Nastia's twenty-sixth birthday

Nastia’s birthday, this year, is on a Tuesday. It’s a tough day of the week to do anything so we waited for Saturday. We told Nastia we didn’t want to go to the restaurant where you cook your own food. I don’t remember its name, only that it is in the Palisades Mall, fourth floor. She picked Gilligan’s in Mt Ivy. We’ve been there before and it is nice. I try to make a reservation for six. They don’t take reservations, only call ahead seating. So as we head toward the restaurant, I call and tell them we will be there in about a half an hour. We are a party of eight. Originally we were a party of nine, but Jesse, Nastia’s friend, the one with the son, said she couldn’t make it.

The weather for late November, early December has been unusually warm, fifties most of the time, so everyone has a lighter than normal jacket. We are seated in the glass enclosed part of the restaurant and it is always cooler there, than the other part of the restaurant. It was cool, not really cold. If it had been a normal December we would have been cold. I took some pictures of Sean and Nastia so I have them for the blog. In all of the pictures I see Sean looking up toward heaven. I’m wondering if he is praying to God for something or is he telling God he really has been good and doesn’t deserve coal for Christmas, I really don’t know. So I actually ask him why he is always looking up. He points to a rather large TV to the right and behind me that I had to walk by to get to my seat. There is a football game on it. I’m not the football fan I used to be, so I didn’t even notice it.

The food is good, Nastia gets a bucket of mussels, like usual. Elena asks to get some calamari and of course the bread is really tasty. Teri begins to warn everyone there is a lot of food coming. I gave up on that years ago when Elena would eat bread, an appetizer and salad. When the main course came she wouldn’t touch it and she’d take it home. I’d ruin the fun of eating out, so I stopped.

Elena did channel her past self this night. She ate bread, the appetizer and salad. At the end of the night she took most of her main dish home, but not one yell and made someone else unhappy. I’m still shocked at the price of going out these days. There was a whole lobster on the menu with something else, I hope and the price for it was sixty-two dollars. We bought a whole bunch of cash, but no alcohol was ordered, so it was a little less than we figured. My mom had leftovers. She said she warmed up for her and Bruce a day or two later. I think the leftovers we took home ended up getting thrown out the following Sunday night. I’m not sure. I do remember Teri showing me three shiny metal containers saying she is just going to throw it all out without opening them. After thirty-two years together, thirty married, I’ve learned to not ask too many questions.

Thanksgiving 2024

Life for me these days seems busy, and very repetitive. It’s like that Kink’s song, that no one except people my age or older might remember, ‘Well Respected Man’ Cause He gets up every morning, And he goes to work at nine (really eight) Takes the same train every time (drives the same car every time) And comes home at five-thirty. And so on, that’s my life. Very much the same thing every day.

Now Teri has been given a job, she doesn’t get anything for, except a thank you and the love of that one and a half year old KJ. I’ve inserted one of his drawings here, he’s gone into his abstract phase. If you look closely you can see it’s him looking over his left shoulder with a very contemplative look on his face. I wouldn't have expected this level of depth from him until at least six or so. Elena helped him sign his work. Thanksgiving, I should have asked KJ to draw me a picture of that event, but he went with his mother to have dinner somewhere else. So he would have drawn an impressionist drawing, I guess. You know, he’d have to draw what his impression of the day might have looked like. Come on, if I have to explain the jokes, they're not funny. We had dinner at two in the afternoon. Sean and Nastia left our house about three-thirty to go to his mom’s house to share dinner with his mom, sister and other assorted relatives. Teri got up early, as usual to make Thanksgiving dinner in the way she remembers it. She’d make the stuffing, just as her mother made it. She used chicken broth, maybe as her mother did because she didn’t want the gizzard and other leftover parts anywhere near the gravy to baste the bird. My mom would use the innards, an onion and some other items to make a gravy to baste the turkey. Teri let me make the sweet potato casserole. I enjoyed making it and put my all into it and, yes, it came out good. I ate it at three different meals. Teri also made white potatoes with dry onion soup mix. They were great. The turkey, like usual, was made in a roaster we keep down stairs. It’s sort of like how her family use to make holiday food in an old oven from maybe the 1920’s? Tony said it didn’t have a way to set the temperature, but it cooked some really good food. I wanted a dual oven stove, but I was out voted back when we rebuilt the kitchen, one to one. She will insist to this day she never voted against a dual stove oven. I wanted one because it was just the two of us and why warm up a big oven for a small dish, plus I thought it was cool. The guest list was the usual,Teri, myself, Nastia, Elena, Sean and Nancy. My mom was invited, but said it was easier to walk to Eric’s for supper. We've lost the Muller dinner time in these last few years. Teri said dinner was going to be two in the afternoon, so Sean and Nastia could go to his mother’s. We served about two-fifteen, not the Muller three, three-thirty. Some traditions die quietly, I guess.

I made a cheesecake in a sixteen inch wide spring form pan. Alexa doesn’t like me, so when it was time for the time to go off, she didn’t and I remembered the cheesecake before it got burned, So it was over cooked, a little rubbery and dry. I threw most of it away about a week later. It was a nice holiday. Shame Kj and Amanda couldn’t make it.