Happy leftover turkey day! Happy buy nothing day! Though we may go out and buy something today, actually; I'm going to try to convince Heather to go see a movie, and shopping might also ensue.

Thanksgiving was good, good, good. The whole week was good, actually. Chronologically:

Tuesday night I went to Au Coquelet again and plowed through all but the last ten pages of Rangergirl line-edits. Whee! Why did I stop with a mere ten pages to go? That's when Heather showed up, and I wasn't going to make her sit there quietly for another fifteen minutes while I worked.

On Wednesday morning I finished Rangergirl edits, though I've yet to type them in. I think it's a good book, y'all. Later I had lunch with Susan at an incredibly yummy and insanely cheap Chinese place (the two of us ate for under $9!). We chatted of the usual various things, and it was good seeing her, since we hadn't gotten together for ages. Afterward we managed to dart into a market for a couple of things (I needed broth for gravy), though we had to negotiate throngs of pre-Thanksgiving shoppers. I bid my farewells and did some shopping, picking up a couple of Xmas gifts -- I do lots of my shopping online, but I do believe in supporting local businesses and whatnot, so I try to do that, in this season of giving. I also picked up a couple of DVDs for the long weekend, though the video store was unusually difficult to reach, because it shares a parking lot with a freaking Honeybaked Ham store, which was thronged -- people were lined up out the door and into the parking lot! Who knew so many people woke up the day before Thanksgiving and thought "Holy crap! I need a ham!"?

Wednesday night we watched The Office Special on DVD, and it was a great capstone to the show. I didn't think they'd give us even a conditionally happy ending, and I was wrong. Tragedy is relatively easy. Writing a happy ending that actually has effective emotional resonance and doesn't feel like a cop-out can be very hard, but they did it. Good stuff.

Thursday I started cooking fairly early, so we could start our festival of eating by mid-afternoon. We kept it simple. I cooked a turkey breast, made mashed potatoes and gravy, and we had cranberry sauce and macaroni salad. Pretty lovely. We spent the afternoon lolling about, pretty much, watching movies. Heather watched Girl with the Pearl Earring while I cooked, and together we watched most of the short-lived live-action The Tick series, which has some truly wonderful lines. After a break to read, play video games, wash dishes, etc., we saw Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which I liked better than the previous two installments. It was darker and better paced. We drank booze and ate turkey sandwiches into the night. Good times, and one of the most utterly stress-free Thanksgivings I've enjoyed in years.

And, of course, I thought about all the things for which I'm grateful, and all the good things that have happened to me in the past year, of which there are many.