Thanksgiving celebrating

We started our big Thanksgiving celebrations last night with a turkey dinner and all the fixins... sweet potato casserole, corn pudding, broccoli salad, stuffing, gravy, the works! Yum! Mom and I cooked for a group of local friends and it was a lot of work, but a lot of fun :) Oh yeah, we made pies too - pumpkin, apple and pecan!

There was only one minor snag in the cooking process - no water! Argh! It is uncanny how often we have a water or power outage on Thanksgiving Day. In fact, my first three Thanksgivings in China were consecutive power-outage-Thanksgivings - how likely is that?

Each year the story is a little different. This year's sounds like this: Tuesday mid-afternoon a work crew finally shows up to work on a bad water leak in our apartment complex. I mean, BAD water leak. Basically, what used to be normal ole ground cover has turned into a gushing fountain.... and it's been gushing for over a week. So, the rubber-booted work crew shows up, turns off the water line, and starts digging. At nightfall they leave their big hole in the ground for more (hopefully better?) tools and assure us the water will be back on by midnight.

Fast-forward to Wednesday morning. No water. A quick glance out the window assures me that the hole is still big and deep and the workers are conspicuously absent. Uh oh. All morning long I keep hoping for some workers, and some water. Nada. We cook anyways, and wash dishes using bottled "tong" water from our water machine. Xiao Li washes and washes and washes..... the rinse water becomes toilet-flushing water, and Mom keeps cooking!

At noon on Wednesday we hear water in the pipes. What? The workers apparently came back, turned on the water, and the hole is filling up but we don't care - we're rushing around the apartment flushing toilets, running the washing machine, taking showers and doing even more dishes!

Water stayed on til 5, when it was off again for an hour or so. Came back on and, as far as I can tell, was on all night long.

The confusing thing is that the leak is still not fixed. But the water runs. And for that, this Thanksgiving Day, I am thankful. Today would actually be a great day for those workers to get their act together and fix that pipe and fill in the hole - we'll be in town all day celebrating with some friends and eat more turkey.

Happy Thanksgiving!