Dear Kid,

We are heading toward Thanksgiving. I’m guessing you’re already aware of that. I’m guessing every college student everywhere in the US knows that because you get time off.

According to My Friend the Internet (MFtI), the average American eats 4,500 calories on Thanksgiving. Yet we gain an average of 4 zillion pounds (follow the math here). There are two reasons we gain so much weight this time of year.

The first is that Thanksgiving isn’t Thanksgiving. I mean it’s not JUST Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving is the Thanksgiving lunch at work, the drinks one evening, the meal preparation tasting, the trying out of the new recipes, the migrating from festive event to festive event, the post-Thanksgiving snacking, pumpkin muffins, and leftovers, leftovers, leftovers, and leftovers.

Thanksgiving is also about the 97 required servings of dessert at each of these events.

Which is why the invitation for our work Thanksgiving lunch specified that attire was (I kid you not) “jeans or fat pants”. I assume we got double points for wearing fat jeans.

Sometimes you just have to gobble down and enjoy.

Love, Mom

Dear Kid,

According to My Friend the Internet, there are 21.8 million veterans in the United States. (Actually, that was as of November 2014—MftI is a little behind on statistics.)

The point is, many, many Americans have served our country in the armed services. And we owe them a debt of gratitude.

While today is a day to thank those who served in the military, there are many other people who serve our country and deserve our thanks.

Law enforcement personnel, fire fighters, EMTs, doctors, nurses, and all the support people who enable them to do their jobs professionally.

The 911 operators, the TSA agents, the investigators, the K9 trainers, the analysts—the list goes on.

To all those who keep us safe, today and every day, Thank You.

Love, Mom

Dear Kid,

I love the fall-back clock change.

Many people like waking up to find they woke up an hour earlier than they thought they did. Or that they snuck in an extra hour of sleep. (It’s all a perspective thing.)

Not me.

I hoard my hour. I save it. I studiously avoid clocks that automatically change the time at 2am and refer only to those that require manual changing. Those clocks—and the extra hour—can wait until I’m good and ready.

Good and ready generally means sometime in the mid-afternoon which is an excellent time to have an extra hour.

Who needs an extra hour in the middle of the night? If you’re going to sleep late, just go for it, sleep in. We certainly don’t need a clock change for that.

I get hoarding an hour can be confusing if you’re meeting people which is why clock changing days are an excellent excuse to stay home and spend the time on yourself. Or myself in this case.

I haven’t quite decided how I’m going to spend today’s extra hour. Perhaps on my nails. Perhaps at the gym. Perhaps napping on the couch. (No, napping is not the same thing as sleeping late.) Perhaps I’ll spend it running those errands I’ve been putting off for a few weeks.

Thinking about how I’m going to spend my extra hour is almost as good as actually spending it. Planning self-indulgence is fun.

That’s how I see the extra hour. As a time for mild self-indulgence. Getting things attended to that will make me feel good about myself or the house or something.

Hope you enjoy your self-indulgent hour today.

Love, Mom

Dear Kid,

You might have heard the rumor that it’s Movember. You know that because A) I wrote about it yesterday and B) you’ve been on the planet for a while. Probably more the second, but still.

And you might have heard about the celebration at the end of the month.

Which means you know a bit about November.

But did you know that November is also International Drum month? And that it’s National Caregiver Appreciation Month? (Thank you, Caregivers!)

Here’s the biggie: it’s Peanut Butter Lovers Month.

Not Peanut Butter Month. Peanut Butter Lovers Month. Seems to me the idea would be to hug a peanut butter lover, right? Apparently not.

November is Peanut Butter Lovers Month, time to celebrate our favorite food! Americans will celebrate by eating more than 65 million pounds of peanut butter during the month of November.

Wait, what? 65 million pound during one month? During a month that features turkey no less! That is a huge honkin’ amount of peanut butter.

So, in honor of PBL Month, here are some fab facts about the “pb” part of pb&j:

• An acre of peanuts will yield enough peanut butter for 30K sandwiches. The average peanut farm is 100 acres. You do the math.
• The peanut plan flowers above the ground but the fruits grow underground. Weird.
• It takes 540 peanuts to make a 12 ounce jar of peanut butter. Unless there’s more than normal taste-testing involved. By law, for a product to be labeled “peanut butter” in the United States, it must be at least 90% peanuts. The other 10% is stickiness.
• 75% of homes in the US have at least one jar of peanut butter. Some of us are overachievers.
• Peanuts are sometimes called “goobers” which comes from “nguba”, the Congo language name for peanut.
• Archibutyrophobia is the fear of getting peanut butter stuck to the roof of your mouth. Don’t know why you’d be afraid of such a thing—you know it’s going to happen (see “other 10%” above).

How are you going to celebrate Peanut Butter Lovers Month? (Please do not suggest peanut butter and jelly instead of turkey on Thanksgiving…)

Love, Mom

Dear Kid,

Happy Halloween!

You (being a college student) probably celebrated this past weekend.

The rest of us are celebrating today. (Boo!)

We are having a Halloween party at work today.

There will be a costume competition and a creative food competition.

Since I won the sock competition last year (Woo Hoo!), I don’t feel the need to compete again. So I decided to make a delicious something-or-other.

My best idea was to celebrate HalloWine and bring a bottle of an adult beverage. But it’s work, so I nixed the liquor and decided to stay professional.

My next thought was a delectable dessert. But my Fitbit conveniently pointed out that I’d probably eat 50% of whatever I made before I even reached the building. And I couldn’t come up with (and by “come up with” I mean “find on the internet”) an idea that appealed to me and wasn’t aimed at the single-digit-age crowd.

But I found a great idea from Steve Giralt on the Woman’s Day website.

Pretty fabulous, yes?

Yes.

Only I didn’t manage to go shopping.

So instead of the winning crudité display, I shall be bringing an excuse.

A creative excuse.

Here’s my list:

1. My dog ate it. Which could be true, since The Puppy will eat pretty much everything (especially carrots). But he’s much too well behaved to do such a thing.
2. I was sick all weekend and didn’t want to contaminate anyone. Which would be good except that I wasn’t sick at all. And I look far too healthy today for anyone to believe me. In order to make this work, I’d need to dress up like a sick person. And I’ve already ruled out costuming.
3. I was so busy catching up on work that I didn’t have time to make anything. I am quite backed up on work. And I had a lot of it at home. I even spent about half an hour organizing things. Not sure that half an hour qualifies as a reasonable amount of time to not get around to kitchen stuff.
4. Aliens landed, took my crudité, and then wiped my memory of the entire incident. Could have happened. I can’t remember.
5. My computer crashed and I spent the weekend trying to get back my work. Great excuse, but would undoubtedly have generated a great blog. Or no blog at all. Not believable.
6. I spilled coffee all over the display and ruined all the veggies. That could have happened.
7. I ran out of coffee over the weekend and slept through the whole thing. That could not have happened.
8. The Bengals were playing in London and the game went into overtime (true). It took until this morning to recover. Uh-huh.
9. Trying to get all the veggies lined up right brought on a panic attack of epic proportions.
10. I didn’t want to show up everyone else.

What do you think?

Love, Mom

Dear Kid,

It’s National Mole Day.

Who is Avogadro?

Not the kind of mole that has Dad doing the Squish-Down-The-Mole-Hole dance in the backyard (although, when you think about it, that might deserve a day of its own too).

This is the mole as in Avogadro’s number (6.02 x 10 ^23).

So we celebrate on 10/23 from 6:02am to 6:02pm. Get it?

A mole is defined as the amount of a chemical substance that contains as many elementary entities (e.g., atoms, molecules, ions, electrons, or photons) as there are atoms in 12 grams of carbon-12 (¹²C), the isotope of carbon with relative atomic mass 12 by definition. (So says Wikipedia)

Whatever.

More importantly, we celebrate this day in remembrance of the mole project you did in high school in which we had to create a stuffed character mole (hockey. I remember hockey, but I can’t remember the exact name….) and during which we learned to say the phrase, “Is going to be a beetch to sew.” Possibly the first time you heard your mother talk that way, which made it funny as all get out.

It was fun.

It was a bitch to sew.

But we did it together and that made it OK.

And you never forgot Mole Day or Avogadro.

Neither did I.

Love, Mom