Thanksgiving greetings, personal news and more...

Happy Thanksgiving Day, everyone! I got up early and fixed cornbread and sausage stuffing (I’d fixed the cornbread last night along with some banana pudding). The turkey is fresh and raised locally. I packed the bird with cornbread and sausage stuffing and it's now roasting. I had banana pudding for breakfast which would have been a Thanksgiving favorite had the Pilgrims landed in Honduras. Even if we can’t rewrite history, we can at least experience it! I hope all of you who read this have a wonderful thanksgiving and if the dinner comes out to be a disaster, well, that’ll be material for another blog post or two!

Personal News: I am feeling like such a bad blogger as I have been so incredibility busy lately. It’s mostly good! My big project which has taken most of my energy for the past five years is finally winding down. Someone recently asked me what’s next and I think I found it. I have been offered an incredible gift for the upcoming year—a sabbatical—and I am now working on the details on a round-the-world trip that will involve no (or as few as possible) airplanes. If any of my readers have taken freighters, I’d love to hear from you. When the details are worked out, I’ll share them with you. This may cut down on my blogging in the short-term, but should be a boom to my blogging for the long-term.

National, Local and More Personal News: What should have been yesterday’s headline in newspapers: “Tom is now really delayed.” Closer to home, we have a former county commissioner and former county Republican party chief who is charged with animal cruelty. When a police officer asked him what he was doing with a dead wet cat that didn’t belong to him, he said he was trying to teach it to swim. It’s a sad thing, the only positive outcome being the new jokes around the coffee shop. And, when our boys in blue aren’t rustling up cat-nappers, they’re pulling over you-know-who. That’s right, yesterday, for the first time in 30 years, I saw blue lights on my tail. Humbled, I pulled over and the officer came up and asked for my license and registration. As I was looking through the glove compartment for my truck’s papers, I asked what I’d done. The officer said my driving was fine but I was missing a sticker on my license. Sure enough, I pulled out my registration and there was the sticker stapled to it. The officer laughed and allowed me to put it on. He ran my license and then gave it back to me saying that I had an “exemplary driving record.” My only problem is that my truck registration comes up in January and the stickers say that you have to put it on when it is warm and dry (which is never is in Michigan in January). So, waiting for a nice day, I forgot all about the sticker. At least the officer was nice about it and I didn’t get a ticket or anything.