I really hate it when people spell "whoa" as "woah". (I'm looking at you, Madewell Black Friday spam email.)

Carry on.

I feel a sequel coming on.

Viet Nom Nom is my new favorite restaurant name.

Yesterday I was disappointed that Martha and the children cancelled a planned trip, which would have left me alone in the house for a few days. I feel a little guilty about that (or maybe ashamed? anyway that's why I'm presidential) but I like solitude and "by myself in my own house for an entire day" is a rare luxury. These days alone in the house for 5 minutes is unusual. I'm over it though.

Oh lord, Thomas. Jammies and the kids left yesterday to drive to Phoenix for Thanksgiving, but I have to teach Monday and Tuesday, so I'm joining them on Wednesday.

If they'd cancelled, I might literally be in tears. I needed this break very much.

I'm glad you're getting a break but no one deserves to be in Phoenix.

We cancelled our TG plans, for good reason, and instead it's going to be pretty quiet. I had imagined (and arranged my work life for) a 2 week road trip: visiting family in Denver, looking at cranes in NM, crossing Arizona to spend TG with daughter and grand in San Diego. The wife, who likes car travel far less than I, let me entertain the delusion for a while, and then suggested we just fly to San Diego instead. Then she had two unrelated health scares -- the conditions are real and likely to recur, but what was scary was the thought that they'd be permanently disabling -- and so we didn't get plane tickets even.

It's -1F right now, but I haven't given up the idea of going XCing later in the day.

6: OMG. Somehow my life has arrived in a situation where I'm going to be going to phoenix all the fucking time. I do not understand.

So, Jammies' parents have moved there, part-time. So we'll be going there for Xmas.

Are we visiting them this week, for Thanksgiving, too? No. Or, not deliberately. Jammies and his BFF from California decided that Phoenix was a nice meet-in-the-middle place, to get together for Thanksgiving.

So instead of ever seeing snow this year, I'm going to Phoenix twice. WTF. I'm never going to see snow again, am I.

7: Oh no, that's so scary. I'm glad the worst case scenario was ruled out.

Yes. Hope she stays well.

My one cousin's husband who got really rich bought a second house in Phoenix (or outside it) and says things like "I know this city is run by Democrats, but they should be able to get this right."

Not about Phoenix. I have no idea who runs Phoenix.

Now I wonder if you're related to Jammies.

We're all gathering in Seattle with my brother and his family, but a wrench was thrown in by parents getting COVID last week. They're both done with at most mild symptoms, which is phewsome given their age (both got Paxlo!), but Mom is not yet testing negative so she's delaying the trip two days to arrive Wednesday. Hopefully it does not linger.

I have a 3 night work trip alone this week and I am beside myself with excitement. But of course the week plus leading up to it has been so hard. Not in any tangible way, just a continuation of my almost-overwhelmed life that leads me to be snippy and short tempered and lonely.

But three nights!

God willing the weather and my child's health hold.

Or rather, cheese delaying her trip: Dad will be coming up as scheduled on his own.

Sorry you'll miss your mom. I guess that's why you stopped laughing.

16: Or rather, cheese delaying her trip

Was it Swiss? I bet the holes could cause problems.

Heh.

8: Can you escape to Flagstaff for a day trip?

Where is Phoenix halfway to? Why not Santa Fe? Or even Tucson?

About a decade ago M's parents moved from their house near a city I used to live in and that I love, to a camazotzian suburb of Phoenix. It's objectively terrible. They have to stay inside their enormous stucco mcmansion all day for months at a time because going outdoors exposes them to literally deadly radiation, and there's nothing to do for miles around anyway. Why move there? What's the attraction of that place? The real estate is cheap, but M's family kept their old house (and use it essentially as the world's most expensive storage facility), so that can't be the reason. Anyway, this year the family is convening there for Thanksgiving and I'm staying here because I am the worst.

I've actually barely been to Phoenix proper, which may well be very nice -- I'm really complaining about their insane suburb, which is an endless hellscape of identical shadeless planned blocks stretching for miles in every direction. Anyway, here are some fun things to do near Phoenix: Poisoned Pen bookstore, Black Sphinx date farm (date shakes!), Navajo tacos, Biosphere 2 (a few hours away).

I had no idea the biosphere was still there.

I think they eventually let the people out.

A lesser Baldwin and Pauli Shore excepted.

a camazotzian suburb of Phoenix.

What a great turn of phrase.

Parts of Phoenix proper, unlike the suburbs, at least approximate habitable communities, but it's still not very nice, and I am not speaking simply as a Tucsonan with second-city umbrage; the place just sucks. The best I can say is, at least it's large enough to support a lot of okayish restaurants, and parking is never hard to find.

If you're unable to get away to Flagstaff or Tucson or anywhere nicer, two more destinations of possible interest are the Desert Botanical Garden and Taliesin West.

I had a very nice walk in the desert right outside of Tucson. It was January though. That's when I learned that cacti have sticks.

Best wishes for Charley and wife.

I had to google to figure out my own wife's name (because apparently that's the kind of guy I am), so I'm going to share this, too: Martha died when she was 38. Together, she and I had six kids. Only two made it to adulthood. Only one of those two made it past 25. (Don't forget - I was governor of Virginia during the marriage and later President. You literally could not be better off at that time than the Jeffersons). Martha had had an earlier marriage, which ended when her husband died, at 24. From that marriage she had a son. He died at age 3.

Last time I was in Phoenix hiking up Camelback mountain was recommended, but that was the 1970s so [shrug emoji]?

Charley, so sorry about the health scares for your wife and the cancellation of your trip.

I can tell that COVID is over from the fact that after two years of not getting so much as a mild cold, I now, as used to be traditional, sick for Thanksgiving break.

I broke a bone* for the first time in my life and now have to have my first surgery/general anesthesia next week to repair. On the plus side I've lost 45 pounds since the summer so I guess that makes it marginally less risky?

*actually two, with terms like "bone fragments" in the CT scan analysis.

Best wishes. I hope the guy you hit has it worse.

The puck was completely undamaged.

I have been to Takeissin West when visiting my grandparents in Scottsdale. I went to the Biosphere, but that was when I was visiting friends in Tucson.

Phoenix recommendations: the Music Instrument Museum and the Heard Museum are pretty good (though I haven't been to the second in ages). This time of year, the hiking is also nice. If you're actually in the eastern suburbs instead of Phoenix proper, I'd also recommend the Gilbert water ranch to see pelicans and egrets.

32 Ow ow ow!

29: No wonder you're conflicted about being apart from them.

Yeah, they were kind of poxy, tbh.

Sarah Marshall and Karina Longworth on the same podcast!

I listened to a couple "You Must Remember This"-es today for the first time. At first I found her robotic elocution really terrible, but then I got carried away by the content of what she was explaining, and grew to like her.

Her tone on YMRT never bothered me particularly (although her pronunciation of the letter t in the middle of words did), but You're Wrong About is of course a conversational show, and it's almost weird to hear her talking like a normal person.

Phoenix sucks in exactly the ways you would expect based on its reputation, but it's a big enough city that it does have a fair amount of interesting stuff going on anyway. I haven't been in a while (we used to go there a lot because one of dad's cousins lived there, but she died a few years ago), but I hear they've done a fair amount of urban-ish development in and around downtown. There's mountains right in the city; I climbed Piestewa Peak once with some cousins. There's also Hohokam ruins (mostly canals but also some platform mounds etc.) in and around the city which I've never visited myself but would like to at some point. If you can get away to Flagstaff, or somewhere else above the Rim, that's much preferable for lots of reasons, but it's a significant distance.

My only memory of Phoenix that isn't a memory of the relatives' home my family visited a few times when I was really young is of going to a restaurant where they would cut your tie off if you were wearing one. Coming from a casual-dressing family, I couldn't imagine every going to any restaurant wearing a tie.

29 was shocking and upsetting until I realised that "Thomas Jefferson" had stopped being ""Thomas Jefferson"" and was instead posting as "Thomas Jefferson", by which I mean Thomas Jefferson.

I had the same reaction at 45 to 29.

Much respect for the Iran team and many of the Iranians in the crowd tonight. There will likely be a price to be paid for that.

I fear it will break my heart to discover what 47 refers to.

48 https://twitter.com/AmichaiStein1/status/1594678140131020806

44: Huh, Tucson had a restaurant that did that too. No idea it was a trend.

Did they cut off bolo ties too? My old boss moved to Arizona and started wearing bolo ties.

Bolo probably indicates you shouldn't be messed with. My memory is they had all the severed standard neckties tacked up as trophies behind the bar.

I promise not to wear a tie to any restaurant over Thanksgiving break.

I'm wearing an ascot.

One early Stross bit that didn't age well was independent journalists in Singularity Sky and/or Iron Sunrise (his early space operas) being called "warbloggers," I think because the books were written around the time of the Iraq War. But now the Institute for the Study of War is describing the growing influence of "milbloggers" in Russian political discourse in a way that almost feels like the path envisioned by mid-00s blogosphere-boosters. (Of course their biggest mediums are Telegram and the Russian equivalents of Facebook and YouTube, not actual blogs.)

And the cause they're mostly independent voices for is fascism; I suppose that's something to keep in frame.

49: What a thing!

(It's a shame, though, that they are puppets of the US neocons.)

Someone drove into the nail salon by my house. Two people have driven into the grocery store by my house, but it's more than twice as large so I think the nail salon is now leading.

Someone also drove into my sideview mirror while I was parked. But that didn't make the news.

45, 46, oops! Rereading 29 I ("I"? no, I) certainly did muddy the waters with the way that comment opened. Only meant to be shocking in a very remote and impersonal way. Apologies!

60: I just thought that it would have fit in with the discussion of Slouching Towards Utopia from a few weeks ago.

Bracing for my wife to have surgery on Wednesday, less concerned about the medical aspect and more the logistical aspect of managing recovery, being the only functional adult in the household, etc. But at least it means all of the work of Thanksgiving is behind me instead of ahead of me.

Need to wake up long before the crack of dawn to take my stepdaughter to the hospital for her parathyroid surgery.

Is that an emergency thyroid or a ghost thyroid?

Or two of them?

your para thyroids are separate hormone secreting glands that are embedded in your thyroid. parathyroid hormone plays a critical role in metabolizing calcium, which is in turn necessary to the proper functioning of the nervous system. an unanticipated failure of the parathyroid pretty swiftly leads to plummetting calcium & a shorting out nervous system. at least it did so with my sister. very scary tbh.

66: That sounds awful! Is your sister ok now?

My stepdaughter has hyperparathyroidism - which means her parathyroids are making too much calcium, so they are taking out one of them.

There are a pair of parathyroids?

Hope the surgery goes well.

68: Thanks, Moby! Actually four!

For more info on parathryoids, visit parathyroid.com

A pair of pairs of paras.

Use spara ngly.

If you don't check the pressure in your spara ngly, it might not be ready when you need it.

67: this was years and years ago, during the initial multi year & grimly spectacular efflorescence of a complicated autoimmune disegulation of her system that has expressed contra many, many different parts of herself. she has heroically imv persisted just by continuing to live. she's being treated for lupus these days although lupus as currently defined doesn't encompass all the shit her immune system has pulled on her over the years. i think the lupus dx is probably correct it just doesn't capture everything she's going through.

best wishes to your stepdaughter, i hope all is perfectly boring!

Ngly1 deficiency is a different and rare disease.
Met the surgeon and he illustrated the current state of my face on a model skull. Apparently your cheek bone is connected to the rest of your skull at three points- the side of your head outside the eye, your lower jaw below that, and your upper jaw just below the eye. My cheekbone was broken off at all three of those points and is just floating freely. But it sounds like that's the most common place for them to break so they just pull it back into position and reattach at each point with a titanium plate and screws. Then they check if the floor of your eye socket was pushed out of shape and if so repair that with some titanium mesh. I was warned to not sneeze or blow my nose for several weeks.

Yikes. Best wishes. I don't think that's possible though. Do they give you some kind of wonder-drug to stop the sneezing?

Try to cover the nose to stop it, and if I have to then only sneeze with my mouth open to relieve the pressure. Otherwise the pressure goes into the space under your eye and forms air bubbles and you get pain and weird popping sounds as the bubbles slowly release from around your eye. It sounds like a party trick someone once tried to do at summer camp.

My eyeballs would sound like a fresh Pepsi.

I would love to have a reason to sneeze with my mouth open.

Well, probably not at the cost of a surgery. But it would be good to have a reason.

Some people would probably question why, if my facial bones were in such fragile state, would I put that much mashed potatoes and gravy in my mouth at once.

50, 52: I wondered if I was mis-remembering, and it's possible I actually went to the same Tucson restaurant, but the driving distance between the two cities makes me think I went to a different place. I know we drove for a while to get to the place but I don't think we would have driven 100+ miles just to get dinner.

I have been given exactly the same advice re: sneezing and nose blowing. I feel like an idiot but it seems to work. Good luck, SP!

74: You said you broke a bone or two, but I somehow wasn't picturing a major part of your face. Yowza, that sounds awful.

BTW, my goofiest patented stop-a-sneeze is to aggressively hold my eyelids open. Probably not the best method for those with tender post-op faces, but there is nothing that works better. When you don't have to sneeze, practice holding your eyelids so wide open that you absolutely cannot blink, no matter how hard you try. Then do that when you feel the need to sneeze. You will feel like a goddamn goon, which is apt, but it works.

Brought to you by all those years in school, when I'd sneeze so much snot into my hands that I didn't know how I'd raise my hand, ask to leave, and touch a doorknob to get out of the classroom, and then pull another door pull to get into the bathroom. Like an actual puddle, cupped in my hands. I made a study of preventing sneezes.

Pinching your nose to prevent the intake of breath works well and looks less goofy, but you really have to be prepared to let your lungs turn inside out with the force of trying to inhale.

Or maybe those only took heroic effort because my sneezes were so gargantuan back then. I wonder what happened - my sneezes are no longer nightmares like that. We just dry out as we age?

I think men generally get worse at sneezing. Or better, depending on your view.

Wetter, anyway.

Our municipal assembly just voted unanimously to eliminate parking minimums for new development!

Echoing heebie's 83. Man that sucks, SP. really sorry. Hopefully you've already met your deductible and out-of-pocket max for the year.

84 reminds me of the Community bit where Chevy Chase is teaching Donald Glover how to adopt a more manly sneeze.

87- Yes! All care for the family is free for the rest of the year. And I'm due so I could get the proverbial free elective colonoscopy (I did the mail your poop kit instead.)
82- you're brave to do it electively.

So is there really a gap the size of an angry hockey puck in those helmet face-cages? Man. I broke my orbital and some miscellaneous bones a month or two before I met lourdes for the first time (infamous over-handlebars flip while racing a traffic light), but they didn't have to do any surgery to repair it. SP, I hope you don't have especially wicked sinus infections going forward -- I feel like mine were somehow amplified for years afterwards.

Apropos of geriatric sports: years ago now, I was in a conversation with a couple of other newish moms about how they tried to do cartwheels with their kids and deeply regretted it. How are adults normally at doing cartwheels, other than ex-gymnasts? Is this generally an unwise thing to try? Does everyone switch to yoga at age 30?

No matter how old I get I will never give up doing cartwheels. Just as I will never give up my diamond mines.

My gym was owned for a while by an ex-gymnast who was enthusiastic about getting us all walking around on our hands and doing cartwheels. Even with instruction, I did not really feel comfortable doing a cartwheel. Also handstands take more finger strength than I have. Apparently that's why I can't balance, even if I can hang out in handstand position if there's a wall nearby to tap against.

Also I am terrible at gymnastics.

I'm definitely not gymnastic-adjacent.

It's interesting, though, watching the judo instructors are my son's class. They are all in their 40s or 50s, and they are all built like me: short legs, overweight, quite unfit looking. And yet ... they can front flip into a diving breakfall, or pull off any number of really athletic/gymnastic looking moves. I suspect it's continual practice and just not stopping doing it as they get old.

90- I wear a cage when I play but this happened when I was coaching. Typically coaches only wear helmets. A kid shot too high and at a sharp angle and hit me even though I was in the corner not right behind the net. He was pretty upset what with all the blood on the ice, and I asked the other coaches not to tell him the extent of the injury. I bought a clear plastic shield last weekend to make sure that barn door is firmly closed. I offered to buy them for my assistant coaches too.

I've never been able to do a cartwheel in my life.

I thought I could do a cartwheel but was informed I was only doing a round off.

In case I was unclear in 91, I also have never performed a cartwheel.

Try a round off. It's easier and sounds like a herbicide.

94: I'm glad you explained! I'd been wondering whether to worry about that kind of injury for non-coaching players . . .