Plenty Left Over

After a busy three days I drove to the airport last night and picked up the returning student. The traffic halted at the lane to baggage claim, so I asked him to go upstairs to the departure terminal, which only had a few cars. Cell phones – a great time-saver and another innovation to be thankful for.

The past few days were as busy as I had foreseen. A couple of urgent requests from Chicago.were added to the pile. Time-honored work habits, such as decorating memos and tables with eye-catching fonts and graphs, and proofreading my work several times, were discarded—“good enough” became the operative standard. At least we didn’t have to plan Thanksgiving dinner since we’ll be going to someone’s house…or so I thought.

As the person who is never wrong corrected me, we’ve been invited to dinner on Friday, not Thursday. On to Albertson’s to buy a fresh turkey---no time to thaw a frozen one---and ingredients for the brine. Around Tuesday midnight we placed the turkey in a plastic bag and covered it with a brine solution of cold water, kosher salt, and spices.

Having wrapped up a half a dozen open items, I managed to leave the office by five o’clock; almost everyone else had left at three. A persistent colleague made me promise to send her an e-mail by Friday on a restructured loan, so I know what I’ll be doing tomorrow morning. Oh well, there are plenty of leftovers to keep up my flagging energy.