Today is Thanksgiving and I am still not celebrating.

At least not yet!

We are waiting for everyone to gather at the one house in Texas so that we can catch the whole family with a skype call!

In the meantime we are trying to make the day a little different from all our other days but with no-one around to celebrate with we got a little off track!

Let’s see, we went to the Sainsbury’s, hardly a Thanksgiving-y thing to do unless you’re running up to the store for something critical for the meal later, which I’ve had to do often enough.

We dumped a duvet in the bathtub because it wouldn’t go in our tiny washing machine built especially for two, and spent a couple of hours swishing its heaviness and crushing all the dirt out of it.

How does a coverlet that sits on the bed idly whiling away the days in flattened bliss, accumulate so much dirt?

Duvet washing was a one off activity!

We laid around on the floor, it was called a yoga class, a restorative yoga class.  There was an hour’s worth of stretching and resting while we waitied for lunch time in America.

Hubs began to feel funny.  Not a very explanatory feeling but it was an uncoerced pronunciation of a feeling.  Rare in the male species.

“How funny?”  I asked hoping to get a joke!

“No-one at the shops knew it was Thanksgiving and everyone in America does!” he said.  I nodded.  “I suppose I’m feeling a bit depressed,” he added voluntarily.

Then it was lunchtime and his mother popped onto his computer screen in our English living room, courtesy of our oldest son’s iPhone.

“Well I declare…” she said in her best Texas drawl, and they had a conversation about who was there, lots of family no-one had seen in years.  But not us!

Malia called.  I could hardly understand her, she sounded as though she was speaking in a big bag of cotton wool balls.   She went to bed and was attacked in the middle of the night by a head cold.

She’s taken the day off college to sleep and get better and indulge in the fogginess in her head and sorrow in her heart at missing her favourite holiday of the year.

Her boyfriend was so busy with family he could only spare her three minutes of,

“Hi Babes’s!”

This didn’t make her feel any better.

All this wallowing was getting us off track.  I returned to my blog, hubs laid on the feather duvet that’s our bed.

“Let’s decoupage the kitchen table,” I suggested, sensing a gloom descending.  I just happened to have the craft supplies tucked away in my study for moments like these.

We put on some music, broke out the glue and started tearing and sticking.

After an hour we were ready for our meal.

Baked fish, an onion bahji, a spinach and dill salad and chips from the chippy.

Different enough?