Because I’m a Hatfield who married a McCoy, we rarely manage to get the two families under one roof for any sort of occasion. So we put our youth to good use and drive all across the Tollbooth Capital of the World. We’re seasoned road warriors (most of our honeymoon was spent seeing Nova Scotia through the windows of a rented Chevy Cavalier) but Turkey Day really saps us. The standard MO is to drive to her parents early in the day, have dinner, race up to my parents and have dessert. After five years, it’s down to a science. We arrive at the in-laws at the appointed time and are told the bird should be another hour. Fine, we’ll relax and chat it up until then.

I should preface the following with a brief discussion on my father-in-law. My father-in-law rarely tries the same recipe twice for anything. He tried deep fried Cajun birds for a couple of years (which no one would eat because they looked like charcoal and tasted like fire and oil), but he’s usually content to tinker with the seasonings in the stuffing or a new spin on Polish bread (called babka). This year he went CSI on the bird. Flip the bird over, remove the entire ribcage, clean the cavity out nine different ways, pack it with stuffing, use some butcher twine to keep the bird intact while leaving the stuffing exposed and pop it in the oven.

Upon opening the oven door an hour later, it looked like a holiday autopsy post-mortem, complete with the bone white skin and open chest cavity of the deceased staring at us in the face. The bird took three hours longer than expected and ruined any chance of meeting up with my kinfolk. The kicker was having the in-laws look surprised when we told them we were supposed to be going to my folks for dessert. Dessert? Actually, I didn’t even get to see my parents, who were both asleep by the time we made it to their house. I smell sabotage.

Then, in an equally brilliant move, I told my one sister I would join her for shopping on Friday. Black Friday to be exact. Get up at 4:30 and be ready to be picked up at 5. Make it to the store by 6, just as the doors open. Attack Target with military precision (hint: all Target stores are laid out the same, so if you know one you know them all). My brother-in-law acted as a storage depot, protecting our wares inside of the plastic confines of the cart and running down the occasional enemy shopper. My sister and I would run sorties through the throngs of people and return with our cache of goods to the Mother Ship (or Brother-In-Law Ship, in this case). I have poor hearing to start with, but I swear I had Superman’s ears that day. Three aisles away in the toy department, surrounded by fifteen jabbering women looking for various things, I heard a woman ask for what I was looking for (a Shrinky Dinks oven). I also managed to hear the clerk say, "They’re on the top shelf. I’ll go get a ladder." This from a man who has trouble hearing a running truck from thirty feet off.

We met up with my other sister, the shopper’s equivalent of Gary Kasparov. By the time we made it out of Target, she had already covered Target, Michael’s Craft Store and Circuit City (and got one of only four Palm Pilots the store had on sale for Friday). She’s a master tactician and the head of what my family calls the Network, a web of people she knows who can find the best buy on anything anywhere. Need a toy that no place seems to have? The Network can get it. A one day sale that starts at six in the morning? Network members have been waiting at the doors since five. Much of their knowledge and membership base remains a mystery, but I can tell you tha***** FILE DELETION ***** UNAUTHORIZED USE OF NETWORK INFORMATION *****

More of the weekend for tomorrow. Trust me I’ll try to make it worth your while. I’m up to the gills in work, too, but I don’t take a month off like Mr. Lileks.