It’s a little ironic, given how much I love to cook, but when it comes to preparing the Thanksgiving meal, all the jobs are taken. My nephew Eric has taken over roasting the turkey. My sister-in-law Teresa makes stuffing and dessert and gravy. My mother-in-law makes the potatoes and yams. My sister-in-law Leah brings corn pudding, roasted carrots and green bean casserole.

I’m responsible for making the cranberry sauce, which takes all of 20 minutes. So every year I’m left wondering how I can contribute more than a condiment. Usually, this means I bring some redundant dish that errs on the healthy, green side, but manages to just be in the way. Then, when we come home, I stare at this healthy thing I made and wonder what the hell I was thinking.

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So. Who else is with me that mini cooking videos are about the most addictive thing running on Facebook? Over the last few weeks, I haven’t been able to close the damn things down. Everything is melty and gooey because everything either has chocolate or cheese in it. And everything seems like it takes 15 seconds to make.

If you haven’t seen one of these videos, let me explain. They are less-than-a-minute wonders that people have been sharing on their Facebook pages. Each video is broken into ridiculously easy steps for how to make a particular dish. They start with raw ingredients, like say several strips of bacon (bacon is another major player in these videos). Then they’ll show someone cutting the bacon into 2-inch pieces and placing them on a sheet and putting them in the oven until they crisp. Then using the crisp bacon pieces as chips to spoon up guacamole. Voilà, done.

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So an interesting thing happened last week while I was in the death throes caused by the Worst Cold of the Decade. All at once and with little fuss, I lost my appetite. And by lost, I mean completely. No thoughts of food, no cravings for burgers and fries, no idea what to make for dinner because nothing sounded good. Even more interesting is it isn’t really back.

This is an extreme situation for me because normally my day begins and ends with thoughts of when I can eat again. Dinner planning either starts in the morning or days before if I’m being particularly organized. So intense is my craving for specific meals that I’d say a good 20 percent of my dreams are food dreams, ones in which I am tasting, with remarkable accuracy, cookies and cake and pasta and pizza.

See, even as I list those wonderful treats now, I feel nothing. No hunger pains, no desire. Just a low-grade nausea.

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CONFESSION: I need to start and finish this column in exactly one hour. Deadline is at noon and it is 11 and I just woke up because I have a horrifyingly bad cold and I hadn’t slept much in three nights on account of a terrible cough but last night I did because I got some beautiful medicine from the doctor except I forgot to set my alarm last night so now I have an hour. Usually this sucker takes me two days — the first to write the draft, the second to make sure it’s not too ridiculous. Today I have 60 minutes to do both and I’m not making any promises, especially about the second thing.

It’s a shame too, because I actually have a very interesting topic this week, which is: For the first time since moving to Kentucky I was able to vote yesterday! (NOTE: If I had two days to write this thing, you can be sure I’d remove that exclamation mark because exclamation marks are embarrassing, but right now it seems like a good idea.) Yes, my motivation for wanting to become a citizen was so I could cast my ballot, which I did yesterday with perhaps not too much fanfare, but I’d like to think a bit of panache.

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About three years ago, my husband and I took the most fabulous trip of our lives to Grand Cayman Island. It was just three short nights, but from the moment we arrived to the moment we took off, we experienced what it was like to live in a perfect place with a perfect spouse.

Last week, we returned to the same spot to learn that not all vacations are made equal.

I won’t go into nauseating detail, but let’s just say we are now acquainted with the hotel doctor. I fell asleep on a restaurant toilet after taking Dramamine to avoid sea sickness. We were attacked by crabs. And one day I looked down and saw that the back of my wedding band, symbol of symbols, had cleaved in two.

But the somewhat challenging holiday (and let’s be clear, I’m not complaining, the Caribbean is the Caribbean) has made me ponder the inner workings of the Romantic Vacation, a getaway that can be a whole lot more lovely in theory than practice.

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When it comes to the Costco game, I’m a bench warmer at best — rather slow, slightly confused and marginally motivated. But, recognizing that my membership was about to expire and I had no plans to renew it, I half-heartedly made my way over there last weekend.

I hadn’t been since I signed up for my membership last year. That first time, I had wandered around the store with glazed eyes. But this time, I was a little more advanced in the game. Costco, Wostco, you can’t catch me, I told myself. I’m only here because I got sucked into the $100 executive membership because I’m stupid and now I’m trying to salvage some of my losses.

So I walked in. Or I tried to walk in before I had to show my membership card. Let me ask you this, dear readers: Do you have to try harder to be a customer at any other store? As I heard in an NPR article recently, most stores have people standing at the door welcoming you in. Costco workers are there to keep you out.

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Yes, dear readers, it’s time to discuss something we all have and yet very few people see. It usually comes out the minute we get home from work and stays with us until the time we go to bed. It’s not something we’re proud of, but it’s something we love and make a point of choosing every day. And yet it almost never comes up in conversation.

Until last week.

I was out walking with my girlfriend who we’ll call Fallula. It was a pretty day and we were, of course, talking about our husbands. I wish I could remember how the subject meandered in this direction, but before you know it Fallula was telling me all about what her husband changes into when … dum, dum, dummmm … he gets home from work.

Yes, the after-work outfit. The little workhorse that waits on the chair in your bedroom all day long and is almost never folded properly. The one that gets washed every week, rain or shine. The one that’s been with you for upwards of a decade. Whose shirt is made of the softest cotton and is frayed at the neck. Whose pants are a little too short and allow for excessive eating. Ah yes, the after-work outfit.

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I was frying apples the other evening in a desperate attempt to get to the bottom of the bushel we picked a few weeks ago. The recipe was for a sauce to top pork tenderloin, but the minute those apple slices started to caramelize in butter, all I could think of was pancakes.

It’s always amazing to me how transportive food can be in your life, how with just one whiff an entire slice of your childhood can be served to you like pie. Instantly, I had a clear image of me, age 8, back in our kitchen in Headingley, standing on a kitchen chair and mixing pancake batter.

It was the first thing I ever learned to make and, until I was about 19 and decided that deviled eggs would be my signature dish, it was the only thing I knew how to make. My dad taught me, showing me how to mix the dry ingredients and then the wet, how to melt butter, how to whisk and whisk until the lumps disappeared.

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The trip down Memory Lane continues, taking us to the playgrounds of old. I started writing about this last week after visiting a play structure at a nearby apple farm. There was so much to talk about I didn’t get much further than a discussion on the monkey bars, an essential part of parks in the 1970s and ‘80s.

But how can you really have a comprehensive conversation about playgrounds without touching on the swings? They are, after all, the most whimsical of all playground equipment, offering the biggest potential of dropping your stomach way in the distance behind you.

The swings at the parks I most visited were all connected to the swing set via long chains and offered a flexible canvas seat for good-quality soaring. Usually upon arrival at the park, we would find most of the swings had been spun into DNA-like twists that needed to be undone before any swinging could occur. This had been done, naturally, by the “bad kids,” who I always thought were boys perpetually in need of a haircut.

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We were at Haney’s apple farm with friends on Sunday and it had gotten to the point where the apples were picked, the pies were eaten and the kids were high on sugar. It didn’t take them long to find the new play structure that popped up over the winter, a real doozy shaped like a barn complete with swings, slides, and climbing walls. As they bounced around and we watched them, it made me think back to our childhoods and all the fun we used to have at the park.

Back then, play structures were still called playgrounds and, as I watched the kids kick up woodchips as they ran around Sunday, it was for good reason. In all our hours at the park, we spent a lot of time on that ground, didn’t we? Either from getting whipped off the merry-go-round, falling off the jungle gym or landing hard on our tailbones off the slide. And that ground was hard, boy. Maybe, if we were lucky, it was sandy or even dusty. That seemed to help those crashes slightly. But usually, it was just … ground.

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