Welcome...

Hi!

It is your old pal, Hil, again, coming at you with full intensity from right here in Rednecktopia! Did you have Thanksgiving? If so, was it good? What did you eat?  Wordpress is trying to hold me up for money, so I thought I would move house over to Blogger. The new address is Thrilary.blogspot.com, for your records. Look around! Kick the tires! Today, I asked readers to help me with my "About" page, so go check that out, too, and thank you very much for the audience participation! Don't forget to hit the "follow" link on the left for email updates. Do you have a link to add to my "Thrillerati" link list? Please let me know.

I am very lucky in the Thanksgiving department, I must say. Both my mom and my mother in law specialize in Thanksgivings that would make Martha Stewart weep. Both Thanksgivings are too sweet for Norman Rockwell.. There is silver and appetizers and candles and cloth napkins and  relatives and grace and gravy. I get to go to both. I get pie at both, whether I've been good or not. I think my favorite part of the holiday is after-dinner coffee. Both families have special occasion mugs, and I love coffee and the lingering conversation.

After dinner at my parents' house, my sister told me that she would start the dishes if I would take the kids to "run around the house". This is a polite euphemism in our family for burning off some energy, but I took them to literally run around the house, in the dark, in their dress up clothes. My parents' house sits in ivy like shrimp on a bed of lettuce. I had a five and seven year old with me, and remember that I really sprained my ankle last week? Well, yes, I did.

There we were, running, and giggling, in the ivy around the house, in the dark. I ran past the picture window where the guests could be seen still seated at the table. Our guest reported that she heard a scream and a crash. My mother laughed and said,"Oh, the kids are just playing..."

"No, that was your daughter..."said the guest.

"More coffee?" said my mom.

My parents' house is an old house, with deep window wells on the sides that let light into the basement windows. To keep rain and leaves out of these wells, they cover them with a hard plastic cover. I grew up in this house, I knew all about these wells. In the dark, I forgot about these wells, and while being an exemplary aunt, exercising the children, I ran full force into the hole. I stamped through the plastic cover, falling up to my waist into a cold, damp, previously invisible, concrete hole. If the kids weren't Canadian, they probably would have said,"Holy shit, Auntie!" When I pulled myself out, I was bleeding on my knee, a bruise the size of a handprint was aching my ass, my ankle was still twisted, my nice outfit was covered in questionable, moist basement-hole material, and the whole thing was pretty hilarious.

And embarrassing. But mostly hilarious.

My dad was sitting in his leather, wing-backed chair by the fire, and I had to approach him, like a teenager who had scratched the car, and say,'Uh, Dad...uh, you know those plastic covers for the basement window wells? You are going to need a new one."

"I KNEW you fell in a hole!"said the guest.




Love and light,
Your friend,
Hil

PS Leave your embarrassing Thanksgiving story in the comments.