Florida is a fine state. I can say this now that I have seen about five towns in the state, witnessed some hurricane damage, and stared down a couple gators. I am so informed now that I can make blanket generalizations about those that call Hurricane Alley home.
First of all the turkey turned out fantastic. Cooked it on a Weber grill using the indirect cooking method. The really difficult part is finding space for the bird in the fridge for the overnight brining. I had to remove some fridge shelves to make room for the 13 pounder, but all went well on Turkey Day... sort of.
Enough about the food though. We spent Turkey Day at my in-laws in West Palm Beach with an acquaintance. Let's call this person bitch...er I mean Carol* (not her real name in case she uses her wonderful Web TV to find this blog). So my new best friend Carol comes over to the house around 1:00pm on Thanksgiving Day. Things seemed fine at first as we discussed a common thread, our dislike for Mr. Bush and his cronies. Carol allegedly was an actress on the soap Ryan's Hope at some point in time and is currently a spinster in her early 40's as she likes to say. Carol was a bit aggressive with conversation at first and then it became quite apparent she would spend the rest of the day lecturing and telling us how important she is to the world.
This social behavior was quite a put-off to my wife and I so we decided to stop talking to her. Eventually we sit down for dinner and my lovely friend Carol decides to lecture me on how computers are bad. I thought to myself, "hey babe, I didn't invent them, but will use it to rat your sorry ass out when I get home." She doesn't know shit about them, but proceeds to tell me that computers and the internet make pedophiles out of many. She says, not suggests, that we should be more formal with people. Wonders why people don't address others using Mr. and Mrs. so and so and bemoans this as a major social problem. Somehow using someone's first name and the internet has led this country down a socially inept path. She also dismisses the iPod as trash, however knows nothing about it. At that point I felt I had nothing to lose considering my father-in-law gave me an iPod for Christmas last year. I asked the bitch, sorry...trying to be objective, but can't, why she has a beef with Apple. Just not sure why she has singled out Apple and it turns out her sister works for Apple. Well, that opened a whole can of worms and almost had her in tears explaining how the internet is yet again evil and why her sister sucks.
Realizing this computer/Apple/pedophile thing wouldn't go away easily I decided to retreat to familiar territory. We settled back down by talking politics some more, unfortunately the damage had been done and I had slipped into A.E.M., Annoyed Egan Mode. The rest of the night I perfected my stare downs and made Carol feel very uncomfortable by simply avoiding eye contact. She proceeded to smoke almost all of my father-in-law's cigars. The woman had my father-in-law and his wife in tears almost all night with her sob stories. My father-in-law was so annoyed he pretended to put a gun to his head whenever she spoke.
Let me attempt to tie this together neatly. So my friend Carol is a politically active Democrat and that's how she met my in-laws. I guess they did lots of volunteer work trying to get Florida voters to elect Kerry. After spending an excruciating 11.5 hours with Carol on Turkey Day, I would have voted Republican too after meeting her sorry ass and I am a staunch Democrat.
My point: I have deemed her the sole reason why Florida's 27 electoral votes went to dubya. 15 minutes in a room or five minutes on someone's porch with Carol and most would be teetering on a chair with a noose around their neck. So this Turkey Day I was thankful to have met The Woman. Viva la Floride!
