If you don’t have anything nice to say…

So, I haven’t been writing much lately. Honestly, I don’t have that many good things to say. Normally I can just push past that and come up with something interesting on a fairly regular basis, but not recently, not really.

I know it’s Thanksgiving and a good time to reflect on our personal and familial relationships, our relationships with our communities, our relationships with however we define forces greater than ourselves. And I am appreciative for those things. I know those things. I am grateful for my family and my friends. I am grateful simply for the hysterical game of Scrabble my family played last night and the 4 cut throat games of now-I-can’t-remember-the-name but it was super-fun.

But I’m also weary.  I’m not feeling transcendant.

New Gene News

My mother’s father’s oldest son by his first wife’s grandson’s third wife just wrote to tell me George has accidentally burned himself in a fire. Bad news, but wow, what I’ve learned in just a year of genealogy connecting.

Lord Byron

Education is one of the few things a person is willing to pay for and not get. ~William Lowe Bryan

NPR T-shirt

Got the much-touted NPR T-shirt. It sucked.

Extravagant Dinner Party

I have an idea to share for entertaining. It goes like this.

HOW TO THROW AN EXTRAVAGANT DINNER PARTY

When I was in college I lived in a student co-op. We met a budget of one dollar per person for dinner.  i.e. we fed 20 people for $20. We had some fine-ass meals, too.  Sometimes the cooks would do something simple like a bean bake and fresh bread, and because it didn’t take long they’d also set the table and make Kool-aid with oranges sliced up and floating at the top of the pitchers. Sometimes we’d decide to eat outside and haul all the food up the kitchen basement steps onto the side yard. Fine times, fine times.

I went back to visit the co-op  a few years later and they were living in, well, extravagance. They were feeding people on TWO dollars per dinner. They had meat, even!

So, here’s my idea. Throw an extravagant dinner party where you feed everyone on $2 per person. 4 people = $8 dollars. If you absolutely must adjust for inflation since I last checked this out in 1996, you might go to $3 per person. I’m looking to try this out.