BTRIPP

For once we got down to the Thanksgiving Day Parade at the official start time, 8am, only to have to wait nearly 45 minutes before it actually kicked off. Usually, we end up getting down there when it's half over and the crowds are thick. It was above-freezing "cold and rainy" today, about 40° and an intermittent drizzle, which was certainly better than some of the years when the temp's been in the teens and there's been a stiff wind!

We'd been down in the Loop last night for the lighting of the big tree in Daley Plaza and, after standing in a tightly-packed crowd for a couple of hours, my knee (the one I blew out at Dojo a few years back) was acting up on me, so I ended bringing a camping chair with me. Since we were early enough, The Girls got spots at the curb, and I had plenty of room to set up the chair. We picked a pretty good spot, as we were right where the escalator from the subway let out and every time a southbound train came through, there was a flow of warm air coming out of the tunnel!

The parade was the usual mix of marching bands (most from all over the place ... one was from Edina, MN, which is where my friend Kathy, who died this spring, was from ... she and her mom would always come down for a visit this time of year, so it was a bittersweet reminder of her death), organizations, floats, companies, and character balloons. I'm not sure, but I think it was a completely different mix of balloons than last year, I know this giant Bullwinkle was new! Making a repeat performance was this place with these tiny horses ... pretty remarkable how small those are, the ones in this pic are probably smaller than a standard St. Bernard!.

We came back home and hung out for a bit ... Daughter #2 had convinced The Wife that we needed to have a "family game time" and they decided on Monopoly (the Pirates of the Caribbean edition), probably because they were pretty sure that I could be convinced to play it. After a couple of hours of that The Wife and I had to get started on cooking ... with my main gig being the Shredded Brussels Sprouts in Cream (I also carve and clean up). This is a recipe that my family has been doing for decades ... as that clip shows, it was featured in the "Food & Wine Cookbook", back in the days when William Rice was the editor of F&W magazine, before he became Food Columnist for the Tribune ... my Mom used to call him up to get the recipe every year, which is how it got added to the cookbook (Bill figured that if she had the cookbook, she wouldn't call to get him to fax her a copy) and it made it into the Tribune back in '95 as part of an article about local "foodies" favorite Thanksgiving recipes. I still have the newsprint version in with the cookbooks, but scanned it in many years ago, so I had a relatively easy-to-track-down electronic version kicking around on the web!

One thing that I found out today was that we're going to the circus tomorrow ... I knew that Daughter #1 had wanted to go to that as part of her birthday (she's turning fourteen next week, how they years fly!), and that The Wife had run down to the United Center to buy tickets ... but I sort of thought they were for next weekend!