Download your free Hanukkah latkes!

In this post: Free latkes, an Amazon speed record, God bless Sam. 

Happy Hanukkah from the Howdygram! To help get the party started this year we’re pleased to offer a FREE DOWNLOAD OF HOMEMADE LATKES from our house to yours.

Oh boy, yee-haw and God bless the shopping fairies at Amazon … my McCormick gravy and Hormel canned tamales will be here any minute now! TWO WHOLE DAYS AHEAD OF SCHEDULE AND JUST IN TIME FOR WEDNESDAY DINNER! This is the kind of fantastic luck a person has when you live smack dab in the middle of the United States — Sam calls it “the cleavage of America” — and Amazon’s distribution centers are all spittin’ distance from your house. Holy crap!

As I write this post I’m pleased to report that Sam is still counting on a four-day Thanksgiving holiday weekend even though his boss tried all day yesterday to nudge him into working on Friday. Sure, Sam had three weeks of vacation in 2013, but he didn’t enjoy ANY of it. He used eight days to recover from separate eye surgeries in February and May and the remainder for two emergency trips to the west coast to visit his sister and mother — both of them seriously ill and hospitalized — in September and October.

To tell you the truth I don’t know how Sam has been able to hold it together so well this year. Aside from surgeries and family stress he also worked 250 hours of overtime — that’s equal to an extra 6¼ weeks! — and had to deal with a persistent but frequently goodhearted kvetch (me) here at home.

I love Sam to pieces and I think I’ll treat him to some serious noggin-kissing tonight. If he was here I’d start NOW. Thank you for reading this.