses and the gorgeous views and we won't even be jealous!" But it wasn't long before we wanted to cram the stupid Stop! signs down the throats of the stupid teenagers holding them. Why, Powers That Be, are we running a marathon in the city anyway? Haven't they heard of a little problem, one near and dear to a Seattleite's heart, called HELLACIOUS TRAFFIC? I felt like a little Sim person with the Mood Meter floating above my head going from cheery apple green to furious stink-eye red.

But no matter- Christmas is in the air! I especially like the snooty sign posted in the Nordstrom foyer promising customers that they will never see classy Nordstrom decorated for Christmas until after Thanksgiving because, well, how gauche. The lights are on the trees downtown, the country music station is playing Willie Nelson's "Here Comes Santa Claus", my second bedroom is full of shopping bags, I have cookies in the freezer and have I mentioned FIGGY PUDDING???

By the way, thanks to all who have asked about donating or to find out where to look for us Friday night. You guys are awesome!