Not to mention that I could tell my Yankees fan nephew that my team won more games than his team. (Hey, I’m his uncle, I can do that. Besides, it’s nice to be able to tell my relatives about the Nats’ successes for a change.)

Hope everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving.

Eat as much turkey as you can, and not just on Thanksgiving!

Incidentally, wild turkeys taste more like goose than farm raised turkeys.

This for some reason made me laugh out loud.

Pernil is for Christmas. Roast pork Dominican style. God bless the pig.

So when you complain about men being pigs, really, you’re just complimenting my gender amirite?

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

*sniff*

A Native American Extermination Day yam epic: yeah, but since you kvetched about the yams (I have a pal who’s a professional chef who snipes at me for using Liquid Smoke in my quail marinade), here’s the true story about how I stopped blanching and learned to love the yam. I grew up hating sweet potatoes (we never called them “yams,” that was something our exterminated predecessors on this continent called them). Hating them. I cannot explain this – perhaps I was abused by one in my protoconscious infancy or at a particularly delicate phase of my Lacanian mirror stage. Or maybe it was my grandmother’s sweet potato pie, with the melted marshmallows on top that always gave me pizza mouth. Whatever.

Anyway, so I grew up hating ya…sweet potatoes. Then, as a senior in high school, an especially perspicacious English teacher pre-empted the free choice of book for a midterm paper he allowed everyone else in the class and shoved a copy of a mammoth tome under my nose with instructions to read it and do my paper on it: Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Unaware that I had been ushered to the crossroads of my intellectual life, such as it was to be, much like Robert Johnson going to meet one of the two greatest guys in the universe, that great guy downstairs, and too stoned to care at the time (there was some just killer weed abroad in the land back then), I embarked upon Ellington’s opus with a pried-open mind. Somewhere during the first third of the novel the nameless protagonist, a young black man who has already been railroaded in just about every imaginable, albeit hilarious, way that White Amerika can railroad a young black man, is wandering through Harlem with his ass freezing off. He comes upon an old man selling charcoal baked ya…sweet potatoes from a cart, and with his last dime purchases one. The ensuing scene has always struck me as a bit of a goof on Marcel Proust being blown into his past by the taste of tea and madeleines, but suffice it to say that the ensuing description of that ya…aw, fuck it, yam, split open and steaming, sweet and bubbly – well, it’s Ellington, you know – had to rank as the single most sensual, no, erotic description of a root vegetable in all of American literature. If I already had an incipient case of the munchies, well, that passage inflamed it like a cartoon of the Prophet at a Taliban strategy meeting.

I made my way through the chill Macondo afternoon to the grocery store, bought a swee…I mean, a yam, brought it home, wrapped it in foil, threw it in the oven and baked it until I saw it collapse into semi-liquidity, broke it open, slathered it with butter, and dove in as if it had hair on it.

Oh.
Dear.
Buddha.

One might say that my entire life since then has been a protracted quest for the perfect yam. I do not expect ever to reach my goal. But at least I’ll never be short of motivation.

I am spending Thanksgiving with the in-laws instead of my folks this year. I don’t like my father-in-law’s stuffing but you know…it’s a time to be thankful, right?

Enjoy your day, HBTers.

And just remember:

130 days until Opening Day. #boysofsummer—
Baseball Reference (@baseball_ref) November 21, 2012

In baseball related thanks, I’m extremely thankful for the A’s having had such an entertaining year. The crowds at the Mausoleum the last 6 weeks of the season were magnificent. Who knows, the A’s may even be competitive this season again, the G & P Beane willing.

But more than that, I’m grateful for this site as a way to engage fans across the country. It’s incredibly rare that the comments section of a web site is readable, let alone as high-value as this one. To the few of you I’ve met in person to the many, many more I’ve yet to meet, have a fabulous Thanksgiving!

I’m thankful I still have a team in Florida that cares about winning, that Maddon is our manager, Friedman is our GM, and our pitching staff is top notch. A good hitter is on my Christmas wish list. I’ve been a good girl all year so hopefully Santa will deliver.

I name my turkey Harry. Don’t ask.

Feeling half drunk and overly awkward, I excused myself politely from their intervention and went and found a nice quiet spot in which to enjoy the early evening.

Sometimes being alone ain’t that bad.