Last night we went to the grocery store to buy things for Thanksgiving dinner. My mother had carpal tunnel surgery on Monday, so she decided she didn't want to do anything for Thanksgiving. My sister is taking her daughters out to eat, and my brother and his family are doing their own thing, too, and Bob and I are going to cook Thanksgiving dinner. I think we might have done it once before, several years ago when Mom was sick.

We're making turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, stuffing, bean salad, green beans, rolls, stuffed celery and olives, and pumpkin pie and cheesecake for dessert. I also want some other sort of side dish, but I haven't thought of what. I'll stop tonight and get a bottle of wine, and we didn't think to get bread so we can have turkey sandwiches on Friday . . .

The kitty hammocks came on Monday. I got the two I ordered, but not the free one, although there was a free cover included. Maybe I misunderstood the offer, although I don't think so. It's okay--that's still one for Dinah and one for Pye, but I wanted to give the free one to Misty. I suppose I could write to the company, but I hated to ask for something free in the first place.

They, of course, ignored them for the first couple of days (and had a great time playing in the box they came in), but Pyewacket was lying on one of them last night and Dinah had figured out a way this morning to incorporate one into the games she plays with the trapped ball toy.

She lies on the hammock and leans over and smacks the ball--I'm not sure why that's any better than lying on the floor and smacking the ball, but maybe it's just because it's different. She really loves that toy. She whacks the ball and it rolls around in the track, then she stops it with her paw and whacks it around the other direction. Sometimes she'll go "hide" under the table and sneak up on it, running and jumping in the middle.

I came back in the room a little later to find that she had moved the hammock over the whack-a-ball toy and was lying under it, sort of half on the toy. She'd smack the ball and it would roll around the track, then be stopped by her body, which was a whole new way to play! What a nut.

Pyewacket hasn't played any games with them; she just lies down.

Matt mentioned today that he noticed that I had removed the link to the archives section--I had consciously removed it when I redesigned, because it just seemed sort of redundant, and although I hadn't checked my stats before I did it, I couldn't imagine that many people visited that page.

But he said he wanted to look up a specific date, and I know that I do that, too, and I realized that it's probably still worthwhile to be able to hit a specific month and year without scrolling through all of them, so I put them back up.