Hold up your hand if you took a turkey sandwich for lunch today? Or, have you been ultra-creative in finishing off your Thanksgiving dinner leftovers that didn’t get gobbled up on Turkey Day? Perhaps you portioned it out for your guests to take home? My mom used to like nothing better than a sandwich consisting of very thin slivers of turkey and she’d pile on a few inches of dressing. This was consumed cold, not heated up with gravy, and was something she grew up eating after big holidays so this was her favorite sandwich.

Holiday shopping lingo hopefully should be down to the dregs by 11:59 tonight and after reporting the results of online shopping tomorrow morning, supposedly the media will give the topic a rest for awhile. We’ve been bombarded with stats about Brown Thursday, Black Friday, Small Business Saturday and now Cyber Monday for countless days now. Soon, the power shopping extravaganza will be in slowmo until the media resurrects it on the last shopping weekend before Christmas.

Not to sound like an old curmudgeon à la Andy Rooney, but, all that glitters is not gold. I just detest sparkles. I don’t buy sparkly cards, but the card store’s sparkly cards cannot help but transfer onto “clean” cards by people’s fingers or when loading them into the display cases. Glittery greeting cards are just a fact of life. But, over the weekend, I hung my holiday wreath on the door after carrying it from downstairs to the living room in a double bag and it has gigantic square sparkles and surely there cannot be a single sparkle left on that wreath as they are in various spots winking and twinkling at me from where the vacuum refuses to suck them up from the embedded crevices on the carpet or floor. I refuse to cast my eyes downward until I return that wreath into storage after the holidays are over.

Finally, I’m working through shin splints today, the after-effects of my extraordinarily (for me) long walk yesterday. It surprises me, since I’ve been walking almost every day and taking lengthier trips every weekend. It slowed me down a little this morning but I hope to be back to my regular walking schedule by tomorrow. I can only imagine how “real athletes” feel after pushing themselves to the limit. No big deal, since I enjoyed yesterday’s walk anyway. I subscribe to a couple of sites on Facebook for quotes and pictures and coincidentally, this was today’s quote, which I think was tailor-made for me and I must share with you:

Face your life, its pain, its pleasure, leave no path untaken. – Neil Gaiman