How was your Thanksgiving?

[Shorty]

How was your Thanksgiving, American-located friends? What did you have to eat? Do you or your family have any special traditions?

We didn't do the general "what are you thankful for! " thing around the table that somehow we manage to do every year. (I hate doing this.) We were all too busy to stuff our faces with our delicious food. I believe we had close to fifteen different items of food for our plates, including dessert. We watched a movie, which I fell asleep to in a food coma. The end.

Pretty chill day! And now I have three plates and several gallon-bags full of leftovers to eat. Thank god for too much food.

Sorry, non-American friends! You're still welcome to share other holiday traditions, or talk about American Thanksgiving foods you've always wanted to try!

[Calliope]

I usually hate Thanksgiving, because I hate football, overeating, eating animal products, spending time with in-laws, and celebrating genocide.

This year, I spent the day before doing homework, and cooking [baking pies (vegetable, and blackberry), making cranberry sauce]. I slept in Thanksgiving morning, then a friend picked me up, and we went and picked up another friend, and then we went to get RED BULL, and then we went and volunteered serving meals and cleaning up at a church community dinner. There were a lot of elderly and poor people who didn't have anywhere else to go (or anyone to be with), so I made a point to talk to a few of them while we were waiting for food to be served. One of my friends who I went with has been having severe panic attacks lately, and I think it did him good to socialize and be of service to others - I'm proud of him! I ate a granola bar while the others ate Thanksgiving food, but I swiped a plate of turkey for El Spuuko on the way out - there were so many leftovers!

Afterwards we stopped by a third friend's house to say hi, and she gave us a wee dram and we walked around her very large property for a bit. Then we went home, and I made mushroom gravy and mashed potatoes to serve with the rest of the hooplah (here's one I prepared earlier). I didn't really eat very much. Then I went and walked around for an hour. Then I half did homework, but mostly thought about Jacqueline Woodson, and what Mike Brown's family was doing for Thanksgiving this year, and then I read some of An Indigenous People's History of the United States and watched some Maori TV. It was a great Thanksgiving!

[Shlup]

We had to drive up a mountain because my grandpa is too enfeebled to be brought down said mountain. Bailey, being a toddler, had to ride in the backseat facing backwards.

Toddlers can hold far more puke than I realized.

[Pike]

I worked all week.

[Mirage]

My thanksgiving... wasn't.

I don't even know what you guys eat, except turkey. We usually eat turkey on new years eve.

[Shauna]

I got sick and broke my phone.

Worst not-Thanksgiving ever.

[Lonely Paper Star]

I worked the night shift on the Wednesday before; 7pm to 7am. When I came home Thanksgiving morning, I managed 1.5 hours of sleep before I got woken up for Thanksgiving brunch at the Hilton hotel at 10. I felt so dead and grumpy. But I guess a mimosa and the good and plentiful food seemed to brighten my spirits. I was kind of disappointed that I was unable to eat as much as I used to; 3/4 through my first plate, I already wanted to explode. XD

As soon as we returned home, I changed back into my PJs and went the smurf back to sleep. I worked that night, too. My doctor and I saw around 28 patients in the 12-hour shift, the first 9 in my first 3 hours. About an hour or so after I came in for my shift, my first DOA came in. The ED doctor and nurses had been preparing for code protocol, but once he felt the rigor mortis in her neck and jaw, he called it. It was kind of sobering because the woman's whole family showed up (I assumed they were all together for Thanksgiving dinner) only for their daughter/niece/sister/etc to die in a questionable (don't know if the death was accidental or not) manner.

So yeah, background noise of wailing and crying and all (with a need for security and police for anguished violence, I suppose), and in the middle of that, another patient came in who needed an intubation right away. My coworkers from the earlier shifts told me that it had been busy the entire afternoon, and that the mid-shift doc had 4 intubations to do between 2-3:30pm. This was #5. My hospital's ED is usually not that busy compared to the other hospitals in the area, so this was kind of like, "what is happening??" to some of us.

Oh, I got to watch a shoulder reduction for the first time. This guy was walking his dog (at 2am...) when the dog took off, the leash pulling the guy's arm out of place. He came in with obvious distress on his face and obvious deformity on his shoulder. He told us that he's dislocated his shoulder before, but he usually popped it back into place on his own.

The doctor didn't even tell the patient that he was reducing the shoulder, and at the time, I thought he was testing the guy's range of motion when he was moving it around. But then he stopped and the patient heaved this huge sigh of relief. He told the guy, "Okay, just wait for x-ray to come and take a picture of that shoulder" and we left the room. The doc turned to me and said, "For technique, just put 'simple distraction.'" The nurse went up to the doctor a little bit after that and told him that she prepared an actual room for the procedure with the sedatives and all, but he was just all, "Oh, I did it already." Pretty neat.

The rest of the night/morning was pretty chill, fortunately. The nurses brought food. One of the ICU nurses from upstairs brought down a chocolate cake with Bailey's frosting.

[Chibi Youkai]

This was the first Thanksgiving I had off in seven years, and that's only because I took vacation to make sure it happened. It was nice; went home to see the Grandparents and extended family.

[Sephex]

I got drunk and argued with my sister's friend about video games. It wasn't a bad or intense argument. He just kept on saying that he doesn't like things with little to no explanation of why while carrying the tone and body language of matter of factness, which never goes over with me well. My sister got irritated and left the room even though both he and I assured her that we are just talking. If anything, I could tell he wasn't taking me that seriously because I was drunk, which is fine. I probably seemed a little harsh because of that anyway.

Later my dad really jumped on my back about it and went on and on about how I upset my sister. Turned out that he actually upset her by pointing out to her that if she wants to get into social work (which is what she is currently going to school for), she's going to have to toughen up if she can't take seeing a family member and a friend debate lightly about things.

Despite the drama everything else was fine. I could have stood to ease off the bottle a bit, but I probably would have engaged in the same exact discussion with my sister's friend. I don't care if I hear a conflicting opinion. In fact, I welcome it because that's essential to learning about things sometimes. I just hate the whole, "[blank] is bad. I don't think it's good. It's kind of lame because [flimsy reason]." Actually explain yourself. Not asking for a speech or dissertation. He finally understood where I was coming from and I understood where he was coming from and that was that. No hard feelings.

I think my sister is still mad at me, though. I apologized again after we got home (we were at another relative's house), but she was kind of dismissive. And that's the last I heard of her!

Also, the Bears s*** the bed that day, and I went on a tirade about it on Facebook, which was fun.

[Araciel]

Excellent - I celebrated Canada Thanksgiving and USAmerican Thanksgiving cause turkey.

I am reminded of Louis CK. "The meal's not over when I'm full. It's over when I hate myself."

[Berzerker]

Sadly, I fell asleep throughout the day and missed out on it. x.x