Thanksgiving is always a time for interesting things to happen. My mother-in-law rents a hall for the entire family and their in-laws to come and eat together, and there's almost always a dog or two running around. This year it was Fuzzy,

who scared the bejezus out of Kaylee, the sweetest little puppy ever.

She never made a sound except to make it clear to Fuzzy her ass wasn't in need of a wash and sniff.

Fuzzy is not the small, quiet, calm lapdog we were anticipating when we thought of Shih Tzus, but he's a great little guy in his own energetic, jumpy, eternally happy way.

Some topics of conversation at the dinner table as we vacuumed the food into our mouths and tried to entice Handsome to come away from Dude's shoes

included:

1) Which year was it that Peej got Lips to announce to the whole table that she did not have crabs?

2) Remember the year Bubba sang "Smelly Cat" from Friends and cracked everyone up?

3) Which family members have Myspace pages and which celebrities are in their friends folders.

4) How to remove your spouse from your Myspace page because they are annoying you at Thanksgiving dinner and also when you say did you get my message and they won't check the computer for it--they expect you to just tell them in person as you lay three inches from them when jeez, you wrote it all out already, Gawd!

5) The time that Dad got into a fight with Donnie Osmond at church because Donnie said you could reach celestrial glory after you die and Dad said loudly, "Then why don't we all go home? We'll all get there eventually." The discussion got so involved that Donnie excused himself to call his mom.

6) Why I did not include a picture of my neice KK, or Goofball as she prefers, in the entry where I talk about teeth and pubic hair.

7) Weird Al and his hilarious new song, "White and Nerdy."

8) How my blog has had 20,000 hits a month for the past few months. I cannot thank you enough, dear readers who should be working on that presentation or changing a dirty diaper instead of making yourself feel sane by reading about my medicated and non-politically correct life. Please pass me along to your friends in an email, titled, "I thought I was nuts until I read about this woman." I can only make you look more dignified and mature, trust me. I'm like the fat woman at the beach--people want to be near me to make them look more attractive. I'm a whore for readers. I'm like a doorknob, everyone can get a turn.

It was a wonderful time to spend with our elders, who luckily retained full bladder and bowel control at the dinner table. Great-Grandma cracked me up when she picked up Bubba's binocular/ViewFinder toy and clicked away like she went back into time 90 years and was a little girl again:

It became the gateway to simpler times for other family members as well. This just cracked me up to see adults playing with this toy, for some obscure reason I could pay $250 an hour to figure out, or I could just blog about it and let the voices in my head tell me everything will be okay and this is fart-in-your-pants-and-blame-it-on-Great-Grandma giggle-worthy:

While we drank Diet Cokes delivered to us by a smiling and cheerful KJ at the ripe age of 21 months (we have yet to teach him the distinction of a Diet Coke with Jim Beam and two cubes of ice and reaching into the cooler for whatever will make his little fingers bluer than Rudolph's jolly little elves on Christmas Eve at 35,000 feet, if you catch my drift, but we are working on it with him--I swear I heard him say "Courvoisier" while playing with a Backyardigans toy), we made the other children work as well. Lil' Dude (Dude's daughter) was in charge of personal comfort and general buttering up of Great-Grandma before the Christmas holidays:

Bubba, Handsome and Goofball were put to work with toothbrushes and bleach cleaning the grout:

When they started whining that their eyes were burning and their hands were sore and child labor laws, blah, blah, blah, we did the next best thing to ensure the floor was clean--our own little mop chased by Lil' Dude:

We are all awaiting the birth of the newest member of the family, McK.

When she's born, we'll have the added bonus of using her slobber as floor wax and her diapers as a polishing cloth. We'll just attach her right to Fuzzy's tail and he can spin her around like a floor polisher at Wal-Mart. Just kidding--we will have the decency to wait until she's crawling and just strap on some Swiffers to her knees to get the floor shiny.

I hope your Thanksgiving went well and you weren't mauled by Black Friday shoppers if you ventured out of the Christmas light tangle from hell. Thanks for reading my blog, clicking on the ads, supporting my delusion of being witty and intelligent. Please pass me around to your friends like the drunk slut of the group in college--whatever I got growing down there can't be passed through the computer screen. But you might wanna wash your hands, just in case.