Thanksgiving

Just a few lines which may be all I manage until after Thanksgiving. We're expecting, as of right now, 24 people (including our two selves). A 21-pound organic turkey just arrived at the front door, and is now reposing in our fridge. Yikes!

Actually, we've been hosting this festivity for 14 years now, so although it's always a bit of a frantic rush, we're used to it. It's a lot of fun to bring together a bunch of diverse folks from teenagers to 80-somethings, and the only thing that would be more fun would be not having to haul the turkey out of the oven every 15 minutes to baste it for four to five hours!

I'm thankful this year, even though I'm also wistful. The vicissitudes of the financial markets have taken a lot out of me, but I'm trying to remember my favorite adage: "Adversity is inevitable; misery is optional." So I do my best to keep my chin up, and count my many blessings. I'm thankful that most of our nearest and dearest are healthy and happy, I'm thankful that we're looking forward to a President Obama (although right now he's looking a bit too "Clinton-lite" to me!) instead of four more years of Bush redux, and I'm thankful that after 24 years and lots of curve balls to deal with, my dearest spouse and I still love, respect, consider, and care about each other. I wish the same to everyone out there!

Obama Drama?

Will he or won't he? Will she or won't she? All sorts of speculation about whether or not Barack Obama will choose Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State. When my cleaning team was here yesterday -- yeah, we've budgeted a cleaning service every two weeks ever since we got hitched, we both hate housework -- one of the ladies complained that it seemed Obama was surrounding himself with people who were more of the same old same old. I can't argue with her too much. I know all the rationales -- the Clinton people are the last Democrats who were in the White House so they know the ropes and Obama has to hit the ground running, so he needs them, or at least some of them -- but the general idea makes me as uneasy as it does Ruth the cleaning pro.

And I can't say I'm thrilled about the idea of Hillary Clinton, less because of her -- though her vote for the Iraq War still sticks in my craw -- than because of the skeletons I fear may continue to fall out of her husband's closet. More his business associates than any "bimbo eruptions," as they called them in the '90s.

My hope is that the Obama team will leave it as it is, not add much more ballast from the Clinton years. The last thing this country needs at this precarious point in its history is to lose hope, get cynical, and turn away from our soon-to-be president, believing he's just more of the same. And I send a wish to all the deities that may be that not too many Republicans are added to the Obama Administration either. We didn't vote for them, and we don't want their discredited ideas distorting both the image and the substance of this new beginning.

I'm sending e-mails to every lawmaker I think might actually get at least a tally of voter sentiment on various issues. But I'm too old to be super-hopeful that, to name the most immediate case in point, Joe Lieberman (Senator from Connecticut, for those of you who aren't political junkies) will actually lose his Senate committee chairmanship for his consistent, obnoxious and mendacious trashing of Obama during the election. He should. And when he's let off without any punishment, the Democrats will once again look like wusses, and amoral ones at that. Not good.

More on morality in my next post.