Casting Blame... or, why our Thanksgiving pies are square

Happy Thanksgiving! As a descendant of one of the first Thanksgiving celebrants, I wish you great remembrances and thoroughly satisfying eatables. Happy Thanksgiving!

We had just the five -- uh, six -- of us for Thanksgiving dinner today. Rufus actually enjoyed his bites of turkey liver. (He is so NOT motivated by food, but there are a few treats that take his mind off those tennis balls.) The rest of us feasted on turkey, stuffing (not dressing this year!), mashed potatoes, sweet carrots, and pretty good gravy.

And then there's dessert.

Pete and I went shopping earlier this week, and I looked with some interest at the frozen pie section. "They wouldn't taste anything like the real thing, Mom." Okay, okay. I know a compliment when it hits me upside the appetite. I bought pie shells, canned pumpkin, and Granny Smith apples.

I was going to bake both pies last night, but it turned out I was really tired. I realized I could just bake the pumpkin one last night so it could cool, and toss an apple pie into the oven when we took the turkey out today. One cold, one hot. Perfect! I mixed the spices for the pumpkin pie, and then went to get the pie pans out.

Uh, oh.

Remember one of the highlights of our summer? New flooring, new paint, new fence? I also bought a new set of drinking glasses to replace the set that was mostly broken and gone. Between the kitchen work and the new glasses, I decided to do some minor rearrangement of the cupboards. Way up on the top shelf above the mugs and glasses, I had several pie pans that only get used once or twice a year. Why keep those so handy when I could use that spot for something we're regularly accessing? So, the pie pans got moved to a better place. Then, other things got moved to make the painting easier. Shift and re-shift.

Last night, I looked in the old place for my nice pie pans. Oops -- silly me, forgetting that I moved them! Um... moved them... uhhhh...

I looked in all the kitchen cupboards. I looked high and low in the pantry. I looked in the garage, where some of my china is still waiting to be returned to the sideboard in the living room. Um...

I looked in the utility room, where the slow cooker is renting shelf space. I looked again in the pantry, climbing onto the bottom shelf so I could look inside a box up high. I looked once more in the garage, in the kitchen cupboards, even in my closet where the jumbo-size china platter is kept.

No. Pie. Pans. Anywhere.

Ugh.

The spices were mixed. The ingredients were gathered. I could bake the pumpkin pie first thing in the morning, since I wasn't planning to eat dinner until late afternoon. No problem. Go to bed, get a good sleep, and surely I'll remember where I put those pie pans. There's a really nice one from my mother-in-law, and one that we received as a wedding gift. I know they're just right here, close by. I'll remember.

[cue rooster crowing]

Morning dawned. The pie pans must have been placed into the sideboard, then boxed up with the china so we could clear furniture out of the living room. The pie pans, therefore, are in that box in the garage.

Nope.

[insert photo of beautiful square pies, when computer and camera are in synch again]

After our wonderful dinner, I helped Rufus get a tennis ball that had gotten behind a piece of furniture in the basement. Right there, in plain sight, was the box with the pie pans right on top. In plain sight. Where I couldn't miss them. My mother-in-law used to enjoy cleaning her house and finding new, better places to put things. And then, when she needed them, she could not recall where they might be found. I have become my mother-in-law, except for the cleaning part.

Happy Thanksgiving!

"Honey, I found the problem with the dryer..."

Our clothes dryer started making an uncomfortable noise, so I decided it would be best to investigate sooner rather than later. You see, the last time a dryer made a bad noise, I spent a couple of weeks hoping it would simply go away. It didn't. And that was one ugly repair job. I learned a few lessons that time around.

So I started taking the dryer apart a couple of nights ago, but it took a while to figure out how to get the top open and then clean what I could reach. (Different dryer, and more than ten years have passed.) This morning I took off the door and front panel, and while I was cleaning, I found... [cue sinister music]



Could this have something to do with why my sons don't have girlfriends right now?

Oh -- that's my hand. Sorry.

Home safety experts tell us it's best to clean all the lint out of your dryer much more often than any of us do. There's lotsa lint in there, and lint is highly combustible, and dust bunnies are plotting to take over the world.

What I really found while scooping out nine years of lint was a little nylon strip that used to be a slide. For $26.17 I can replace both slides and have a happy dryer again, except I'll have to wait for the parts to come and then I'll have to take the WHOLE thing apart so I can install the little buggers. Guess what I hope to be doing next weekend? Eh... just in time for our wedding anniversary.

Oh, and pretend these are decorations. I did get the dryer put back together, but I'm not crazy about using it and listening to the drum scraping... scraping... clawing... trying to get out... Oops -- wrong holiday. Happy Fourth!