Canadian Thanksgiving in the UK

Thanksgiving has never been a huge deal for me.  I really like it, but it's never quite held the same emotional ties as, say, Christmas or Halloween.  At least it hadn't, until this year.

This is the first year I've been outside of Canada for Thanksgiving, and I'm finding it (in part because the shops have already started putting out Xmas merchandise) pretty tough.  I've recently re-broken the record for the most time spent away from my family (It has now been 8 months since I last saw any of my friends or relatives) and rather than me getting used to my homesickness, my homesickness is getting worse.  It's little things, like the fact that the stores here don't sell egg nog, or that despite going to two different grocery stores, the closest thing we'll have to cranberry sauce tonight is "Cranberry juice drink"  No one sells Brownburry Farce, or even tubs of breadcrumbs.  I did find a whole turkey, but it was one of the pre-spiced kind, so we're having chicken instead.

And yes, I know there's more to Thanksgiving than the food, but that's just it.  The food is wrong and the family and friends we're supposed to be sharing this wrong food with are thousands of miles away.

I guess I'm just feeling sorry for myself... I know I'm one of the luckiest people alive and I know I should feel nothing but grateful for all the wonder I have in my life.  I'm just... I don't even know.  Homesick.

Sorry to be such a downer on the one day we're all supposed to pull our heads out of our asses and appreciate what we have. I'll try to post a little later, when I'm in a better mood.

NaNoWriMo makes me cry.

From NanNoWriMo's NaNo in a Nutshell:

Who: You! We can't do this unless we have some other people trying it as well. Let's write laughably awful yet lengthy prose together.
Why: The reasons are endless! To actively participate in one of our era's most enchanting art forms! To write without having to obsess over quality. To be able to make obscure references to passages from our novels at parties. To be able to mock real novelists who dawdle on and on, taking far longer than 30 days to produce their work.

Ugh.