Monday, November 26, 2018

Some Bones To Pick With You

In much the same way that we believe “there’s still some good meat on those bones” as our leftovers dwindle to a precious few, so too do we feel like we can coax at least one more semi-vacation day out of Thanksgiving even though it’s getting pretty distant in the rearview mirror.

So today will be another collection of semi-random topics and thoughts, which we’ll blame on the lingering effects of our recent tryptophan overdose.

For starters, we’ll report that we had a genuinely lovely Thanksgiving dinner with family. As is tradition, the younger members of the party shared the exciting new things happening in their lives, then tried to suppress their expressions of horror as we older folks regaled the table with our latest rounds of doctor visits, surgeries, and odd medical quirks which may or may not do us in before next Thanksgiving.

We’re pretty sure the original pilgrims didn’t do this while eating turkey, but only because living to “old age” way back then meant hitting 35 or so. Granted, dropping dead at that age isn’t great, but at least their Puritan corpses still had cartilage on their knee and hip joints.

We were, however, delighted to meet a new family member at this occasion- a beautiful month-old girl born to our niece here in Texas. And speaking of babies (clever segue, huh?) this is as good a place as any to also welcome the three-week-old boy recently born to our nephew and his wife in Alaska, and an additional baby girl born to another nephew and wife in Indiana. Seeing all these new lives, in person and via Internet, reminds us yet again of the importance of trying to get the world into some kind of reasonable shape since that’s where the kids are going to have to eventually live.

On a different topic, we cleverly side-stepped the brutal crush of Black Friday shopping by buying a new big screen 4K television on the previous Dusky Wednesday, when the deals weren’t quite as good but you had a better chance of not ending up on the local news. Later today, we’ll be adding numerous electronic umbilicals to the new TV while enjoying Tourette’s-style expressions of enthusiasm.

We are, of course, very excited about being able to experience the full unbridled glory of having a television which offers widescreen 4K resolution and “billions of colors” as we watch our fuzzy old black and white films on Turner Classic Movies. We will, however, probably find a 4K online video of a grizzly bear standing in white water and snapping at jumping salmon just so we can “ooh” and “ahh” at the eye-slicing detail of something we normally wouldn’t watch at gunpoint.

“At gunpoint” is also how we’re feeling after receiving a letter from the Social Security Administration on Black Friday, explaining that they’re going to charge us an additional $6000 for our (ahem) “free” Medicare based on their hallucinatory estimation of our non-existent income.

We can’t say for sure, but we suspect that this may be a direct result of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tapping keys on a government computer that she was explicitly told not to touch.