Happy Thanksgiving!

To all of my American friends/readers, I hope you have a lovely, warm, toasty, delicious holiday with tons of reasons to be grateful and none of the usual holiday annoyances to cloud the gratitude.

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I raked leaves today. Wasn't going to, because they're wet, and wet leaves are a bitch to move around. We have to haul them uphill to the front yard for collection. And the muscle was, of course, at work. But it's supposed to rain tomorrow, too, and there were a lot of leaves already down, so I dragged the girls outside and we did a little.

We have two maples on the rear property line and a giant maple in the center of the backyard. The rear maples have dumped probably 75% of their leaves, half of those in the neighbor's yard. Our previous rear-facing neighbor used to collect whatever was in his yard, even after he cut down his own maple and the leaves were all from our trees. But we have a new neighbor now, and they seem to be more like us, delaying such things. So we raked their yard.

Never doing that again.

It wasn't the leaves. It was the dog poop. You could barely find a place to step, it covered so much area. I wouldn't judge, honest--I mean, we only clean up our dog stuff periodically. But that's because Dolly goes out twice a day: once in the early morning when I'm still in my nightgown, once at night, when it is now dark. I'm not picking up doggie-do in those conditions. But they walk their dogs on leashes in the backyard. They stand right there while the dogs do their business. I can't fathom why they leave it there.

So anyway, the leaves were mucho heavy, and we only did two loads. We'll probably do the rest of our yard on Saturday, after the first coat of paint is put on.

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One of the other things I did today was start to clear out my spices. McCormick had an ad in a coupon circular that talked about how if your spice has a Baltimore address, or is in a tin, it's at least 15 years old. You can check the codes on their web site, too. Ground spices are supposed to be good for 2-3 years. I know I have spices that predate my marriage, so I probably should replace stuff.

So today I grabbed a pen and started cleaning out my spice cupboard. I took out maybe nine bottles. The first three are things I use a lot--garlic and onion powder and lemon pepper--so of course they were okay. They don't expire until 2009 or 2010, have the dates right on them. But then I pulled out some more. And none of them are McCormick. The bay leaves are, but they didn't have a date or anything, and I realized writing down the codes didn't do any good unless I wrote down the spice, too, and most of my spice bottles are 3/4 full and throwing them away seems way too wasteful.

So I gave up.