We watched turkeys and ate turkeys. :-)

Of course sat and watched the Macy's parade, but I managed to miss the last part of the dog show. (I did see the fox terrier win--hurrah!). As mentioned some months ago, the Roto-Rooter man tried to sell Mom a complete pipe replacement just to unblock her kitchen drain. The drain was still working very slowly, so she brought me some Drano she had downstairs. We were going to put it in the drain before we left to eat, but I wanted to make sure there were no fumes that would harm Pidge. So I opened the bottle.

The sides had been pressed in and the darn thing burped like a volcano and spilled on the counter and into one of the sinks where the dish drainer was. So I had to scrub the counter, and the sinks, and re-wash the couple utensils in the drainer as well as the drainer itself and the rubber mat in the sink.

Just for the record, the combination of Drano this afternoon and baking soda and vinegar tonight combined with a vigorous workout with the plunger worked slightly. But the drain is still slow.

We had a delicious dinner at Bassett's Inn on West Shore Road. I had a traditional Italian Thanksgiving dinner: I had macaroni for a side dish!

But it pains me to watch Mom eat. The radiation has irritated the inside of her mouth and she can't eat anything hot or with any type of a "bite" however slight (I'm not talking pepper, I'm talking salad dressing or oranges). The only thing that made her feel good was the Grapenut custard pudding she had for dessert. She hates eating so now that she's lost weight, which the doctor says is not good. She has some ointment for her mouth, but it has to be reapplied every three hours and it isn't coping against the radiation well.

Because it was pouring when we finished, we came home instead of going visiting. We ended up watching Samantha: An American Girl Holiday, which is based on the different historical series of books formerly published by Pleasant Company, now owned by Mattel (you can tell the change because suddenly there are dolls and accessories and a bunch of other geegaws based on the different characters. I was amused when I saw the first announcements because of the eight girls in the series I always thought Samantha was the least interesting: she's the rich orphan living with her grandmother in 1904. I would have thought they would have made the story about Addy, the girl who escaped slavery, or perhaps the two frontier girls, Native Kaya or immigrant Kirsten. (The other girls are colonial Felicity, Hispanic Josefina, Depression-era Kit and World War II Molly.)

The books are all "empowering" for girls, so while you will find old-fashioned attitudes there, modern politically correct slants always overrule them. Samantha, for instance, learns about the evils of the factory system and has an aunt who is a suffragette. The movie turned out to be a combination of several of the six books (the first and the sixth, primarily, and also one of the short story books), and to emphasize the character of Nellie, who is suddenly becoming a main character of her own right, with a book of her own, the mischievous twins have been condensed into one younger girl. But the books at least had marginally good narratives: the movie is a series of hugs and assertions of love, with no suspense to it. The orphanage sequence fell flat because every cut to commercial showed the happy ending. The girl playing Samantha wasn't bad, but Nellie, who in the book is practical and sturdy, is wimpier in the movie. Almost every shot has her seeing Samantha suddenly and having her jaw drop open and squealing her friend's name. Granted, none of the three of us were of the age group this movie was aimed at, but children aren't dopes: I don't think they need such predigested pap.

The commercial breaks were made more tedious by an animated series of Tide commercials about a blizzard affecting several families who were heading to a special event that turned out to be a clothing drive for the poor. It could have been an interesting narrative using live action and a better script, but the result was dull and preachy.

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 11:33:00 PM

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