I got nothing– and what with Black Friday being tomorrow and having to spend the next million hours at work, I’m not about to get any more talkative. So you get to look at this for a while. Happy Thanksgiving! Iä!
Tag: thanksgiving
Black Friday WOO!
Okay, furniture sales is probably– probably– not going to be Ground Zero of the retail zombie apocalypse, but still. It’s gonna be a twelve hour day (only one longer than normal, if we ignore the fact that I’m not supposed to be at work on Friday in the first place) and I’m probably gonna be too tired to post when I get home. And then I get to do it again on Saturday! Whee!
Be nice to retail employees today, is what I’m saying. And shop at places where the employees are more likely to either own the store or related to the owners, as those folks are likely to be a lot happier to be at work than most of the rest of us.
Thanks.
Nope^3, the I Can’t Use Proper HTML in Headlines edition
I feel like a GIS for “Nope Turkey” ought to produce some decent results, particularly on Thanksgiving, but I have been thwarted, and it does not. Instead, I have a picture of an innocuous casserole dish. A very specific, innocuous casserole dish. And I’m not going to tell any of you why.
It’s just going to sit there.
Where some of you can stare at it.
Because reasons.
You know who you are.
Dinner was at the in-laws’ tonight, as First Thanksgiving was at my mom and dad’s when my brother and new sister-in-law were in last weekend. I had a revelation partway through the meal; there’s absolutely nothing that keeps me from learning the recipe for my mother-in-law’s corn and bacon casserole and making it whenever the hell I want. It’s not like there’s a law that says I can only have it on two days a year.
Well, two days a year and at least one more day following each of those two days. Unless I eat all of it tonight, which is a distinct possibility, as I keep casting eyes toward the kitchen as I’m typing this. Thanksgiving was five hours ago, after all.
At some point this week I have to make it over to my parents’ place for some persimmon pudding, speaking of things I actually can’t have whenever I want, since persimmons are, like, never actually in season.
<record scratch>
Wait.
Maybe that’s a lie too. If I can have corn and bacon casserole whenever I want… does that mean that I can have persimmon pudding whenever I want, too?
God.
That would change the entire universe if it were true. I’m not sure I’m prepared.
What do you eat two days a year that you could have anytime, if you were actually free to do so? Answer me, while I go have more mashed potatoes.
Come see me tomorrow at @StarbaseIndy!
I should be packing right now; I’m spending the next three days at the Wyndham Indianapolis West in, uh, Indianapolis at the Starbase Indy science fiction/ Star Trek convention. I will, hopefully, both have a really good time and sell an insane number of books.
It goes without saying that I think if you’re in Indianapolis or within reasonable driving range that you should come see me. At least, it should go without saying, even though technically I just said it twice.
“But, Luther!” you cry. “Who shall post roughly every four to five hours while you are awake? How could we go a weekend without you? Isn’t it true that it’s been a year since you missed a day?”
First of all, no, not quite; the last time I missed a day was December 23, 2014. So it’s been almost a year. Second, as of right now my next six posts are set up, taking care of the blog through Monday morning. You’ve got two from me (well, one’s a Station Identification) and four guest posts coming from four very capable writers, at least one of which genuinely deserves to go even more viral than the Syria post (35,456 hits and counting) did. You’ll know it when you see it. There’s also an announcement coming Monday morning! Your hint is that it’ll be on Cyber Monday. Let your brain run wild.
Anyway. Don’t spend too much money in the big boxes this weekend, kids. The sales aren’t that good anyway. Support local and independent retailers and all that. And come see me!
It is Thanksgiving
And therefore, in accordance with my own ancient customs, I present you with this.
Enjoy your day, y ‘all, even if you’re not in the States.
What I’ve been doing the last couple of days
Lots of schools do food drives this time of year, generally trading a canned food item for some sort of prize, like a dress down day or a homework pass or something like that. My school is no exception. The difference is that my school turns around and gives that donated food right back to our own families rather than donating it to a food bank. We pulled together 54 boxes of donated items in all; I h ave no idea how many items in total but you can get a sense of how many from the picture. A couple of our employees spent a couple of days sorting everything out and trying to make sure that what was in each of the boxes was roughly equivalent, and on Tuesday a few of us drove to a meat market in Buchanan, Michigan and bought 54 turkeys, one for each of the boxes.
I spent most of yesterday with our librarian, out distributing packages to our families. We went out in pairs, most teams going to 10 or 12 houses. The librarian and I had a double run and hit 21.
It was… sobering. I’ve lived in this town for most of my life and taught in its public schools for the last eight years, and I’ve always known that there were pockets of severe poverty throughout the town– hell, I’ve talked about the effects poverty has on our kids any number of times in any number of venues. But this was the first time where my job for a day was literally to drive around and find out where my kids live. Our principal, at one of his houses, was greeted at the door by a man with a gun in his hand. The librarian and I didn’t have that, but we did have one house that we didn’t leave food at on account of the place looked like it had been abandoned for years, only to get back to school and discover that, yes, that was the right address and more than one of our students still live there.
I can’t properly describe how bad this place was. Suffice it to say that my job today was to drive around and deliver donated food to families who are poor enough that they need such assistance. These people, as you might expect, don’t exactly live in beautiful, well-maintained homes. Nonetheless, the rest of the houses were mansions compared to this one. There is no way they have electricity or heat. They didn’t have knobs on the doors, for God’s sake. The front door was held shut by a padlock. The librarian looked in a window and said that the place was full of trash. I got back to school too late to do anything about it, but I’ll be calling DCFS on Monday. I have to.
Across the street was what looked like a $300,000 house. Literally exactly across the street.
We got back to school in time to discover that three of our kids were being removed from their father’s home, also by DCFS. It is absolutely the best decision for everyone involved.
Be thankful for what you have, folks.
Luther Siler Thanksgiving Weekend Sale: LIVE!
(NOTE: I’m leaving this pinned to the top of the page during the sale. Scroll down a touch for new posts.)
Starting NOW RIGHT NOW and going until I get bored with it, the following AMAZING DEALS are available to you:
At Amazon:
- The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 is only $.99
- Skylights is $2.99.
At Smashwords:
- The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 is… free. Still. And you should really be getting it from Smashwords and not from Amazon, unless you really really want to send me money or you’re not sure how to load files onto your Kindle. You can download the Kindle version of the file from Smashwords, remember.
- Skylights has set-your-own pricing. Which means that you can have it for a penny if you want. You can have it for nothing if you want. Or if you’ve been reading me for a long time and you have way more money than you know what to do with you can pay a thousand dollars for it. I will cheerfully take any percentage of All Your Money, from 0 to 100. It’s up to you!
I have a brief Thanksgiving post that is planned but not yet written; other than that and a reminder or two of the sale, expect tomorrow to be quiet. Enjoy your holiday, folks.
Is that a plank in my eye?
So here’s a novel way to have Thanksgiving: don’t have any turkey, because your oven betrays you again and the turkey doesn’t even come out of the goddamn oven until everything else is on the table and cooling, and then you find out (because you didn’t make the turkey, and you’ve never made a turkey, and you didn’t know this) that a turkey has to “rest” for half a goddamn hour after coming out of the oven and therefore everything else is going to be well and truly goddamned eaten before the turkey is even ready.
S’fun. You should do it. We call it Side Dish Thanksgiving. My mother did some sort of corn casserole thing that was basically just corn and sautéed onions and bloody cream cheese, of all things. It was delicious. We did Thug Kitchen’s stuffing recipe (needed a teensy bit more liquid, but otherwise great) and Albert Burneko’s mashed potatoes with roasted garlic, because we can’t cook a meal around here anymore without referencing either Thug Kitchen or Foodspin and really why would you even want to cook without using recipes from one of the two anyway. And green bean casserole and crescent rolls and a multitude of pies (which is the proper collective for pie) and two different kinds of deviled eggs, because have you ever made deviled eggs with sriracha? Holy God.
I am not going to be shopping today.
I’m getting more conflicted about holidays as I get older. I boycotted Christmas entirely last year; I made it clear to everyone that I wasn’t buying any presents for anyone and they were not to buy anything for me either; I really want to raise the boy in a way that he grows up substantially less materialistic than I am and one of the main ways to do that, I think, is to cut the emphasis on getting stuff around holidays.
Sounds great, right? All principled and shit, until I get to the part where I tell you that I ordered a PS3 (not a typo; 3) from Amazon yesterday so that I didn’t have to go stand in line at Gamestop at midnight to fight for one of the eight exactly-identically-ridiculous PS3 packages that they have in-store. A 250 GB PS3, which can’t be had for $199 by itself, plus two games, one of which is the entire reason I want a PS3, for $199, plus Saturday shipping for less than tax would have been. It’ll show up tomorrow sometime.
Which is as far as my “no materialism/no shopping on Thanksgiving/no shopping on Black Friday” thing gets me: I spent $200 on an electronic doohickey that I don’t actually need, on Thanksgiving, so that a low-wage Amazon employee can package it and mail it on Black Friday so that somebody else can scramble to get it to me on a Saturday by 8:00. Which should be about when I’m getting home from work. So, yeah, I’m all big and bad and principled and won’t go shopping on Black Friday… because I ordered my shit online on Thanksgiving.
Maybe I work on my own materialism before I try reprogramming the boy.