Duchess Jane

For those of you who missed the beginning of the Take No Prisoners weekly posts, here's a repeat of the backstory on the title.  When I was a kid, our "leftover night" was called Take No Prisoners night.  The food came out of the fridge and anything that wasn't eaten was thrown away, nothing went back in the fridge.

For whatever reason, when I think about little things that are not worth their own separate post, they feel like "leftovers".  So they all get compiled once a week in my Take No Prisoners post.

Post-Thanksgiving, I have a lot of prisoners.

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On Wednesday, I had a late-night post-hockey trip to Los Portales with Marc, home for the holiday.  So good to see him again, but like always, way too little time together. 

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I spent Saturday night in downtown Chicago with visiting family from Memphis, who could not have had better timing.  It was a crystal clear night, perfect for a view from Sears Tower, and Snowsera was in town, playing Reggie's Music Joint. 

I heard 3-4 new songs from the guys at this show, stuff they've put to tape (hard drive?) in the last few weeks that was completely new to me.  And I'm very excited about it.  Wags had a Cougar Fan Club spontaneously form in the crowd, including a woman who rushed the stage to grab the drumsticks he dropped as the last song finished. 

I'm not really sure I'm ready for him to be a celebrity in that fashion.

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Stately Manor mini-update:  The deck work has closed for the winter, finally.  It's in a good place.  The landing and stairs just outside of the patio door are finished, so we can exit the house from either door, in either direction, and we aren't impeded.  Duke has turned his attention to the garage, where he's replacing all of the guts of the roof, it seems, so that he can correct a sag, insulate, drywall, and install the furnace we just tore out of the house last spring (which was brand new in 2006) in the garage, to warm up the Mad Calf, the little truck, and the motorcycles.

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In January of 2007, my friend Becca introduced me to rugelach and I've been a little bit obsessed with it since then.  Now she sells her own online.  Go buy some.

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Today is the last day to help reward my friend Melon for looking pretty pervy this month.  He hasn't shaved his moustache in 30 days, to raise money for men's health causes.  You can donate to his 'stache stash here.

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A fun moustache site?  This one.

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I've renamed the "Fat Ass Blogging" category "Buck Up, Cupcake". And I've written there recently, and plan to write there some more, though it's scary for a lot of reasons.

"Buck up, cupcake" dates back to August of 2005, when Vote4Me said those words to me during a particularly whiney day during a bad breakup.  I believe it was followed by his 2nd most sound advice to me at that time in my life:  "Hunker down in your own emotional Superdome.  Help will come."

I own the domain buckupcupcake.com.  It has had several different websites, all short-lived, and all blogs dedicated to topics that I didn't discuss here.  Weight-loss and food issues.  Work.  Depression.  The separate site usually became that emotional Superdome.  Festering issues, ignored, never going away.  So it's not separate anymore.  This is a big step for me.

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This week, years past:

2008:  I found the face of Wrecks in our bathroom door. 

2007:  Helio Castroneves won Dancing with the Stars.

2006:  Jen! and I risked life and limb along Highway 251 with Minica taped to a yardstick.  The "Home of Danica Patrick" sign in those photos no longer exists - what's up with that, Roscoe?  If that wasn't enough excitement for one week, I also posed next to an enormous pig to make myself look thinner.  What's up, Jason Notermann?  I wonder if I've dropped out of your google results yet?  Ooops.

2005:  I had the greatest dream of my entire life.  And then Stinky Ferret Boy and I went to see the Rent movie and watched an entire row of shocked and horrified Rockfordians get up and leave at the first man/man kiss.

I would imagine that almost everyone's Thanksgiving table looked like this yesterday, no?

No?  What was different?  Oh.  This?

Yes.  'Tis the season for malt liquor.  Duke.  Keeping it classy, per usual.

We had an amazing dinner at my parents' house yesterday.  Turkey and all of the traditional accompaniments, but DuDad-style.  Camembert mashed potatoes.  Gingered cranberries.  Stuffing with more meat and fruit in it than bread.  A savory corn that I plan on serving with every meal I ever make again for the rest of my life.  The sweet potatoes that he made yesterday were a meal in and of itself, I could have passed on everything else on the table. 

Wrecks enjoyed the meal too.  Or at least the process of helping with the dishes.

The meal was followed by the typical laying around the living room, groaning.

(and drinking Olde English out of a wine glass)

Spoiled rotten dog.

After we'd recovered, and had pie, and recovered again, we headed back to the table for our traditional Sequence game and shouting match.  Wags abandoned his post for a few minutes and we replaced him.

So you know how I have all of these cute pictures of my dog?  Ever wonder if he models for them willingly or if I have to bribe him and pose him?  It's about 50/50.  Many of my best pictures of him, he looked straight at the camera and did everything I asked of him. 

This one, not so much.  It involved 2 assistants and a hunk of turkey.  The rejected photos are after the jump.

I hope you all had an amazing Thanksgiving.

This morning's moment of serendipitous confluence was courtesy of Wrecks, my MP3 player, Matraca Berg, and Union Pacific.

That Train Don't Run:

My musing about the need to costume Wrecks for all holidays has generated results.

First, via the internet.  The incomparable Jennie Pants has dressed Wrecks thusly:

And at home, where Duke finds out there has been PhotoShoppery and busts out the papercraft turkey costume he made earlier today as a surprise:

I'll let you guess which process Wrecks enjoyed more, and whom he would prefer handle all of his costumes from this point forward.

Note:  This is a little mind-wandery.  I have clicked the submit button on Twitter 18 times today, and only one of them was new content instead of a reply or retweet.  That's the kind of week I'm having.  Nothing new, just reacting to others (likely overreacting, in some cases) or recirculating somebody else's something.

I've been in lots of "What are your Thanksgiving plans?" conversations today, and it has me thinking about best and worst Thanksgivings of years past.  I have trouble getting all fired up or stressed out about Thanksgiving, because my parents have always been refreshingly relaxed about it.  It's a day.  We eat a lot.  If it's imperfect, so be it (see: the pre-stuffed bird incident).  Sometimes we eat steak instead of turkey.  So in other words, this is just a nice long weekend for me.  No holiday stress.

Here's Jimmy Fallon as Neil Young doing the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme song.  It doesn't fit here, but it needs to be watched.

Dad showed me his Thanksgiving menu on Saturday, and there was no Taco Salad on it, nor was there Wags' favorite strawberry Jello.  It could end badly, you guys.

Hmmm.  I just realized something:  I don't get very excited about holidays that don't involve putting a costume on my dog.  So that's probably what Wrecks is thankful for this year.  Not wearing a turkey costume.