Final drinking glass and a bowl that broke but turned into sort of a little leaf-shaped thingy.

Menu

Spiced nuts

Turkey
Gravy
Mashed potatoes
Cornbread dressing
Green beans, the way grandma made them, simmered to death with bacon
Pan-roasted brussels sprouts
Sweet potato gratin with marshmallows a la Jeff
Fresh cranberry relish
Cooked cranberry sauce
Rolls

Pumpkin pie
Apple/dried cherry crisp with candied ginger

Wine, beer, sparkling juices, seltzer, water
Coffee, tea, port, bourbon, antacid

I'm cooking Thanksgiving dinner this year, with a little help from my friends. Jeff, who lives all the way across the street, is in charge of potatoes both mashed and sweet; Claudia is supplying desserts, her dad, and her dad's favorite cranberry relish; and Christo is supplying his new beau, rolls, and a level of overall sophistication that we would not otherwise achieve.

The coordination among Jeff, Claudia and me has hit a fever pitch: We're trading grocery runs (who has the buttermilk?!), wine pairing tips, recipes and serving dishes. I'm hoping no more than two of us will be jockeying for stove position at any one time on Thursday afternoon. I made what I think was my last grocery foray today at lunch for a small mountain of green beans, returning only to find an e-mail from Jeff asking about the overall number of potatoes for the crowd. Somewhere along the way I started to be concerned about the sheer quantity of food and drink we're about to consume.

I haven't been in charge of a full-scale Thanksgiving in 10 years, and I'm prone to going a little overboarding on the hosting even in mundane circumstances. Having a full four-day weekend at home (also for the first time in 10 years) and a nice roster of 6 people at the table means doing the meal properly and also banking on a certain amount of leftovers consumption over the next couple days. Pumpkin pie for dessert is spectacular, but pumpkin pie for breakfast Friday morning is sheer bliss.

There's not much to do except wear loose pants and hope to do a lot of walking over the weekend as we entertain Claudia's dad. I've proposed an after-dinner waddle through the park on Thursday afternoon, weather permitting, enough to help dinner settle and create a little room for pie. If it's raining, we're doomed.

How do you count an anniversary? Particularly in an era of protracted courtships and cohabitation that might last for years until actual government-sanctioned vows take place (if ever), what do you count as the start date? Your first date? First kiss? First full-fledged lustfest? Exclusive dating? Declaration of love?

Claudia and I met a year ago last weekend and proceeded to have three very intellectually rigorous and extremely reserved dates before the ice finally broke at my holiday party in mid-December. So we're claiming to be 11 months in at this point even though we could conceivably claim an earlier starting point. I think it's reasonable in that it took that full month for either of us to decide we wanted to actually try it out, see where things went, actually declare some sort of interest.

If, and I say "IF" with every possible sort of tentative, hypothetical, devil's advocate, just throwing it out there, not in any way sort of suggesting any binding kind of statement... thing... you know, like in Spanish how you have the future conditional tense which makes it very clear that you don't actually mean this to be taken as gospel ... so with all that, IF we were going to have some sort of binding, public, avowed connection to each other at some point in the really very hypothetical future (and I'm stopping with the hypotheticals only because I think it's starting to be a case of protesting too much, and I just want to be clear: We are nowhere near that sort of thing, for reals, y'all), then that would be the new zero-mark date. "Oh, we've been married/domesticated/unionized for X year." Except just about everyone I know, not having had arranged marriages in which they met their spouse a few weeks before the ceremony, has the "Married for 4 years but together 12" or whatever attached to them. Particularly the gays. And those who were together, broke up for a few years while they sorted their stuff out, then got back together and lived happily ever after, how do you count that? Is there a time when the marriage has just lasted so long that it trumps everything else? Or is a wedding an incidental blip on the radar and you keep counting back to that first tingly kiss, the one long before you found out about the snoring and the congenital inability to clear the lint trap?

What do you count, people?

I finished the first semester of intermediate glassblowing last night. I have three bowls, a small creamer, and one large drinking glass to show for it. A few things account for this. First, I missed two classes, the ones on cone shapes, because of another commitment and a week of being sick. But mostly it's because at least 2/3 of what I made ended up in a heap of shards on the floor. Sometime over the summer, something clicked and I finally got comfortable working with thinner glass, which in turn means a whole new learning curve for precision handling. It's just that much more fragile. A lot of the stuff I make for gifts still is big and chunky because I don't want to risk the time and expense and have it tank. But in class, just doing drills of the same shape over and over, you're gaining experience with each piece no matter how far along it makes it.

The bowls, as shown above, remain challenging. There are just a lot of factors involved in getting them right, but I like them. I spent the last two weeks of class working on them instead of moving on to bottles. Next semester starts in January, and the plan is to take intermediate color. Having gotten basic shapes fairly well under control, the next thing is trying to learn how to handle the weird temperature variability that color introduces, and also how to work with pieces when you can't see the bubble inside the opaque color. If that goes well, I'll take advanced cover-making in March -- lids and stoppers and stuff. Both classes run twice a week for a month, which is kind of a drag on making other plans, but the repetition and frequency help a lot.

Since I've been doing this for more than a year and don't show any signs of being less obsessed with it, the next step is tools. I've got my eye on a set of the standard hand tools and a Dremel to let me touch up the bottoms of my pieces, and there's talk of a field trip to a glass supply company in western North Carolina at Christmas.

The other question is that of independent study, which I sort of try to do about once a month, budget permitting. Mostly I've used the sessions to work on particular projects -- birthday gifts and things -- but I'm thinking about buckling down and trying to just focus on drills for a while to really get the hang of bowls and bottles before going further. By the time I'm done I ought to have a full set of slightly lopsided servingware.

Saturday I was Philadelphia all day for a conference and used the opportunity to have dinner with an old friend of the family. She's a retired librarian in her 70s and she travels in a pack with several friends, including an English lirbarian and a gay man. I had met them a few years ago on another trip through Philly, so they all descended on the Marriott to pick me up and whisk me down to South Philly for dinner. My friend is looking a little frail and smaller than usual, but she's bursting with energy because she just bought her first house and is packing up her 80+ boxes of books for the first time in 50 years. She caught me up on her real estate transactions, the English woman talked about her travel plans, and the gay guy nattered on about his new goldfish. Eventually, my friend had to find the restroom.

English woman: It's the corridor to the side there. There's one on the left and one on the right. Try the one on the right -- I had a peek in and it's big enough to hold an orgy.

Friend: That's definitely the one I want! Cheers!

Here's a classic story in New York City living.

A few weeks ago I finally took the long-delayed step of getting a sconce installed in my foyer. Wall and ceiling lights are relatively few and far between in our building, and that combined with weird light switches meant that for the past two years it wasn't always easy to walk in the door and turn on a light. I bought a fixture, called an electrician and set a date. He did the necessary rewiring and laid in a new cable in my wall, which necessitated digging a moderate trench up from the nearest outlet. After a few hours, my apartment was coated in a medium layer of plaster dust but I had light. He mentioned something about having knocked a hole in the wall near the outlet and being able to see a hose -- the neighbor's dishwasher plumbing, perhaps. I figured he meant he was in the space within a double wall and might have punctured their side. I made a mental note to talk to my neighbor the next time I saw him -- the hole was pitch black.

I enjoyed my light and started consulting friends about how best to patch up the wall... figuring to have it done sometime before Thanksgiving. Then my neighbor knocked on my door. Had I had any work done recently? He showed me not one but two spectacular holes in his closet wall, where the outlet and the junction box had punched through. My stomach sank to shoe level. You could see the daylight through from my apartment, and he noted that he could hear the previous weekend's Halloween party pretty clearly as well. I apologized profusely and coordinated on times to get a plasterer out post-haste. Within 72 hours we had walls again.

I bemoaned the story to some other friends in the building and they confirmed that it happens all the time. The walls that don't carry plumbing or gas lines are a single inch-thick layer of masonry overlaid with plaster. They're hard as rock, literally -- I've broken countless drill bits trying to install hangers for photos. And if you go too deep, you meet the neighbors.

The neighbors -- the guy and his wife -- could not have been nicer about the whole thing, despite the inconvenience. I dropped off a conciliatory bottle of wine after the work was done, and they invited Claudia and me over to share it Saturday night. The common threads of New York life and our professions -- he's a magazine editor, she's a hospital-based social worker -- gave us hours of conversation. For as awkwardly as it started, the story had a very happy ending. But I'm done renovating for quite a while.

The weekend has been a restorative one, although I failed to catch up on the work projects I abandoned on Friday. It broke down thusly:

Friday, 2 p.m.: Ease into a cab, direct the driver to take West Side Highway home. Cringe at sudden starts and stops between office and 59th St. Get home, go directly to bed for several hours and remain very still.

5 p.m. Determine nothing else bad is going to happen digestively, eat some bland pasta.

7 p.m. At some point Claudia comes over. I think we watched The Cheap Detective and I moaned intermittently in belly-cramping distress.

10 p.m. Sleep.

6:30 a.m. For some reason, we're both awake so we watch The Battle of Algiers, which she has had on Netflix for about six months.

1 p.m. Hit farmers' market and C-town, decide walking is too jolting.

3 p.m. Watch the Deep Space Nine, Season 3, disk that's been on my Netflix for a month.

4 p.m. Nap.

7 p.m. Feeling much better. Neighbors invite us over for a glass of wine. This wine, as it happens, was the wine I left outside their door on Friday following a week in which we got to know each other very well because my electrician poked through into their closet wall while installing my sconce, and it took a lot of coordination to get the plastering done. But we had a nice time.

10 p.m. Bed.

Sunday 7 a.m. Up, oatmeal, coffee, gathering glass supplies.

8 a.m. Out the door en route to Brooklyn.

9:30 a.m. Arrive at studio, set up station.

10 a.m. Commence blowing on several holiday gifts. The projects I picked were a little more technically involved ("hot" colors, color layering, handles) than the basic stuff, but Isaac and I powered through them and got everything done. It all looks really good.

1:30 p.m. Leave studio, devour sandwich and Coke at Subway before subway ride home. Notice people sniffing me on subway.

3:15 p.m. Shower.

4:00 p.m. Begin meatloaf preparations (Sarah's recipe)

So now the meatloaf is in the oven. This evening Jeff and I are having a meatloaf confab -- not a competition, per se, just both putting out our best efforts and comparing and contrasting them, trying to come up with the ur-meatloaf. Claudia's making greens. There will be wine.

Virus aside, is there a better weekend? I'm saying no.