Are we ever really fin­ished upload­ing the celes­tial orb? Wih the MacAir, the “don’t close” mes­sage is seem­ingly non-​existent. When I worked in a Microsoft envi­ron­ment, I knew that the order to not close the win­dow meant REALLY do NOT close the browser win­dow… fatal sys­tem crashes would occur. *Update: In 2010, this type of mes­sage rarely occurs for the every-​day web surfer. We have enough RAM to con­sider com­plet­ing myr­iad tasks and objec­tives. The CPUs of old didn’t have enough mem­ory to down­load a new pro­gram or soft­ware pack­age while per­form­ing other func­tions. The rea­son for the warn­ing appears to be one for older CPUs.

On Thanks­giv­ing I cre­ated an anal­ogy between down­load­ing PIE and down­load­ing a soft­ware pro­gram. It was lame and not received well at all by my crit­ics. But the gist of the the­ory at hand was that to eat all the required food placed upon the Thanks­giv­ing groan­ing board, one’s sys­tem would suf­fer a severe over­load and our body browser would crash. Lame, eh?

Can life become so ornately dis­or­ga­nized that we for­get to down­load our dis­tress and trust in the almighty — the left­over Thanks­giv­ing, fight for it, wake up in the mid­dle of the night and find it, warm it for one minute in the microwave, get me some vanilla Breyer’s ice cream, for­get the fork — I’ll use my fin­gers, the one and only, most impor­tant of all

last piece of

PIE?

We had pecan pie. We had Tar Heel pie. We had cin­na­mon scones for break­fast. We had sweet ‘taters with pecan crunchy top­ping. We had a spi­ral cut ham from Fresh Mar­ket. We brined a turkey à la Alton Brown recipe. Smashed pota­toes with an entire stick of but­ter and some whip­ping cream mixed into it. Ubiq­ui­tous green bean casse­role. Cran­berry rel­ish. Scratch yeast rolls. Corn­bread — the sour cream kind. Bour­bon sugar glaze pecans for nibbling…

It is my favorite day. An Amer­i­can hol­i­day cen­tered around food. Eat­ing. Just a day of eat­ing. And most of the fam­ily except the Math­e­mat­i­cal One Who Must Remain Afar. She will return to the fold soon enough.

So, for the day, at least, Assem­blage means the chem­i­cal prop­er­ties of flour when mixed with egg, of salt and poul­try… and fam­ily. Some of it.

c