Turkey Turkey

Two day weekends around here are scarce; we get one for Thanksgiving, on for Christmas, and one for New Year’s, the rest of the time it’s six day work weeks. At first it doesn’t seem like a lot…the long weeks, the long work days…but after weeks and weeks of it, all that work builds up and you start to run on empty. It was partly due to said exhaustion that I failed to complete yet another of my goals for the season...the first was to not get sick…but I did, the second week of the season, the second was to not get injured…another one bites the dust. On Tuesday afternoon I was about an hour away from the end of the work day when I was trying to remove some conduit from a bracket and I took my gloves off so I could loosen the tiny nuts and bolts keeping the bracket in place while I pulled the conduit out, the conduit slipped back into place due to the weight of it and slammed the pad of my thumb in between the two pieces of metal, which resulted in some pretty deep cuts and one hell of a blood blister. I had to go to medical just in case I need stitches, thankfully I didn’t, especially since I’ve already had stitches in that thumb once, but it did get my week preceding the holiday off to a crappy start. I wasn’t allowed to use my thumb for the rest of the week…have ever tried not to use one of your thumbs? It’s hard. I felt like a squirrel.

It made the week extra long, even though it was only 5 days, but finally Friday rolled around and I woke up at 4:30 in the morning to wind slamming against the side of the building. A bit of a storm hit, just a little one, and brought snow, winds of 50mph, and a couple overturned waste bins. It was actually kind of nice, the wind died down but the time I did town walk in the morning and with all the snow (and excellent music from my shiny new mp3 player) it actually felt like we were getting ready for a holiday. Unfortunately the rest of the day was not as pleasant as town walk, there was a lot to do to make sure town would be set for the weekend (Turkey day produces a lot of food waste) but we managed to build a gabillion food waste boxes and head for two whole days off.

On Saturday I had Thanksgiving dinner up at the BFC (Berg Field Center) where my

friend Leah works, it was kind of a long walk with a tray full of food and it ended up being a lot more people then I could really handle, but the food was excellent and I got to eat with the friends I really wanted to spend the holiday with so that was good. The BFC crowd kind of devolved into game night and drinking which didn’t really feel like my scene at the time so I went home to curl up in bed and watch new episodes of some shows my parents had sent me, which made my Thanksgiving, it was a good way to end the day. On Sunday I unfortunately had decided to do the craft fair, an annual Antarctic event where people who’ve made things down here (jewelry, knitted stuff, ceramics) can sell their stuff and people can do some Christmas shopping (not something people get to do too easily around here). I sold some bracelets I had made out of sheet metal, they turned out pretty cool but I had spent a lot of my free time the week before making them (once I was actually signed up for craft fair I was pretty stressed out about it) and though I made a good amount of money, around here free time is a lot more important. So I kind of wish I hadn’t had to devote so much of one of my days off to that but what’s done is done and I know better then to over commit myself for anything when it comes to Christmas...famous last words

So that was my holiday/two day weekend…only three more weeks or so til the next one….sigh.