Happy Misgiving!

My fellow Canadians: ask not whether the turkey fits in the roasting pan, ask whether the roasting pan fits in the oven.

Or maybe ask both things, but I recommend doing so in rapid succession so you can intercept yourself early on in the dinner preparation process.

While you're at it, ask those big emmer-effer black basement spiders why they persist in colonizing the roasting pan during the off-season. (Do you really want to die alone inside a vacuum cleaner? Huh, tough guy, do ya?)

And for the ten thousand dollar grand prize finale question, ask yourself what is the number-one top cause of marital strife in the month of October on a certain street in northwest Calgary. I'll give you a hint: Thanksgiving dinner. In-laws invited. DH at a conference in Texas for the week prior to the date.

I have done positively Herculean amounts of cooking, cleaning, cross-country running team carpooling and spider-vacuuming this week. Not that Hercules had a vacuum, but you get my point. In addition, I managed to hold down a wee bit of a job, plus a little parenting gig in my free time. All these things together would be enough to cause most mortals to snap, but they did not make me snap. Creating a gluten-free Thanksgiving feast to appease DHs delicate digestive tract did not make me snap. Even the in-laws arriving a day early due to a miscommunication on DHs part did not make me snap.

Know what made me snap? The spider in the roasting pan.

While I cried and vacuumed spiders, it all became very rationally and logically clear to me, as things are wont to do while I'm insane: this is your fault, DH. All of it. You owe me forever for this dinner from hell. Do you have any idea how long forever is? Let me illustrate:

One day soon, you're going to press start on the washing machine then stand around waiting for the hero cookies to start rolling in and I am going to say, "Gluten-free cornbread stuffing - from scratch!" and just walk away, and you will hang your head and know that you deserved no such cookies. One day a few years hence, you will think to yourself how nice it would be to eat turkey again sometime but I will hear your thoughts and whisper menacingly to you, "You said they weren't coming until Saturday night," and you will mourn anew the loss of gravy stains from your life. One day many years from now you will be tweezing my prodigious old lady chin hairs and sigh, and from my wizened lips will come a croak, "That fucking spider was huge," and you will understand that you have still not lived down that fateful day in 2012 and probably never will.

So I hope you really, really enjoy those two kinds of gluten-free pie tomorrow, and that you hold the memory of them close to help you through the tough times ahead. 'Cause I'm gonna grow me a lot of chin hairs.