Susan is forced by her voluntary oath to write a BLAHg post every day in November, to do so right now, in the last few moments before the current day turns into the next day, even though she is bereft of anything to say. At all.
OMG, what a horrible sentence.
There you have it.
Come back for more of the same tomorrow.

Susan has scrolled through her five stages of grief;

• Horror 
• Vomiting
• Crying for her mommy
• Realistic consideration of her options
• Acceptance

Susan is not one to fight that which she cannot change. She has a good track record for finding different ways to think about those things, ways that help her move forward and be a good example to her children.

Even though she may want to blowtorch everything in the universe, she knows how to calm herself down and come up with a better plan.

This is Susan's plan;
Susan believes that we all are given opportunities, and we each decide how we'll use them. She also considers herself to be a team player, so there will be no hating (she replaced yesterday's angry picture with a funny one) & no b*tching, just genuine curiosity to see what the new president will do.

After an exhausting and sad day at work, Susan went home and made some phone calls. First to her friend who talks to dead people to apologize for giving him false hope on election night, then to her parents (for ninety  l o n g  minutes!) and lastly to her friend Cyndi (yes she really spells her name that way) just for the hell of it.

Susan's dad made her laugh when he told her he voted for 'the junkyard dog' and attributed the moniker to Maureen Dowd, but Susan's due diligence revealed that it was actually Jeb Bush.
Maureen Dowd likened Trump to Rasputin.

See everyone tomorrow!

Susan can't escape the risotto.

Two years, one month and eleven days ago Susan and the husband hosted a party to commemorate 20 years together in matrimonial entanglement. Lots of lobsters got eaten at this party & Susan made stock from the shells with the intention of using the stock for risotto.

She tried and failed and tried and failed to make the risotto, it was always too al dente. She got tired of trying and failing, so she put the risotto project on hold & kept the stock in the freezer.

Not too long ago she bit the bullet and purged her freezer of the beloved Twentieth Anniversary Lobster stock. It was sad but necessary and Susan knows there are other lobsters waiting out there on the horizon for her to eat them and make more stock.

Last week Susan took a risotto making class at Sur La Table, which is a great place to learn how to cook something. Aside from learning to make three types of risotto Susan met Roseann, a girl with an entire Wonder Woman comic book cover tattooed on her arm. It was pretty impressive. Susan and Roseann hit it off enough to partner up for a future class.

Anyway, Susan left the class feeling excited to finally have mastered the secret risotto and put Arborio rice on her shopping list because one does not use Chinese Restaurant Rice for such things.

On NaBloPoMo Day Three Susan was invited to Little Sister's house for dinner. Little Sister's town has a pretty nice upscale Italian supermarket at which Susan stopped to look for her rice. She also wanted to pick up a tin of Italian tuna fish in olive oil because she's always heard how good it was. While standing in the aisle considering her choices she heard someone addressing her.

A gentleman with the appearance of a homeless dude in an army jacket and full grey beard appeared to be stunned by Susan's beauty and dropped the bag he was holding right in front of her. As he picked it up he said 'That's a bright coat you have.'

Sidebar: It was! Susan was wearing an orange double-breasted coat, vintage (thrift) of course, with new buttons she had sewn on two weeks ago.

He came closer and said 'It matches the color of your hair.' to which Susan responded that's exactly the effect she was going for.

The homeless dude kept on walking but then doubled back and asked 'Are you accompanied tonight?'
Susan explained that she was on her way to her sister's for dinner.

'May I accompany you there?'
Susan smiled and declined his offer with a little flattered laugh.

He smiled back and said 'Maybe I'll see you another time then' and extended his hand 'My name is John'.
Susan shook his hand, introduced herself and wished him a good evening as they parted.

Then she got the hell out of Dodge.

Forget the risotto story, it's not that interesting. Maybe she'll revisit it if she's short on material later in the week.

NaBloPoMo Day Two Susan turned her clocks back then stayed in all day & watched a subtitled Italian movie, a Bill Murray movie and a movie with some British actors she knows from other things, it made her cry a little. 

Did she ever tell you when she watched two movies, one right after another, where the main character ascends into Heaven at the end? She was unaware of this distinction when she sat down to watch that Liberace movie with Michael Douglas and Matt Damon, followed by The Lady In The Van with Dame Maggie Smith, which she wasn't too keen on, but she stuck with it and was rewarded by the ending. But, that's no reason to watch it.

Susan will see you all tomorrow.

Susan likes to participate in National Blog Post Month (NaBloPoMo) every November, but this year she forgot. NaBloPoMo is a grueling exercise where Susan has to write a BLAHg post every day for a month.

Every day.

Ugh. 

Susan maintains high standards and can't always come up with something interesting to share every day, or every few weeks even. You've all seen the frequency with which Susan has been BLAHg-ing lately, that's her high standards in action. Luckily there is no standard for NaBloPoMo beyond frequency. 

Day One Susan will give you a Bolognese update:

So, last week Susan found the white Bolognese recipe, while she was eating leftover restaurant Bolognese and pondering why her own Bolognese efforts never come close. 

Anyway, Susan made the Bolognese then stuck it in the back of the fridge all week because she wasn't in the mood to do anything more productive than climb into bed in her work clothes. 

Fast forward to this weekend, Susan made a pot of mezzi rigatoni, saved a cup of the pasta water, heated up the Bolognese and ate it.

Perfecto!

It was a teeny bit salty, so she wrote on the recipe 'watch the salt' and then served it to her children for their opinion. Her children liked the delicious Bolognese so much they approved it to be put into dietary rotation. Then the son's friends showed up and ate every last bit of the delicious Bolognese even though they were already filled with pizza and chocolate donuts.

Susan may tell you a risotto story on Day Two. 

Susan has dragged herself across the finish line to Day 30.

She hopes that everyone appreciates how difficult it was to stretch what was maybe five days' worth of material into thirty. What a testament to her awesome blogging talents!

December First and Second are Susan's ground zero. She's got a plan to get through each day and they both start with getting up & going to work. Her Acme Heaven Sent family is pretty good at caring about Susan and who wouldn't want to get a little bit of that on a difficult day? Or two.

Don't worry if Susan observes a few days of radio silence, she'll be fine, and you can believe her when she tells you that.

Susan has never seen Breakfast at Tiffany's so imagine her surprise when she sat down to watch this beloved classic and discovered it to be a horrible waste of her time. 

Seriously. 

Holly Golightly is intolerable and everyone else is insipid.

What an awful movie.

On Day 28 Susan pinched this from the awesome Nick Holmes.

Susan cried into Cousin Lisa's stuffing on Thanksgiving.
It wasn't just Lisa's recipe recreated for Thanksgiving, it was actual stuffing made by her own formerly alive hands.
At first Susan didn't understand, she just thought it was stuffing. But when Cousin Danielle hipped Susan to the deal, she felt stunned.
Stunned by Sausage Stuffing!
Susan filled her Thanksgiving plate with food and nestled Cousin Lisa's stuffing next to her daughter Danielle's orzo with spinach. Susan took a seat on the staircase and ate her food. She didn't intend to cry, but she's not in control of these things and began almost immediately, until tears were rolling down her cheeks. Eventually she was found out, knocked off the crying and resumed the enjoyment of her Thanksgiving.

Happy Thanksgiving, Guys!

'I always give my bird a generous butter massage before I put it in the oven. Why? Because I think the chicken likes it and, more important, because I like to give it.'
-Julia Child

Susan is determined to use up that bottle of maple whiskey so that she never has to encounter it again. She dumped two cups of it into apple cider then threw in star anise, ginger and cinnamon. Stay tuned to find out what her fellow Thanksgiving revelers will have to say about it.

Disclaimer: This is not Susan's photo, she pinched it from here.

Susan's elderly car is making a funny noise. Sort of like a whistle, if that whistle was screaming while it wheezed.
Screams and wheezes don't even go together, but that's what it sounds like.

Nothing bad can happen to this car.

You may recall that Susan & the husband shared one car for almost two years. This translated to Susan being driven to work & then picked up from work EVERY DAY for TWO YEARS.

It took her more than six months just to pound into the husband's thick skull that she required silence during her morning commute; there was to be no commentary or stories about the old neighborhood or business conversations on the phone, in which he engaged unceasingly anyway.

Even now that he's gone, Susan never thinks Oh, if only I could have one of those miserable drives to work with him again...

Anyway, after a pretty lengthy search Susan saw an ad for her elderly car and dispatched the husband to check it out in person. On a bitter snowy day two years ago they brought it home and Susan regained her independence. This car was the result of her blood and pain. Well, not really, but it was made possible by a combined effort, and she still feels linked to the husband through it.

Nothing bad can happen to this car.

Susan is out of ideas for her enforced daily BLAHg post.

Forgive her.

Day 23 is bogus.

Bathtub Drain, Two Ways

I:

Susan asked her son to remove some hair that had collected in the grate covering the drain in the bathtub then watched in horror as he took the hair, threw it into the toilet and flushed it away.

II:

At the very end of Susan's shower she noticed she was standing in a half inch of water. She took her foot and played with the lever. Nothing happened. 

She got out and plunged until she was sweaty and wracked with old age pains. Nothing happened.

She asked her son to plunge. Nothing.

She went out with her little sister and returned with Drano & a snake which her son took and went to investigate. A few minutes later he emerged and asked if Susan had been messing with the lever. 

Uh-oh.

She may never learn why the tub was a little slow to drain but apparently she sealed the drain opening shut when she flipped the lever the wrong way.

Susan spent a crisp Saturday on a walking tour of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery with her little sister and two nieces.

Susan's a sucker for a good cemetery and this one's on the National Register of Historic Places, plus it's right in Headless Horseman territory. It's got a lot of famous and infamous residents, folks like Leona & Harry Helmsley, Washington Irving, William Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, William Chrysler, Brooke & Vincent Astor, as well as the dude who wrote Yes Virginia There Is A Santa Claus.

After the two hour walk Susan needed a cocktail, then a nap.

Susan's fave, the final resting place of The Queen of Mean

A peek inside, nice right?

Susan is too disinterested to BLAHg.

She has buyer's remorse after spending $43 on a bottle of maple whiskey. She wouldn't have minded the expense if she liked maple whiskey, but she had to spend that amount to discover that she didn't.

Hope y'all liked Day 20.

Susan is roasting asparagus for Acme Heaven Sent's Thanksgiving lunch tomorrow. She roasted them in batches, making the first over-done and limp then each subsequent batch a little less so.
She envisions treating her coworkers to asparagus gruel after an hour of sitting over a sterno.
Susan also made the apple cider punch undrinkable with a heavy handed addition of cayenne. But, not to worry because she managed to pour half of it all over her kitchen counter.

Susan promised everyone a normal topic for Day 18 and here it is; Eggplant Pizzas!

This is the sort of thing that Susan would never think up on her own because she's got an inside-the-box brain. Her aubergine averse kids might even eat these although nowadays Susan doesn't care if they eat what she makes.

There you have it, all Susan's years of maternal effort have brought her to this point; she doesn't care.

That wasn't Susan's husband yesterday, she's got more than one dead guy making her sad. That was Jeff, her daughter's former figure drawing teacher, although this description of the relationship is very inadequate. Suffice it to say that Jeff was important to Susan's family and also had the distinction of having the best, most entertaining wake.

Seriously.

Susan's husband died two weeks after Jeff, so she still has that jubilee looming on the horizon, but first she'll have to endure Cousin Lisa's birthday, the day before. Susan made it through 54 years intact, there were losses, but they belonged to other folks. This double whammy is hers.

Anway, Susan's gonna give you all a break tomorrow & BLAHg about normal stuff.

Susan is sad today.
She'll be better tomorrow.