We started out the Holiday season with a dinner at Wolf Creek Golf Course with our good friends Lloyd and Juanita.
This nice restaurant decided to offer a buffet Thanksgiving dinner for $35 per person. The offering included macaroni and cheese, green salad, sweet potatoes, brussel sprouts, turkey, ham, and mashed potatoes. Everything tasted the same… like different versions of mashed potatoes. It sucked. We could have had a better meal at Del Taco for a whole lot less.
(Thanksgiving meals are sometimes memorable, and I’m not just talking about the five- to ten-pounds of food that one stuffs down his gullet. I recall one “special” Thanksgiving meal that Charlie and I and the four boys had at Charlie’s parents’ home. Her dad Chuck was always socially inept and would sometimes say awkward things just to make conversation. At some point, he found it necessary to blurt out to his grandson Tim, “Well, have you got anyone pregnant lately?” Tim got red in the face and said something like, “Mom, why did you tell him?” Charlie, who had kept the secret to herself, replied, “I didn’t, you just did!”)
(The best Thanksgiving dining experience we’ve ever had was in Tangier, Morocco. It’s a very exotic place, lots of Muslims walking around in costume, and all kinds of shady characters lurking about in the Casbah. However, we found a little restaurant in there where the owner took real good care of us and brought us a variety of great food (who knows what it was?) and drink. The male customers in the restaurant (Charlie was the only woman) were friendly and respectful, even the guy who was a spitting image of Osama Bin Laden. Those gentlemen didn’t know John Smith and Pocahontas from Ice Cube, but kept their daggers sheathed and tried to ignore us infidels. We had a great time. No turkey or mashed potatoes, however, but a lot of fish, cous cous, rice, and such.)
We rescued Thanksgiving evening by going back to our place, playing some cards and dominoes, and having some apple pie with vanilla ice cream. The latter was much better than our Thanksgiving meal at Wolf Creek and only cost a few bucks. That’s how you fight inflation.
Charlie has scheduled four cocktail parties at our home over the coming month to press the flesh with some of our closest friends and neighbors. She also gave me my Holiday haircut: the girl has talent.
We have held some big Holiday parties at our Mesquite house in years past but our enthusiasm for such has waned, as many of the neighbors who show up never reciprocate. Accordingly, we’ve decided to just invite maybe twenty folks and break that number down into four cocktail parties where we can actually spend time sharing stories and enjoying each other.
In the midst of this Holiday Season schedule, our son Jeff and wife Carol are going to be visiting the area in their motorhome. They are full-fledged boondocking professionals now and they plan to camp in the Arizona Strip area for several weeks and watch our home when we take our annual jaunt to Yuma. Their dog, a huge pitbull named “Chongo”, will watch the backyard and scare the bejeezus out of the rabbits and roadrunners.
My birthday is on December 5 (75 years young), so we’ll be having a small party with some friends at our home. Charlie’s birthday (who knows how old she is?) is on January 3rd. We’ve decided to spend that occasion in Las Vegas with Lloyd and Juanita (a South African who has never seen Sin City). We’ll probably go to Caesar’s Palace, wander around, and then have a nice meal somewhere. Hopefully not a mashed-potato-flavored buffet!
Did I say that we were going to Yuma again for Christmas? It’s true, we’ve been invited back by our good friends Dan and Peggy Quinn. We really like going there and spending time with them, as they’re great people and also have a Boston Terrier named “Katie”. We will spend a lot of time going to bars and restaurants, probably spend some time in Algodones, Mexico, go to the big flea market, hang out at their spacious digs, drink a lot of adult beverages, and tell a bunch of lies. It’s all fun. And, maybe, Dan and I will get a chance to golf one day.
Speaking of that, I haven’t played a round of golf since last May here in Mesquite. I didn’t take my clubs on our 3-month RV trip and hit one bucket of range balls about a month ago. I am thinking about going to the driving range this week to see if I have anything left. It’s a crapshoot these days when I swing a golf club: anything can happen. Hopefully, I won’t embarrass myself with Dan.
Charlie and I spent Black Friday remodeling the house into a Christmas-themed paradise. It was a back-breaking exercise, as usual, but the end-result was very nice.
Back in So Cal, when we lived in Murrieta, we used to go all out decorating our 3-level home. I had an entire loft area in the garage where I kept all of our decorations; we could have outfitted three homes with all that stuff. Thankfully, we’ve tossed . or given a lot of it away and now have a manageable inventory. I used to do a lot of exterior lighting but nowadays I just spiff up our backyard pergola and call it good.
As far as Holiday gifts are involved, we send some gift cards to our kids and don’t really get many presents for each other. Charlie and I have been together for about a half century, and we give each other gifts each week. If she wants something, she just orders it on Amazon. “A happy wife means a happy life”
Our biggest Holiday gift will be (fingers crossed!) Charlie’s successful follow-up exam on her broken foot, which will occur on December 9th. Just like the podriatrist predicted, the broken 2nd metatarsal seems to be healing itself: Charlie has ditched the bulky Frankenboot for a more petite version, and does some walking each day without any orthopedic appliance. Hopefully, the xrays will reveal a healed foot and my wife can be done with the almost-six-month ordeal.
That will definitely bring us some Holiday cheer.
