Thanksgiving, Away

Attentive readers will note that there was no Conservative Wahoo Substack Monday this week, and they will likely note its absence this coming Monday morning. I am away this Thanksgiving, for a hybrid work/play vacation with the Kitten, the Kittens, and a couple who have been friends of Catherine’s for 25 plus years. They have a daughter (17) who has also joined us, and after being here with them for four days, I must proclaim this trip a rousing success.

The younger of the kittens is employed at a school here, here being the Island of Eleuthera in the Bahamas, and since the Bahamians are immune to the charms of American Thanksgiving, she was unable to join us on the farm, so we brought the farm to her. The older daughter flew in yesterday from California where she is in grad school, so our little squad is at full strength and full of the spirit of this most American of holidays. I made it clear to all that because of my annual workload this time of year, I would be unable to “check out” fully, which in my mind means that I would not be available for activities which caused me to leave the premises, the premises being a house with a pool by the ocean. I would of course, be moved to join the crowd for meals; I am no misanthrope. But some of the “hey, let’s go visit the shops in X Town” or “hey let’s go kite sailing in X Bay” kinds of things were and are a no go. I’ve been here since Saturday evening, and my plan is proceeding swimmingly.

The crib’s pool

My days consist of morning coffee and world situation monitoring, a couple hours of work, a midday 30 minute jog on the road along the beach, a hop in the pool, and then a fine afternoon nap. Monday and Tuesday I had additional phone calls after the nap, but it looks like the balance of this week will look much like the last couple of days, without the work and the phone calls. In other words, self-indulgent sloth.

We are using Elon’s Starlink for internet provided by the house owners, and it has been fine…but a tad spotty. Now, I realize how first world it is of me to kvetch about wifi on an island in the Atlantic, but when I think of how reliant the folks in Ukraine have become on it—well, I surely wouldn’t want to fight a war on it.

I have written before of the sterling quality of the friends Catherine and her late husband acquired along the way, friends I have been given access to over the years. The couple with us come from that timber. She was an Olympic Sailor, and he has crewed on America’s Cup boats. Both are still employed in the sailing world, she in a non-profit and he as the owner of a rigging shop and “hand for hire”. I spent some time the other night with their daughter, for whom her parents presumably exhibit all the warts and imperfections of any parent—making sure she knew that in my view, her parents are pound for pound the funniest people I know. She has a razor-wit, and he is the most accomplished story-teller I’ve ever heard.

Twenty-two years ago in September when my girls’ world was forever changed when their husband and father was murdered, he (our co-vacationer) hopped in his car in San Diego when he saw the towers fall and drove straight to Easton MD to comfort his newly widowed friend and her two orphans, the younger of which was his god-daughter of four months in age. He was beaten there by the other daughter’s god-father, but his ride was from New York. Think for a second about the love these two men showed my family six years before they became mine. I am awed and humbled by it, and both men and their spouses and families are in the amazing friend group I have been admitted to. Among ten thousand other blessings, I am thankful for them.

As I write this, the ladies piled into Kitten #2’s Island-ride to descend upon the provisioners in the area for the makings of a fine, island Thanksgiving tomorrow. We are not in Kansas anymore, and the pickings are somewhat slim, but there is chicken to be found, and potatoes and bread and boxed stuffing and various vegetables, and for my two vegetarians (they no longer claim to be vegans, so it seems life is teaching them tough/required lessons) tofu. We are missing Easton’s annual “Turkey Trot”, but it seems me, Dash 2, and our friends’ daughter are willing to have a go at an expeditionary version thereof.

Our dinners thus far have been wonderful, and anyone who knows the man behind this keyboard knows that dinner is the thing I think about more than anything else. My first conscious thought most days is “ah, I’m having X for dinner tonight”, with only “damn, it’s early” taking pride of place before it. There’s a little beach joint five minutes walk from us with all the things a person could want, and if I had it my way we’d have lunch and dinner there every day. But as you might surmise, I do not get things my way, at least not with that consistency.

I am looking forward to the MOMENT we begin to clean up dishes after Thanksgiving Dinner tomorrow night to break into Christmas caroling. My ladies are quite strict about pulling Christmas early/before Thanksgiving, and so I make a SPECIAL POINT to reinforce that Thanksgiving is over each year, and the playing field is solely owned by Christmas. I am generally thrown unhappy looks.

College Basketball

Attentive readers also know I am a keen college basketball fan, and that my team (The Virginia Cavaliers) are a source of the highest highs and lowest lows in my generally pretty flatlined life. This is “Feast Week”, full of great college tournaments and games between REALLY good teams (Marquette beat the brakes off Kansas last night, for instance). And Virginia is playing. Virginia won the whole thing in April of 2019 and has not won a tournament game since. In the meantime, NIL and the portal have REALLY changed the game, and I wonder if we’ll ever have the ability to attract and keep the kind of talent we used to be able to, when paying players was done on the downlow and you had to sit out a year when you transferred. A group of pasty Wisconsin boys boat-raced UVA on Monday night, winning by 24 points. I was at dinner following along on my phone—so I have no first person knowledge of what happened. But I surmise the other fellows were more successful in making baskets than we are.

Seriously, let’s go back to the broken record for one of my greatest hits. Virginia basketball is frustrating not BECAUSE we lose, but HOW we lose. Our losses are UGLY. They are EPIC. They display utter INCOMPETENCE. When we lose, our team looks like they have NO IDEA WHAT THEY ARE DOING. Put another way, I challenge ANY UVA fan (homer, more likely, because most fans know I’m right) to lay out FIVE good losses in the last ten years. Games where we played our hearts out at a high level, and just lost to a better team that day. You won’t be able to find them, because they don’t exist. Because we lose UGLY. Go back and look at the stats. You won’t find a single loss where there two or more of these items isn’t front and center: turnovers, poor 2 pt shooting, poor 3 point shooting, poor foul shooting, horrible rebounding. Just ONCE I want my heart to be broken by the team playing WELL and losing rather than watching them stink up the court against lesser teams or evenly matched teams.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.