November 2020

Joe Biden has finally won the election--or he's won for the fifth or eighth or 12th time, depending who you ask and where you live in this circus--and he's started to announce his team. While some of his picks aren't particularly exciting, some are milestones for the country. We actually have a climate change position on the national security team, which is long overdue.

It's officially pie season and everyone seems to have pie on the mind. My teen and I took a poll of everyone in our family's favorite pies and discovered that while most preferred pumpkin (with apple in a fast second place), at least two don't like pie at all. It's funny how years of eating pie with people didn't alert me to this, but we do usually have dessert while people are coming and going after dinner. This will definitely be a quiet year for my big family.

There's a lot of hype about a certain book sequel this week while lots of fans take to Twitter, live-tweeting their reactions to each chapter. Having read and hated the first book and seeing a pretty gross transphobic excerpt from the second, I'm not going to read this book. It read like a petulant incel who, instead of changing for the better, is rewarded for his gatekeeping behavior. There's even a literal scene where people clap because he knows a piece of obscure trivia that someone else doesn't know.

While the whole "Meg is so awful and can't get a date" trope is getting incredibly old, it was used to further the story of a character we normally see on the sidelines. Bruce, otherwise known by most of us as the "Oh no!" guy, was going to marry Meg in order to appease his homophobic family. Meg encouraged him to come out and marry the love of his life, Jeffrey, instead.
 

It's that time of year again--cranberry time! Who doesn't love a bit of cranberry during the holidays? A few years ago we started a tradition of using holiday leftovers to create yummy turkey and cranberry quesadillas, which sounds super weird but is actually quite delicious! We also like to make our own cranberry sauce, which is so much more delicious than the weird jelly kind (although I do like the jelly, too).

Have you heard of Liar Liar, the game of Truth and Lies? It's a print-and-play game that tests your ability to lie and tell the truth! You get category cards to guide you in what kind of lies to tell, followed by cards to delineate whether or not you are to be the liar of the round. Some examples of categories include traffic, snacks, hotel and songs.

Black Friday is going to look really different for many people this year as, hopefully, most shoppers do so from home. As someone who normally does this anyway, I have been using Black Friday deals all week between stores that have them on multiple days, and I look forward to Small Business Saturday and Giving Tuesday as well.

It's a great week to start reading more work by indigenous authors, and O magazine has a list of 31 authors to follow. My teen and I have been reading some of these works and really enjoying them. It might also be a great week to pledge to read one work by an indigenous author each week for a year, which would certainly give everyone a greater perspective.

A helicopter crew recently discovered a metal monolith in the Utah desert while they were doing a flyover to count sheep. Whoever stuck the thing in the middle of nowhere may not have known that it was illegal to do so on federal land, but the 10-12 foot metal object had to have been hauled by someone with a purpose.