Happy Thanksgiving, one and all (humans and dogs)! We here in the Valley of the We-Do-Mean Sun hope you're not having to cope with inclement weather by way of getting your families together and your TG feast under way.

Today the high is supposed to be 80 degrees. We'll be feasting outside at the home of my son's friends, the parents of a fine pair of lively twins. Once a year, on Thanksgiving, they invite all their friends and relatives over, trotting out the old folks to parade around for a day, and it's a lot of fun.

Just finished compiling a gigantic pan of oven-baked "stuffing" -- dressing, I suppose, is the word. It develops that pan stuffing is now in style among the mid-range generation, and so we have a vast roasting pan full of croutons made from fresh bread, gussied up with giblets and sausage and onion & garlic & celery & fresh sage & tarragon & parsley & pecans & drippings from a turkey I roasted yesterday.

LOL! What a project! Makes me glad I'm not a mom in her early 30s with a job as an oncological nurse and a matched set of five-year-olds. :-) And a puppy. And a husband in medical school.

Is it not enough to have two corgis to chase around?

Ruby-Doo is coming into her own as a corgi. She's starting to fill out and take on the Royal Imperious Imperial Attitude: "Do my bidding, sheep!" Just now, she's ordering my son around. It's not easy to out-order Cassie the Corgi, so this is an interesting development.

The Dooby has been having a field day in the scavenging department. If it falls on the floor, she considers it to be HERS:

A pecan
A piece of bread
A chunk of sausage
A piece of onion (eeek! Grabbed away from dawg)
The entire bottle of dried thyme that slipped out of my hands and exploded like a Taliban bomb, covering the kitchen floor with herb and shards of glass

The royal We were unhappy to be locked in the back bedroom while the human spent a quarter-hour cleaning up that ungodly mess.

Dooby, to the Human's vast unhappiness, has somehow located a former garden patch, long ago relegated back to the desert, where once the human planted fistfuls of onion sets. None of these onion sets ever grew. The ground is simply too hard for onions, which, surprisingly, do not relish caliche. Yesterday morning I stepped out the back door to find an old onion set, about the size of a scallion and still somehow alive, all chewed up. OMG.

Pup was fine, but Cassie barfed every bite of her morning chow, leading me to suspect that the one who actually ingested said onion set was not the Ruby Doo.

Went out and tried to dig up as many of the old onion sets as I could find, but wasn't very successful. It's been so long since I planted those (and assumed they all died...) that I can't even remember exactly where they were. Plus a bunch of them were covered by a rim of rock I laid down around the orange tree. Ruby seems to have discovered that -- she's pushed rocks aside to yank the things out.

So, I'm afraid that as in the case of the new-found taste for lamp cords, I'll have to pray that God stays on her side.

And  now, it's off to the far side of the Valley, there to find the young folk in their suburban digs...

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!