Sunday, Oct. 9/2016

Thanksgiving Day, Sunday, Oct. 9/2015

The day had a good start, a very stressful middle, a lovely third half and a mediocre end. Nick and I joined my daughter and her-husband-to-be along with his parents and his sister. My other daughter was also there, introducing to all of us her new boyfriend who she had met while earning her Master's degree at Western University in London, Ontario and who had travelled from England the day before to spend five days here in Nova Scotia with her. Everyone prepared their favorite/their specialty recipes and as a consequence there was tons of delicious food and lots of lively conversation. We had contributed two of our free-range chickens and had brought from our garden almost every traditional harvest vegetable imaginable, including some of our giant zucchini and to-die-for tomatoes. One chicken had been stuffed and cooked in the oven surrounded by potatoes swimming in butter and juices from the meat and the second chicken had been deep-fried outside over a propane flame. I doubt anyone celebrating Thanksgiving ate any better than we did.

The problem was getting there on time. I woke up at 8am in Alex's bedroom where I had gone to escape Nick's snoring. I find it almost impossible to spend the entire night in the same bed as him unless I am completely exhausted. He wakes me up every night and snores so loudly I cannot get back to sleep. Usually when he hears me leaving the room Nick will get up and leave himself instead, which pleases me because I prefer sleeping in our bedroom on the quieter side of the house.
There had only been the bedspread on Alex's bed and although I woke up several times knowing I was cold, I didn't wake up enough to get out of bed and get another blanket. This I finally did at 8am and decided I needed to go back to sleep for a bit longer now that I would be warm. At 9am I got up and started with my food preparation for dinner. Everything was proceeding smoothly and on schedule until I realized around 1230 that Nick had just put the horses out and was not nearly done in the barn. He still needed to pick some things from the garden for me, help load the car as well as get himself ready. We had planned to leave at 3 but it was 30 minutes after that when we pulled out of the yard. I get so annoyed at this, and it happens every time we go anywhere. In June of this year we flew to Ontario to attend my daughter's graduation from Western and we managed to miss our flight, arriving in Toronto less than half an hour before the ceremony was to begin, about two hours away.
Although we had been running late I had thought we had to be checked in 30 minutes before our flight but this deadline had been changed in the last two years or so and while we did arrive about 35 minutes before