Thanksgiving.

We had a wonderful thanksgiving. We had 13, down from our usual 40-50ish and it was lively. I’m not sure that we would have reached the 40 in attendance this year even without the pandemic because of other family health issues. I insisted to Jeremy that we should buy two turkeys because I thought we were going to be 20 (we had many last minute cancellations due to various reasons) and it was too much turkey. It was entirely too much food because we are so used to cooking for 40. But it was small enough to have one conversation for the entire group which slipped easily into side conversations. We invited all the family dogs and this one, Tuna, perched on Edda’s lap for a little while and looked for food. We had four dogs in attendance and my parents had fun feeding them bits of turkey. We did insist that everyone was vaccinated – so we did not invite anyone under the age of 12 (who by now are 1/2 vaccinated). I think the most insistent person of this rule were my parents – because there were (numerous) families with children under 12 who I would have loved to have invited, but I understood the parameters. But funnily, my parents had been hesitant to getting their booster shots (which did worry me, even though they insisted they “never went anywhere” – because they are EIGHTY) but I felt like I couldn’t “make” them go get it. But we all, as a group, managed to convince my parents to get their boosters and they got them on Friday – just in time for the Omicron variant. We did not rapid test everyone before the event, though.

I worked at the hospital on Friday. I feel (this is my own general rule) that I should work either Thanksgiving or Christmas and usually I pick Christmas. But this year, I’m going to be out of town on Christmas – so obv. I should have worked Thanksgiving, and I kind of hemmed and hawed at this but I ended up not working Thanksgiving day, but I did work on Friday and it was brutal. So I feel like I did my holiday coverage for less pay. On a “regular good” day – I have 4 patient and one tech who I usually share with 2 other nurses. Yesterday – I had 6 patients and no tech. I did not cry – I was telling Bob that when I’m so busy – I just know what things I can drop and not do and then I try to not feel bad about it. On a “regular good”, I usually feel like I have a grip on the day by about 11 am. On a “regular day”, that feeling comes at about 1 pm. On a bad day – you feel like you are always falling, falling and going backwards.