Well, thanksgiving was somewhat frustrating but worked itself out. We had friendsgiving with our gaming group on thurs, then we had our normal fri night game session, and then saturday we invited friends over for our personal thanksgiving with grilled cheese & tomato soup. I made jelly for the first time on tuesday - I made a mulled currant and cranberry jelly and it came out ridiculously good. So I was pretty busy cooking from tuesday on, even though I was aiming to reduce my time in the kitchen this year. Didn't happen.

I'm skipping stuff - spouse got back from his trip late at night. We were chitty chatting, getting ready for bed, and I checked the target website to see if they had a PS5, because we have been on the hunt for one (like everyone else). Every time we go to target, spouse will wander into the gaming aisle and stare wistfully at the bare case where the PS5s would be if they had any. The week while he was gone I got serious about checking the website in the morning and evening, thinking they might get a shipment for the holidays soon. This particular night it showed they had 3 in wasilla. We got excited. First time I have seen them in stock! We tried to order for in-store pickup but the website auto-cancelled our orders. So in the morning we hopped in the car for a drive, but we didn't get there right at opening because spouse was tired from travel. Made a beeline for electronics and their PS5 case was empty, oh no! Lucky for us, a really nice lady was working in electronics and she actually went in the back and found one for us. They hadn't made it to the sales floor yet.

So hooray, we got spouse a PS5. But you know what this means, right? Yeah, spouse wants to mess with his PS5. So guess who gets to do everything for thanksgiving while he plays games. Yup.

Everything was going fine - I was busy working on thanksgiving cooking - and then I asked spouse to send an invite to our friend (the one with the two kids who tried to murder each other in our backyard) to come over on sat for soup & sandwich because I was elbows deep in veggie croquette dough. The text message he sent was poorly worded and she replied that she and the kids would love to come over. My stress level instantly goes through the roof because our house is absolutely not kid safe and I didn't really want to extend the invitation to the kids. I was hoping this would be a week where she didn't have them. There's cleaning for visiting adult friends and then there's cleaning for visiting child tornadoes. It's too dark and cold to send them to play outside. These goblins were grabbing everything not bolted down and using it as a melee weapon. I have all kinds of loose project bits and fragile things and spillable toxic substances in the house. Oh fuck. Spouse, what have you done?! I have to do like three times the cleaning now, and we have already committed to stuff that leaves not enough time. So I'm upset.

Friday afternoon we meet with spouse's brother to catch a movie and he says that their cousin from fairbanks is in town with his family (with two hockey playing sons) and didn't know we all were in the anchorage area. We should get together for dinner. Sunday would work, I say, knowing we have already committed to hosting our friends on saturday from 3pm-10pm.

We get up later than I wanted Saturday morning because we stayed out until 2am with the gaming group playing zombicide and red dragon inn, oof. I told spouse I felt like King Theoden in Helm's Deep when the uruk-hai army is approaching. 10am and it's shit shit shit, tornadoes inbound, going to destroy everything in range of their sweaty little paws, we gotta clean. I write spouse a list of easy cleaning tasks he can do while I get the turkey in the instant pot and start the soup. Well, he does one thing on the list and then he starts "improvising" and I have to put him back on the list. You're making more work for me. Please just do what's on the list. These are the things that need doing. Well, he feels like "it's not his house" if he has to follow a list. Oh my fucking god. I do like 90% of the housework so you can enjoy your time off and play video games. I am the housework general here, and we are going to war, and you need to be the corporal and follow orders. When you do more of the housework then you can write your own list and tell yourself what to do.

Then his cousin messages to say that they're flying out on sunday, so could we do dinner today? Spouse floats the idea of inviting his cousin & wife & two hockey playing sons to our house tonight. This is a horrifying idea. I have no idea if we have enough food - that's like six adult servings worth of food, extra. Our house is small. I've never met these people and I don't want our attention monopolized by a pod of strangers when we already have our friends over (and our friends are introverts, you don't just bomb strangers on them). Fuck, no. Spouse says, well maybe we can meet somewhere for dinner. But I already told everyone the doors were open until 10pm. I'm not going to faff off at 7pm because this dingdong whistles us up. How close a cousin can he be if he didn't even know we had moved back, and I've never met him in the past 10 years we have been together? Spouse is annoyed. Spouse says he's going to leave our thing to meet them for dinner at a restaurant. Okay, but I think it's rude. But he says it's also rude to ignore family and he grew up with this cousin. He says he was brought up where his mom would always make room and feed people. Yeah, and that's very admirable and I wish I could do that too, but this is too much on too short notice, with people I have never met. We are still working the kinks out of hosting. Besides, your mom's obsession with giving "hospitality" is not healthy. She doesn't turn people away when she absolutely should. Spouse agrees this is true, but clearly he's mentally grappling with not dropping everything to accommodate his cousin. He just has too much ingrained dysfunctional family culture to tell the guy no. Meanwhile, to me this dude is a total stranger and there's absolutely no way I am slighting our friends for a pack of randos. We already made a sat evening commitment. My child slots are full.

There was a couple tense hours as spouse went back to marking tasks off the cleaning list. The house looks pretty good. We basically shove everything not kid safe into the guest room/garage. Bandaid fix but okay. People are running a little late, thank god, so there's plenty of time to put out food and get the arrangement just right.

Then spouse's brother says he can't make dinner due to work stuff, so dinner with the cousin gets cancelled anyway. Yay! He'll be back in town in February - I am more than happy to host him and his family for dinner then! No problem. Spouse is relieved and we both cheer up.

The evening goes well. The tornadoes are better behaved this time. The one younger kid decides to run laps around our kitchen and up and down the hall, and I had to tell him to stop jumping on the furniture a couple times, but nothing got broke and nobody took melee damage. He did decide the bowl of ranch dip was his personal bowl of ranch dip (I kinda think our friend is a bad parent - either that or she's been worn down with so much excessive chaotic behavior that jumping on furniture and making off with the communal dip bowl are not events worthy of scolding). Our friend brought settlers of catan and the younger kid insisted he wanted to play, so pretty much the whole game was the adults trying to coax the child to hold still and coaching him to make his moves and letting him win. He didn't really care about other people's turns so half the time was telling him it wasn't his turn to roll the dice, he can't put that down right now, etc. The older kid just sat on the couch and played with his switch.

As a group gathering it sucked, but as a hosting trial it was very good and successful. I was too busy worrying about what trouble the kid was potentially getting in to have any fun. What is he doing at the far end of the hall (leave my cats alone)? What is he doing in the kitchen by himself? Why does he keep going into the bathroom - did he pee on the floor? But the food was a success. Making on demand grilled cheese on the panini maker is a thumbs up. I will have to write up an instruction card so I don't have to hover around, showing people how to turn it on and set the timer. The soup recipe makes three quarts of soup and we only had two portions leftover. There would not have been enough food for cousin & family. Next time I will double the soup recipe. Also, I think I used a veggie stock in the soup that might have gluten. We did not have the GF friend over this time, but it is always good to serve something everyone can eat safely. The other thing I learned is I bought good bakery bread and I forgot that real bread can mold quickly. It went bad the day after. I like doing holiday grocery shopping early - well, next time, gonna have to immediately freeze that bread to make sure it is fresh for the meal.

I do not enjoy hosting young children and probably never will be able to relax when they are visiting. They monopolize the whole event and we do not share the same ideas of what fun is. I won't exclude my friends with kids, but I am never going to be thrilled about catering to small goblin tornadoes. Teenagers are okay if they don't flail around too much.

Also I learned that I need to be giving spouse more house tasks as a normal thing instead of trying to emergency conscript him when an event is imminent. If he doesn't feel like the house is his because I write him a to-do list (because we don't have time to mess around), then he needs to take charge of some aspect of the house and he can be the boss of that.

He's always been bad about understanding that having people over is a significant increase in work for me, and really ramps up my anxiety. There's something about having people in your personal living space that is intimate and puts private bits of you on unwanted display. There's a lot of stuff I don't want up for conversational topics, so it's a lot of, how do I control the living space to direct the interaction. Maybe that's just my personal insecurities and introversion running amok. But I've always told him, if you want people over you have to help me with the work. There's food and drink decisions, there's shopping, there's cleaning, there's cooking. If everybody else enjoys it but all I get is a whole bunch of extra work and stress dumped on me, don't expect me to be thrilled. So we'll have to have a talk. I've been putting all this work into the place so we do have a nice place for gatherings. I've put so much careful thought into flexible furniture and seating and serving. I want friends/family/coworkers to come over and feel comfortable and have the house reflect positively on spouse. I don't think it's very fair of him to say that he doesn't feel like the house is his when I've been constantly asking him for input that he doesn't seem motivated to give. So the bulk of the decision work falls to me, of course. And the person who makes the decisions is the one "at fault" if things flop. That's a burden.

Part of it is cleanliness standards too. Sure, spouse's mom will host at the drop of a hat, but then you go over there and nobody has bothered to clean or make room for visitors. I would be too embarrassed to host like that. So perhaps we have different levels of "company ready" and spouse thinks the chore work I ask is excessive. But I need a certain level of basic clean to feel prepared and mentally ready for guests. Anyway.

Speaking of spouse's mom, she let spouse know she wasn't up to host anything for thanksgiving this year. We'd been talking about driving down before thanksgiving but then spouse didn't really get his vacation days. I mailed her a package with a jar of the currant/cranberry jelly and currant cakes, because I talked about them when we were texting before halloween. I texted to let her know they were on the way and she said "thank you" but nothing more. I was trying to open a communication channel with her but it doesn't seem like she's interested. Either: 1) she doesn't like me or my treats (possible). 2) she's in a really deep depression hole right now and just doesn't have the energy (also possible - SAD starts being a bitch in november). 3) she's juggling a ton of other important stuff and getting back to me is too low on the totem pole of priorities (less likely). 4) she's upset her political picks lost and is busy sopping up fearmongering propaganda over election results (maybe).

I think I'll let her chill out and get back in touch when she's ready. Christmas is coming and we will make a visit down when spouse has his vacation days.

In general life is very positive. Completed a number of projects and things feel like they are really shaping up. I'm working my way through the supplies that I bought and built up - the more I do, the smaller the pile gets as things find their places, the better things are. This week we're going to put up the TV mount. That's the big project. I'll have to work on the accent wall around the mount placement. Who knows how long until I get around to the accent wall (we could be waiting forever). It's gonna be good, though. The more I do, the more I like the house, the more comfortable I am. It feels like an important process, like I am doing good foundational work. I have had my nose buried in fiddly domestic minutia for a long time but I haven't stopped thinking about art and where I'm going and what I want my goals to be. It is so freeing to be able to make a good space to do work in.

I have been thinking some about wise femininity and creating traditions and rituals. We saw the latest Black Panther movie and I liked that it had that element of using cultural traditions and rituals to heal and process. I liked the strong artistic design and the way art took a prominent position in the costumes and sets. There's a lot of audacity in fashion. We slump around in mass produced hoodies and leggings and it takes some guts to choose differently. I guess the game changes once you get past your twenties, too. Goals are different. Tastes are different.

I don't really have time to puzzle it out right now. But it's percolating in the back.