There was mad panic in my house this evening. I lost a week. I was all set to write my  Grateful 4  blog about celebrating Thanksgiving in the village and what a great time we had. I was going to write about the hunt for the turkey because turkeys cannot be found in Hungary until December when you can get massive ones but if you’re in the market for a 6kg bird in November, you may as well be looking for ice cubes in the Sahara. And we tried. We tried the travelling butcher van. We tried the market. We tried the supermarkets. We had even sourced two 3kg birds on the north side of the Balaton and I was prepared to travel. But, as luck would have it, I stopped off in Metro on my way down last week and found one, lone, single, solitary 4.4kg bird that came with freezer burns but hey, those could be cut off.

I was going to write about the joys of cooking dinner for 8 using a gas oven that could just about hold said 4.4kg turkey and four rings ranging from very small, to small, to sorta medium, to what passes for big. Thankfully, the lovely RWs at the other end of the village took in the spuds. But the pressure was on. I was trying new dishes – like Asian sprouts and a maderia/mushroom/green bean casserole. I was all set to do the bourbon hasselback sweet potatoes but I was behind schedule and the guests had started to arrive.

Yes – me – behind schedule. I was going to blog about that, too, before I lost the week. I’d spent far too long that morning figuring out how to make paper napkins look like turkeys. You gotta love YouTube. It really sucks the time out of the clock and shoves it forward. My turkeys ended up looking more like swans because I didn’t have the patience to find the foil the lovely woman said I’d need. But the thought was there.

I was also going to mention that our little party of 8 was representative of 7 countries: Austria, England, Hungary, Ireland, Malta, Serbia, and the USA (x2). Countryside cosmopolitanism at its best. Age wise, we spanned 40 years from oldest to youngest. And I’m proud to say that none of us had a real job (as in one you have to get up in the morning and go to, clock in and clock out, and then ask for holidays) – something all of us were very grateful for indeed. Most of us had been there at some stage in our respective lives and none of us wanted to go back.

I was going to share the diversity of discussions which ranged from the ridiculous to the sublime, from politics to parochial gossip, from recent awards conferred to what Wikipedia had to say about those in our party famous enough to warrant a page. But my missing week put paid to all that.  And then I did the math.

I was on Grateful 4 which would suggest that there were only three more weekends after this one till the end of the year. I checked the calendar just to be sure and found that December has five weekends so I was really missing two weeks, not one. I went back and trolled through my Gratefuls to find that I was had posted 42&41 together one week and the following week, instead of 40, I did 41…again. And then went to 39. So I skipped 40. And I’d skipped 47. Now, you may think this trivial, but believe me,  doubting my ability to count backwards from 52 could have series repercussions. My faith in myself right now is low (thinking turkeys and swans) and I don’t need any more self-doubt.

I tried going back and renumbering the posts but that would invalidate my links and create all sorts of headaches later. Then I remembered that video I’d watched earlier in the week about how, for (some?) Native Americans, Thanksgiving is a day of mourning. And I got sidetracked. I watched some more videos (all contradictory, I might add – does anyone know the truth?). I read the comments (and some downright nasty ones ,too) and chased up referrals. And I lost a couple of hours. But at least I found my two weeks – and for that I’m grateful.