A Lazy Baker's Dozen

Notes from a Backroads Thanksgiving

1. Adult children really need to learn how to eat regular food, and not expect the world to whip up macaroni-and-cheese and deep-fried chicken fingers to placate them.

2. Certain relatives will lure you into a card game they call "Fitzgeralds" and change their explanation of the rules every time you make a play. At the end, you will find out that the game might as well have been called Bicycle, Hoyle, or Old Casino Used Playing Cards. Because a kid named the game after the cards being used. Upon further investigation at home on the trusty internet, you will discover that the actual name of that card game is Six Card Golf.

3. If you make deviled eggs especially for the person who takes two or three every year, commenting, "I really don't like olives, but I guess I can just pick them off," that person will eat only one of the oliveless eggs, and leave five untouched and unwanted by olive-eaters.

4. Salted butter is way better than unsalted butter, so don't play ignorant and say that you didn't know there was a difference.

5. It is not really considered polite to take a 20 gauge single shot shotgun out of the ceiling and take it home in a bag labeled 20 gauge automatic shotgun.

6. Some sore losers will try to manipulate a game of Apples to Apples by deliberately not choosing the best answer, in fact choosing the WORST answer, rather than give the rightful winner the green card.

7. People who don't know the difference between Miracle Whip and mayonnaise must be missing a taste bud gene.

8. Apparently, the proper way to cool off if you are too hot is not to tell the hostess so she can adjust her thermostat, nor take off your long-sleeved zipper-neck sweater and wear just your T-shirt, nor fan yourself with a styrofoam tray. The solution is to open the kitchen window, struggle with the locked storm window, switch to the next window, and fling it up so cold air rushes through the screen.

9. Girls who get their first real job and move into their own apartment do not know that a layer cake should be put together with the bottom layer turned upside down, so its flat surface will be in contact with the upper layer's flat surface, thus preventing the top layer from sliding off in a declaration of allegiance to gravity.

10. Individuals can be SO condescending when they ask, "Do you have an iPhone? I'm not buying you one. But do you have one? No? You can get internet on them. And the Ellen Know or Go app. Do you even have texting?"

11. Green bean bundles soaked in butter and brown sugar and wrapped in bacon and skewered with a colored wooden toothpick are...like...the best way to eat vegetables, ever.