And nix on the wishing for more wishbones

The day before Thanksgiving was filled with a nor'easter that hit the area, bringing enough rain and flooding to make one seriously consider gathering gopher wood and pairs of animals. I spent much of the afternoon on the phone trying to help a friend navigate her way to work amid the maze of impassable intersections. It took me about twice as long to get to work as normal, but nothing too terrible.

Thanksgiving, however, was much better. Things were beginning to dry out and I got together with a bunch of friends who were also in town -- most of them also working later that day -- and we had an excellent potluck meal with way more food than we could consume. (I made candied sweet potatoes and a corn casserole.) Most people think it's kind of a lousy deal to have to work holidays like many of us in the newspaper business have to do, and it is a bummer not to be able to travel and spend time with family, but the truth is, it's not so horrible. We look out for each other and create our own semblance of a family. It's one of the many things for which I'm thankful around Thanksgiving and Christmas.

And this year's meal featured synthetic wishbones. I didn't even know they made such things, but lo and behold they do. So we all paired up, made our wishes and pulled. I won my first wish and there was an extra wishbone, so we decided to have a wish-off. I challenged a guy who had simultaneously won TWO wishes (we had an odd number of people) in the first round, so I knew going in that I was up against a heavy challenge. No one else who had gotten the bigger half of the wishbone wanted to put their first wish at risk, so I stepped up.

We both grabbed an end of the wishbone and when the countdown ended, I pulled and ...
it slipped right out of the other guy's hand.

I'm pretty sure holding an entire wishbone doesn't really count as winning, so we went again.

I lost.

He won his third wish in a row. That's genie stuff right there. Of course, maybe one of his initial wishes had been to win the second round of wishing. Damn cheater.

I still have to look at the replay footage and photos to examine what happened. Maybe the placement of my grip was off. Or the angle of my wrist. There are a dozen possibilities.

If my life were a movie, this is where we would cut to a training montage -- me doing finger stretches and strengthening exercises, flexing my wrists, doing push-ups and pull-ups to improve upper body strength, sparring with wishbone after wishbone ...

Mark my words ... next year, I'll get my wish.