The Virginia country ham arrived two days ago, and for a while there I feared for his prospects of making it to the table this evening. Salt-cured, so you’ve got to slice paper thin, but oh-so-good on a sweet potato biscuit. Not really a part of the real meal, but as an appetizer, oof. The Hobbit has been cooking down the cranberries for quite some while. And the turkey arrived right on schedule, unfrozen and patently unpardoned.
There are various efforts left before us, but the house still sleeps and we are more or less intact. Kids these days – there, I said it – get the whole week off for Thanksgiving, and I am not yet sufficiently curmudgeoned to resent it.
Went down with Son Number One to the American Shooting Center yesterday. I chose the H&K USP .45 to rent, the Sig P220 being already out, and the shop not renting .46s. I had some wild notion of test firing one of the greater or lesser Glocks, having recently read four reasons to have one or more. But they are frankly ugly, and I can’t abide an ugly pistol. Not on the day prior to Thanksgiving. SNO chose a 9MM for reasons of his own.
Ten rounds that you could cover with your fist at 7 yards, and all in the red at ten. At 25 they were all on target, but some were beginning to fly, a little. Back in close for some hammer pairs with an aimed follow-up. I didn’t get around to doing misfeed drills. I rarely do, they seem a little ostentatious.
Some folks don’t mind. Was a young guy there with a tactical rig, laser sight on his Glock, executing speed draws with a chambered round and single shots at 10 yards. After which he’d come to rest, look left and right, re-holster, repeat. I found myself hoping he was military, or police maybe. But doubting it.
The highways were a bit of a nightmare both up and down the 5, but I was in good company and we talked of flying. The radio told us it was much the same on the 15, but we saw no reason to confirm this with our own eyes. I suspect the hive mind at work, everyone sneaking out of work just a couple hours early and trying to beat the rush. Instead becoming a part of it.
–
My favorite holiday, as I may have mentioned before. One that doesn’t, despite the preceding paragraphs, have much of anything to do with shooting ranges or freeway traffic. But rather having family around, and everyone healthy, to varying degrees. Someone I care a great deal about, someone familiar to you in these pages – not a particularly good driver – has nevertheless been free of her worst vice for 70 days and counting. She speaks of starting school again in the new term, and we have reason for guarded optimism. She has a young man who obviously cares for her.
The Hobbit will craft for us all a lovely meal, a labor she enjoys immensely. We will sit around the table and think back on happy times, talking about the places we have been and the things that we have seen in a soft glow of mild gustatory discomfort. We may even talk of those pilgrims who came hither seeking freedoms unobtainable in the Old Country, and how they hacked a difficult life out of the wilderness, with everything trembling in the balance, life itself on the razor’s edge.
Or maybe not, we’ve had that speech before and it can sound preachy to modern ears.
But like them, we are free people in what is still a free country. We are safely housed, gainfully employed, mostly healthy and well-fed. There is real love, and even inter-generational kindness. Forbearance and acceptance. My children are nearly fully grown, and I do not only love them, but like them. Barring some unforeseen, life-altering event, I’m pretty sure that they will be OK. I am in a loving marriage that has lasted nearly 30 years, and I think it may even work out; I like our chances.
Next year SNO will be in Guam, or deployed. Our youngest daughter will likely have gone off to college and may or may not make it back, depending on the breaks. We may have sold this place and moved somewhere further up the coast, in order to be closer to the new work. Change is in the air, a feeling that we ourselves are in the midst of a penultimate transition. We were two, and became five, and in the not so very distant future we will become two again, with occasional visitors.
We haven’t talked much about that yet, but it’s always in the room.
Uncertain winds blow outside, and there are wolves in the forest. But we have stout guardians who patrol the nearer and farther borderlands, young people far from their own homes whose physical safety is not assured but whose hallmark courage has been tested again and again over the last decade, and not found wanting in the least.
Taking these things together, and taking a broad sweep of the human condition over whatever time scale you choose, we have many reasons to be thankful.
And try as hard as we might to hold on to this.
Thank you for that, Lex. I am thankful for many of the same things as you.
May God continue to bless us and our loved ones as he has in the past – and I count all my fellow gentle-readers of your wit and wisdom in that as well.
Lex,
A happy Thanksgiving to you and yours. Thanks so much for your hard work on this, your labor of love. It is greatly appreciated by all hands.
A Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours!
…I’m enjoying Thanksgiving at the ancestral homestead in Cleveland for the first time in decades, and we’re all having a ball, but the years tend to drop on you like a ton of lead when you realize how much you’ve missed and how much things really have changed no matter how much they look the same. But today my brothers are inbound, the kitchen smells the way it always did, and there’s a thousand Thanksgivings to come.
Mike
And the happiest of Thanksgivings to our esteemed host and all his family!
Mike
Change may be constant, but there is another more important: you have a wonderful wife and friend, something that I share and revel in. It’s one of many things I give thanks for, not the least are all the virtual (and some physical) over the intertubes. I’ve a good home, good family, a decent job and the little white dogs still love me…but of course, that only lasts from breakfast to breafast
Everyone have a good Thanksgiving and please remember that there are many who are not at home today like us, who stand post against the dark hordes that threaten us every day.
Lex,
Happy Thanksgiving to you and family, and may those 70 days turn into 70 years. A good boy friend who truly loves her will definitely aid the process, and I hope the prospects are for permanence in both relationship and health.
As always, I’m thankful to God, for family, for friends, and extra thankful for country and those that keep her safe.
God bless and God speed.
Mrs SoCal and I have also gone from 5 to 2 as the 3 have gone on to families of their own. It makes for a quiet day but the meaning of the day has not changed in our empty nest. Turkey and all the usual dishes to be made. We have so much to be thankful…
for Country, The BEST in the history of mankind
for family, 3 beautiful daughters and 6 great grandkids
for our health, finally on the mend as Mrs SoCal recovers from broken shoulder
and all the blessings of this life.
Wishing all that sail, and fly, with Lex the happiest of Thanksgivings and continued joy thru the coming Christmas season and the years to come.
From the shores of Massachusetts, a stone’s throw from where the Pilgrims landed – cold, sick, hungry and seeeking God’s blessings, I send along my best wishes to all.
Been in touch with those family who will not be here today and also with friends overseas in AFGHN.
Hope all is well there at Chez Lex and to all others here in company. We have a hard road ahead but not as hard as the Pilgrims faced entering a new uncertain land – we will succeed as they did by keeping at it.
Cold, sick, and hungry…yeah…
But more to the point OUT OF BEER! They landed more so they could make beer than for any other reason.
Beer – that wondrous gift from God on which civilization is based. Why did we settle down and start village and town life? Why to grow grain to use for beer, beer pre-dates bread.
Beer is an antibiotic – skeletons from ancient Egypt show traces of tetracycline – a “modern” antibiotic. How did it get there? It was a naturally occurring product of the beer they brewed. Also, loaded with vitamins and minerals. A true health food.
Brewing of beer makes otherwise undrinkable water drinkable as the process kills off E. coli bacteria.
And, because people needed to keep beer cold for shipping, we now have refrigeration and air conditioning.
Let us all give thanks for beer.
+5
Enjoy your Holiday, Capt. Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours. What Edward said about 70 + days to 70 ++ years.
Happy Thanksgiving to all!!!
Just got news that QM, Jr. has met a girl at church and is taking her to friends for Thanksgiving then to her parents home for the evening. Hopefully he’s found a girl that isn’t the typical feminist basket case. I know he really wants a decent girl in his life, like most of us men do.
I’m praying DNO remains clean and that she keeps looking up. A decent man is good therapy in such cases. If he’s a Christian man, so much the better.
If she’s smart she’ll look for a man thats as good as her dad
Who would want to be married to a guy that “dies” several times a week?
Happy Thanksgiving!
So, so, so happy for your daughter. I’ve often thought about and prayed for her and your family.
To you and yours Capt.
Adding our words to the mix: Happy Thanksgiving, Captain and Mrs. Lex! Thankful for service rendered, stories told, and inspiration revealed. God Bless us, everyone!
Happy Thanksgiving.
SGT B sums it up, so I’ll just say, “Gobble Gobble!”
Thank you, sir. And a Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.
Never, never neglect those misfire drills. Have someone else load up your magazines with a mix of live and dummy rounds at random.
Also, a few magazines strong hand, a few weak hand, unsupported.
A glass to you and your’s, Lex. Happy Thanksgiving.
Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours Lex.
Sorry you had to go with the H&K instead of the SIG, although I prefer the .40 over the .45. Glad things are well, Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.
Lordy! I would shoot ANYTHING else in preference to a .40 S&W. Both the report and the recoil are, to me, very sharp and unpleasant. The .45 ACP is very pleasant. Heck, compared to the .40 I find hot .44 Mag. pleasant to shoot. Takes all kinds.
My everyday duty weapon is a HK USP45F. Wouldn’t have anything else. Happy Thanksgiving to you all!
As an aside, when I came into work todight, I went into dispatch to drop of the Dispatcher’s Thanksgiving dinner, it being my turn to do the cooking for the 3rd shift “have to work on a holiday meal”, and found her reading Beowulf! There is hope for the younger generation!
Good Point Scott. When I dropped off a Pumpkin Pie and a Sweet Potatoe Pie to the on-duty Security Staff yesterday, and there were a few quality books out for reading when they had the time.
Me, I would probably be reading (or reading again actually) a Nero Wolfe book, or possibly Chernow’s relatively new book about Washington -seems to be pretty good so far.
Hope all had a Great Thanksgiving -ours was quite enjoyable, and I am going to try golf in about an hour.
First time in about a year. So invigorating, challenging and satisfying to be on a course. A good friend from Virginia is driving to to join me -will be another great day.
I just don’t like SA only. I’ll stick with my Browning design in .45.
As mentioned above in the Chair Force thread (teach me not to read sequentially)a most bountiful Thanksgiving to one all, whether you celebrate the Day or not.
The Doctor and I have schlepped the brood, or brood-minus or plus one or two, to Coronado most years for the past 20+, so as to be with the “fun side” of the family and so as to experience the joy of walking about in shorts and flip-flops on the day, most times. But for us, it truly is NOT a trip to Sandy Eggo without the mandatory trip to the American Shooting Center, so as to bust many caps and slay paper zombies and other miscreants with great joy, gusto and abandon, and not do so as we do up here in the Great North Woods, with much bundling and gloves and mufflers.
Here’s hoping you’re not quite moved in 12 months, Lex; we will be returning next year and I do owe you a Guinness. Or two. There, I said it.
And may the blessings of Providence, as given by our Creator, continue to be bestowed upon our Nation and our people, so that we may still stand as a beacon of freedom and an exemplar to all.
I hope Lex, SNO and the World Famous All-Girl Shopping Team have a wonderful Thanksgiving,
And the same as well to the fantastic commentariat here.
And Flit, too.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Happy Thanksgiving, to one and all.
Happy Thanksgiving to all, and very best wishes that the 70 days do indeed become 70 years.
v/r
All I can add to all of the above is Happy Thanksgiving to one and all.
(Al used my line before I got here, dog gone him, the dirty scoundrel.)
Paul
No one has a monopoly on such lines.
God bless us, every one!
GRRRRR! Badgers don’t like Dickens, he is too verbose. When you read him, you can tell his works were originally serialised in magazines, and he was paid by the word.
God bless us every one! And, Lord, don’t leave out the Badger, even if he is a curmudgeon from time to time.
Happy Thanksgiving, Lex, to you and yours. Change is not always bad. May this coming year bring you all sorts of good change. And may 70 days turn into 365.
Yes, a happy thanksgiving to you all.
http://www.kewego.com/video/iLyROoafYtDe.html
Happy Thanksgivings to you and yours Lex.
I’ll add thanks for the community of commenters here. May we all continue to have much to be thankful for. In truth, we are blessed to live in a golden age.
Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours, especially to those who have turned 70 way too quickly and yet not quickly enough it seems. I have to argue with you on the Glock, being the sexy sleek weapon it really is. Reminds me of the FA18 a little with those really sleek lines, but I regress. Besides, I love my Springfield Arms XD45 even better than the Glock. GO DAWGS – Beat TECH!!! Love ya Lex
And a happy Thanksgiving to all here and standing watch away from home!
Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays as an adult. Sure, Christmas is a gas as a kid and of course Halloween with all that candy is no slouch either, but I find as I grow older I like the relative simplicity of Thanksgiving and the family meal over presents and costumes and the like.
Growing up with a large family on the farm we had a tradition of inviting somebody we knew sans family in the area to our place to share. Might have been the Mexican worker who hadn’t left after the apple harvest at the orchard up the road, often times it was the new member at church who hadn’t yet become familiar to folks in the area or the new teacher at the school who had just moved in that August. In college it was usually my roommates or classmates, often foreigners themselves from Oriental or Asian countries. Of course I introduced my girlfriend and later wife to the family during Thanksgiving. Today it’s neighbors who’s kids are far-flung and busy themselves, leaving the old home cold and silent.
Come sit at the table, share a meal, converse about things large and small, and no thought or pressure to finish that job or fix something or do laundry or otherwise interfere with lethargic gluttony as the task of the day. The more the merrier — it makes placing the table and doing the dishes go faster. My Good Wife, the gourmet, even sees fit to make a green bean casserole on account of our guests and in honor of tradition, where normally I think she’d rather suffer oral surgery than produce something so bland and oddly comforting.
Well-fed and satisfied, I can pause and look out the windows over the harvested fields and a landscape that will soon be asleep beneath the blankets of winter snow. The season of harvest is done, the larder is stocked, the chill winds and snows of winter are soon upon us but we are prepared and have stores in abundance. Let us give thanks, then, and take our measure of rest.
I understand tomorrow is the day where, having contemplated our blessings and given thanks for all we have, the entire nation will head to the shops and malls to buy everything we think we can’t live without. Does anybody else find that odd?
– Max
Max, grew up on a variety of Air Force bases across the globe and it was my fathers tradition to invite some young airman to the house. Once I enlisted and took a bride we continued the tradition and brought young sailors who were far away from home, some for the first time, into the home. The best was when stationed in Scotland we had a healthy mix of Scots and Sailors in the house and we tried to explain the significance of the day to Americans. The conversation flew around the room with everyone joining in, a most joyful day. Happy Thanksgiving to all!
It occurred to me this morning that I may have had some beers last night with one of SNO’s instructors. Good friend of mine from high school did a stint in Pensacola as an instructor not long ago, and had and has been flying Ospreys for the Marines in Afghanistan. Caught up with him and many other old friends in Kirkland WA — good night all around. Thanks be that we can still produce men like this. Best to all, Hutz.
Ruger RedHawk .44 mag in the long ago, most satisfying side arm I’ve ever known. Know where it is locally, but, sadly they won’t sell it back to me. Ruger P something in .40S&W is 96% – maybe more just for ammo costs. I shudder to think what the change in the neighborhoods in Oxnard have become since 1980.
“Uncertain winds blow outside, and there are wolves in the forest. But we have stout guardians who patrol the nearer and farther borderlands, young people far from their own homes whose physical safety is not assured but whose hallmark courage has been tested again and again over the last decade, and not found wanting in the least.
Taking these things together, and taking a broad sweep of the human condition over whatever time scale you choose, we have many reasons to be thankful.”
Possibly my most favorite thing you have written on these pages. Know I’m a day late (and lurk more than comment) but Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family. Truly a great day.
Something to make us smile.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2011/11/not-photoshopped-beam-of-light-shines-on-fallen-soldiers-miracle-dog/
Ah MaxDamage and 6290ret—inviting some “strays” to Thanksgiving dinner (and Christmas dinner for that matter) is always a good idea. We’ve made it a point over the years to have friends of our daughters who didn’t have a family in the immediate area over for these holiday meals. In some ways it’s a matter of self preservation. She Who Must Be Obeyed, aka my wife of 46 happy years, likes to cook big Thanksgiving meals just as much as The Hobbitt. If we didn’t have those two or three extra mouths at the meal, why I’d be eating turkey sandwiches for longer than I like to think about.
But it’s also a way to share in the blessings that we all enjoy. I’m proud to be a mongrel American who doesn’t know where to put the hyphen–and my family and my ancestors have been truly blessed for a long, long time.
11 guests this year, including a new-born baby and even a guest’s little puppy… well behaved and loved by all. Some family, but most guests were without anywhere else to go. Some were repeats from last year, but some others were new, and people I have never met before. It was a great Thanksgiving! Lots of laughter, shared stories, and good groceries and wine. It is what it is all about, gathering together, sharing our bounty, and giving thanks for all our many blessings, great and small.
Two days late (but hopefully not two dollars short
Happy Belated Thanksgiving to you and your family, Lex and to all your many readers. So very happy to read about your daughter – I’ve been wondering how she was doing and not sure if no news = good news or bad news. Long may the trend continue.