The Hungry Cook

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

I’ve been thinking a lot this past week about gratitude. I’m grateful for so many things in my life this year, and even when I think about the less-than-great things, I’m grateful that I am capable of handling them and have the confidence to do so. We don’t do the television family thing of going around the Thanksgiving table to say what you’re thankful for (my family is far too irreverent for that), so I thought I’d make a little list to share here.

Ten things I’m thankful for (in no particular order):

• My family and my relationships with them (especially my niece, who brings me such inexplicable joy)
• A great place to work and truly wonderful people to work with
• Mexican food – comfort and food coma in one neatly wrapped flour or corn blanket of goodness
• The strong, capable, imperfect body that I live in
• Humor – it makes everything better
• My super awesome friends, who are my partners in crime whether we live thousands of miles apart or down the street from each other
• Singlehood – seriously, it’s worlds better than being with someone who’s not worthy! (I will be reminding myself of this come Valentine’s Day!)
• Friendly bartenders
• That I live in a country where freedom of speech is protected and people can express their views without fear of false imprisonment or assassination
• When the printer actually pulls from the correct print tray.

And, of course, I am thankful for you, bloggy readers! Thank you for participating in my life story and sharing some of yours. What are you thankful for today?

I’m kind of in love with my horoscope for the past week:

“In your experience, who is the best-smelling actor that you’ve worked with?” TV host Jon Stewart asked his guest Tom Hanks. “Kevin Bacon,” replied Hanks. Why? Not because of the bacon-as-a-delicious-food angle, although that would be funny. “He smells like a mix of baby powder and Listerine,” Hanks said. Keep this perspective in mind, Capricorn. I think you should be engaged in a great ongoing quest to put yourself in situations with pleasing aromas. I mean this in both the metaphorical and literal sense. To set yourself up for meaningful experiences that provide you with exactly what you need, follow your nose.

I think this means I need to hit up a bakery, buy myself some new perfume, and take a deep long inhale of a glass of wine.

I’ve been feeling a lot of blog-guilty lately. I have about a half dozen blog posts rolling around in my brain, but I haven’t taken the time to actually write or post any of them. I even tricked myself into believing that I would take advantage of the long weekend and some quiet time at home to write, but we can all see how that turned out. (My “quiet” weekend involved a lot of super fun auntie-niece quality time, as well as enjoying the delicious meals that *other* people prepared.)

So, what’s been going on lately? Well, there’s all sorts of stuff to comment on in the world of politics and the economy, but I generally try to avoid those topics on this blog. (I prefer to save them for impassioned rants with friends and associates.) Being near ground-zero of a pretty big protest movement, though, I do feel compelled to post this picture:

Scary, no? That was the police presence at the Occupy Oakland site a couple of weeks ago after disbanding the encampment. There’s been a lot going on in the Occupy movement and there are many different opinions about things, but I just found the sight of all those police with gas masks and batons and guns to be totally disturbing. Particularly in my city. In the United States. Where we don’t have a military state. Ahem.