Phrase of the day

When psychologists do experiments with lab rats, they deliberately keep them underfed because hungry rats learn faster. When the experiment is over, the psychologists let them eat as much as they want. Sometimes they gorge themselves so badly that they become prostrate and unresponsive. This state is called satiation shock.

Bet you can guess why I mention this on the morning after Thanksgiving! :)

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We had such a good time last night at my parents' house. The food was sooooo good, a mix of traditional and new, including our Thanksgiving sine qua non: Nana's cocktail. Nana was my great-grandmother; her cocktail is a lovingly-crafted homemade Bloody Mary mix. With or without vodka. Mmmmm!

Anyway, even better than the food was the family. The cousins played together nicely -- nicer than ever before, in fact, given the age range. The parents were able to pay attention to each other instead of the kids. It was great.

Best of all, we revived an old game. My family (my family of origin, that is) is very big on playing games. Board games, word games, guessing games. And we're also very big on inventing our own. My sister and I have a looooong history of playing made-up games. Mostly the object of our games is to laugh and be silly. One of my favorite games is one we play at the mall during the Christmas season. The name of the game is "Heavy or Light?" One sister points to some object, typically a Christmas decoration, but could be anything, and asks the other sister "heavy or light?" We both guess. Then we lift. Heaviness or lightness is relative, based solely on whether the object is heavier or lighter than our expectation of it. Is it metal . . . or just gold-painted papier-mâche?? And there's the sneaky goofiness factor. Usually we're examining and lifting things that we have no business touching, such as the fake presents under a fake tree in a department store display. Oh ha ha!

But that's not the game we played last night. The game we played last night was invented many years ago, when my sister was away at college. She was on the phone with my mom, and my mom was trying to describe a new pair of earrings she had just bought. They were hard to describe. Finally, she suggested that Eva go get a piece of paper and a pencil, and my mom would give her instructions for drawing them. "Okay, draw a hexagon. Now inside the hexagon draw another smaller one, about halfway in. Now draw lines connecting the points of the inner hexagon to the outer hexagon . . . " Etc. Nowadays we'd probably just take a digital photo of the earrings and email it, but in the technologically-benighted late '80s this was a marvellously entertaining way of conveying information. So entertaining that we did it frequently, even when we were in the same room. We would take a jewelry catalog, choose a piece, give drawing instructions, and then compare the result with the original photo. Is this totally kooky or what?

Years passed, we forgot all about the game. Until last night. I think what brought it to mind was my mom's ridiculously large collection of costume jewelry. A lot of it, coincidentally, came to us from the Nana of cocktail fame. She keeps it readily available for grandkids to play with. They were playing with it, and . . . oh yeah, the earring-drawing game! So nothing would do except for my mom to go and get the original hexagon-shaped earrings and describe them to us. So we drew the hexagons, and about three more pairs after that. All to the tune of gut-busting laughter.

Now that's what I call a great Thanksgiving. Hope yours was wonderful too. : )