December 20, 1999

Food and Massage

It's really, really funny when the very first thing we're greeted by is our boss' boss with a 25 pound turkey in a foil blanket. They'd bought the turkey for us locally, as we didn't know where to get a good turkey other than Whole Foods and that had been fairly expensive. With 14 people at the dinner, we were thinking a 25 lb. turkey, for some weird reason. I don't know why I ever really bought into the thought of more than a pound per person, but it seemed like it's be fun. I think that some of it was that we'd had a 16 pound bird for five for Thanksgiving, but the amount of leftovers then was faintly ridiculous if I hadn't actually bought it for the leftovers. Well, we'll see how it goes.

I couldn't forget that I'd forgotten the eggs to the fruitcake and for all that it tasted okay, it was a failure of sorts so I felt, mildly, that I really should just get rid of this batch and move on to try it again. It amuses me, mildly, to equate the second floor break room for the engineers as the place of locusts. I put a pecan pie there one morning, before 7:30 a.m. and when I got back there around 8:30 it was already completely gone, the plate cleaned up completely and tossed into the recycle bin. Now that was quick work, especially since most of the engineers don't even really show up until 9 or 10. So I put two of the fruitcakes there around noon, I kept one and a half for our group.

When I got back around 2 p.m. the container was completely clean. So I put the last fruitcake there as well, without an announcement this time, and when I wandered back around 5, all but some large crumbs were gone. So I packed up the crumbs and took them home with me. In a closed container they'll last a while.

It is a great comfort to be able to say to people that I'm going home to a massage and a pizza dinner and be completely and thoroughly and totally content at that fact. It really is very, very good to be able to say that and mean it and know that it was going to be true. This taking care of myself thing could be a very keen habit. It really did make me happy to be able to do this.

John got me to Erie Massage on time, and CeLena took me into her strong hands and it was wonderful. She did arms, legs, shoulders, back, and then did a much more thorough working over of my entire neck, relaxing muscles I didn't even know I had, including every tendon that ran through my neck area. That was really amazing. Finally, she also worked a bit more on both of my forearms, smoothing and soothing out knotted tendon and muscle and trying to unbunch things that had been clenched closed for months.

She got them to come mostly undone, too. That's what's amazing. So John came to pick me up and he had the pizza in the truck already and it was good to be completely discombobulated for a while. Just eat pizza, watch Monday night football and feel like sun-melted butter. The bath was really good, too, just a deep, long soak in Epsom salted water and then I bundled myself into bed and really, truly slept.

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