And getting ready

 Hard to believe that, unless something goes very wrong, this time tomorrow evening I should be on (or very close to getting on, if it's late) a northbound train to spend Thanksgiving at my mother's.

Last year Thanksgiving was not that happy - I was here because case counts were rising and there was no vaccine availability yet. And I also remember how I special-ordered some lobster macaroni and cheese for my dinner, and the day before Thanksgiving UPS was very late getting the (frozen, 2-day-express) thing to me and I was afraid I'd have nothing special for dinner that night.

(It wasn't very good. If I had to do solo Thanksgiving again I'd just roast a chicken or something.)

When I was quite small, we would spend Thanksgiving at my paternal grandparents' - I remember one year driving back and it was snowing quite hard (Western Michigan, so probably lake effect). I didn't feel unsafe, in fact I remember falling asleep in the back seat holding my (then fairly new) Tony the Tiger stuffed animal (you sent away boxtops...). One of the blessings of having a good childhood is you do get those few years of trust, where you know your dad will get you safely home, or that your mom can fix the thing that broke, things like that. 

Later, one year, we went to an uncle - who was closer. That wasn't as ideal - my grandmother had enough spare beds for everyone, at my uncle's, as I remember, we slept on the floor of the rec room and there was less privacy and more people. I think after that we just stayed home - as my brother and I got older we all got busier and traveling wasn't as good. But we still did the holiday as a family of four. 

Even when I grew up and went away to college, I came back. After I took the job here - farther away from my family that I'd ever been - I made the effort to travel. (A couple years, when my brother couldn't get away, my parents came down here, before my dad's arthritis got so bad).

Last time I did Thanksgiving with my family, it was hard on the heels of my dad's memorial service. And then, of course, everything closed down in 2020. 

I admit I'm always apprehensive traveling at this time - crowds, and the potential for bad weather, and I confess I do not love traveling when everyone else is. (I am leaving a day before I normally would, had to do that in order to get a roomette, and in the era of COVID and bad-human-behavior-in-public-seeming-more-common, I did NOT want to travel coach.)

I've got several books - The Radium Girls, which I bought recently, and Miss Pinkerton (which a friend sent me as a gift), and an omnibus of the novels in the Penric series (ummm....Lois McMaster Bujold?). And I might stick in "The Poisoned Chocolates Case," the mystery novel I'm working on reading right now in, if I have room at the very end.

I'm almost packed. I have to put in my medications and my makeup and things like that in the morning. And probably will take Squishy Dog again, and a couple of my little crocheted ponies, because I sleep better in a strange bed (even if the bed at my mom's house isn't as strange as a hotel would be) when I have something familiar like that. 

And I have knitting. I put in the "Oma's Sokken" that I've been knitting on since the summer, and a couple balls of sockyarn (one for lace socks, one for plain socks), and I'm going to stick in the "Pioneer Braid" scarf I am knitting out of those weird color-changing cakes of yarn. (I'm not convinced I love it but it's interesting enough to knit on that I will finish it and see). 

And I packed all the Christmas presents for everyone. I might need one or two more small things for my mom later on, but I will have time for that - my brother's family likes to exchange gifts at Thanksgiving as they do not travel at Christmas.

While I'm up there, hopefully I can get my COVID booster - distribution in my area has been kind of a cluster, so my mom asked for me at the pharmacy near her and they said sure, I just needed to fill in some paperwork online and bring in my insurance card and vaccination card (the shot is free; I assume the insurance card is for record keeping) and I can do it, even though I'm younger than 65 and don't really have any BAD comorbidities. 

And we plan to go out to the law office where Jo had her will; they have the two items (a small crazy quilt I made her, and a quilted wall hanging based on a topographic map that she wanted me to have) and I can pick them up and carry them back - which seems safer than depending on the USPS at this point.