Thanksgiving. I am compelled to reflect.

I turned on the TV this morning expecting the usual soggy parade coverage from New York (sidebar: I really hate parades, unless I’m in them, and even then it was more about the drinking than the waving at the folks); instead I’m greeted by Breaking News Coverage! of extra-specially awful carnage from Iraq on every major news channel. I can’t even make myself recite the details. It’s all too horrible.

So I actually escaped to MTV and took in the latest overwrought eye candy from the Pussycat Dolls, featuring some rapper with whose work I am unfamiliar (ahem...). It would have been fairly hilarious with the sound turned off. But this morning, the music critic in me took a back seat to the guy who wanted to try to enjoy a happy family Thanksgiving, and the news from Baghdad made the soft-core porn on MTV look even better than usual.

After all, I’m doing pretty good. It’s a couple of hours later now. Everyone’s up. I’m listening to the new Tom Waits triple-CD courtesy of The Best Man who was thoughtful enough not to make me wait till Christmas for it. He’s not The Best Man for nothing.

I’m falling hard for “La Femme Nikita” on DVD. This show’s running theme is an examination of different shades of moral ambiguity, and that a show with this much eye candy has a theme at all is more than I was expecting. (Don’t use Blockbuster online, though. Their interface is clunky and I had an impossible time trying to re-order a disc that they had sent me the wrong thing of... My point is, Netflix is much more reliable. They’re sending me the disc I couldn't reorder from Blockbuster.)

The big news is that The Missus landed herself the career-track gig we knew was waiting for her out there. It starts next year and promises to improve our circumstances and allow us to begin paying down some debt. What’s that you say, debt?

Hopefully the new gig will also allow us to move out of this crappy apartment complex; unfortunately it will keep us in this same small town of searing sun and dingy downpour with precious little climate variation in between. I want a garage for my personal crap that’s currently in storage across town. I want a back yard so we don’t have to keep walking the dog six times a day.

And we both want a room for The Man Cub. He’s more than a year old now and will probably be almost two by the time we escape this dump. High time for a young padawan to have his own place to hang his light-saber.

DIGRESSION: If we don’t have him sleeping through the night by then, we never will. I took that over as my new Special Project a couple weeks ago. He’d been waking up bang at 4am, even after the time change! It was killing me and I decided I would not go quietly into that early morning. So me and the boy have been working on it since. The trend-line looks good, but I don’t want to jinx it by saying anything prematurely. (We did sleep till 5:30 this morning, though! My immediate goal is 6am. I can live with getting up at 6am, I cannot live with getting up at 4am.)

So that’s the news around the house, and it’s all good. And what fool wouldn’t be grateful for that, if a national holiday happened to compel him to examine such issues in his life?

Not this fool.

To which, The Man Cub adds:

HAPPY THANKSGIVING, EVERYBODY!