I wanted to be the all-American kid from New York City

Seth and I went up Broadway this morning to see the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. It's true that television adds ten pounds, or in this case, about an hour and a half, because it was shorter and smaller than I had anticipated. It also made me hate large crowds of people a little more, especially if those people were pushing baby carriages, and especially especially if those baby-pushers had a knack for running over my toes. It also didn't help that every third balloon had "MACY'S" stamped all over it, as if we could forget that This Parade Was Sponsored By Macy's; Shop Macy's, For All Your Christmas Needs. But it was worth a visit if you want to see a Pikachu the size of your house chasing a Poké Ball the size of your car, which I most certainly did.

My favorite float was filled with Muppets. Actual-size.

We ate lunch-dinner at Marissa and Jesse's in Brooklyn, where they are renting a room on the top floor of a townhouse owned by Bela Fleck's brother. We ended up splitting four bottles of wine between the five of us there and feeding turkey bits to Louie's twenty-one year-old cat Iddy. We'd all made the food ourselves, most of it for the first time. Marissa remarked as she was spooning out the mashed potatoes that it made her feel like such a grown-up. Then she proceeded to knock the spoon out of the bowl and get potatoes all over the table and floor.

I'm sure Iddy got most of them for us.