Thanksgiving

Spent Thanksgiving Day with the in-laws, who were helping host a huge Thanksgiving dinner for people at their church. So instead of the 8-12 people I’m used to for holiday dinners, it was 24. Hectic, but I discovered that I’m actually good at playing Jenga. (I swear, I haven’t played the game since college, and I don’t remember being any good at it at the time.)

With the warm weather, I’d been joking that we should have a Thanksgiving barbecue. The first thing I saw when we got there: a barbecue. Okay, it was being used to cook a turkey, but still…

There was also the highest pie-to-person ratio I have seen in a long time. I think there must have been at least 10 pies, if not a dozen. Probably enough for everyone there to eat half a pie!

We stayed in on Friday, avoiding the insanity of Black Friday sales (though I did look through the 15 or so emails from various online stores whose lists I’m on), then drove up to Westwood in the evening to see Equivocation (Shakespeare gets caught up in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot).

Current Music: Some video game from someone else in the waiting room at the car service dept

What I Did on my Thanksgiving Vacation

My brother and his fiancĂ©e drove down from San Francisco to visit last weekend, and we ended up spending a lot of time hanging out with them at my parents’ house. And playing Munchkin. Which was fun, except for the interminable turns when someone needed to discard a bunch of cards and, because most of us were new at the game, agonized over which cards to toss.

Family gathering on Thursday at my grandparents’ house. In the old days we’d drive to my parents’ house, then pile into their minivan and carpool the rest of the way, but since my mom traded it in for a Camry, we had to split 6 people across two cars. I’d planned on driving since I knew neither Brion nor Marti was going to want to spend ~2 hours driving in holiday traffic after spending the entire previous day on the road.

Other than visiting family, I mostly stayed at home. No Black Friday sales. I did order tickets to a play (The School of Night, about the death of Christopher Marlowe), and tried to order tickets to Man of La Mancha only to discover it was in presale, and I didn’t have the code. (Subsequently signed up for Reprise’s newsletter. Next time…)

Did a lot of reading. I’m about 100 pages into George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, and decided I needed a break. I picked up Robert J. Sawyer’s Flashforward the day before ABC announced the first casting for the TV pilot. Jack Davenport — yes, Steve from Coupling and Norrington from Pirates of the Caribbean — is playing the lead , and Courtney B. Vance (Law & Order: Criminal Intent) is playing a character who is either new to the adaptation or shows up at least halfway through the book. I get the impression from earlier articles that they’re not adapting the plot so much as they’re taking the concept and using it as the basis for an ongoing series. I also reread Girl Genius from the beginning, which is much easier to do in book form than on the computer.

alenxa completed Nanowrimo over the weekend, having written 50,000 words during November, though she’s pretty sure the full novel is going to be more than twice that.

Also, on Tuesday we went out to Huntington Beach’s street fair to see Gigi Edgley, Farscape’s Chiana, do fire twirling (write-up w/ photos at K2R).

Today, I’m tired. 9 days of antihistamines plus 3 days of getting to bed late and getting up early plus a couple of weeks of not sleeping well. Okay, back to work.

Current Mood: 😴sleepy

Thanksgiving Weekend

Wednesday: Scrambling to finish a section of this big web project for work so that the client could test things over the weekend, and still get out early enough to pick up alenxa when her office closed at 3. Planned to leave at 2 & hit the comic store first, but got out at 2:50. So I went straight to pick her up, and we got stuck wading through pre-TG traffic and grocery store madness. (Gripe: The express lane clearly says cash only. Why do some people insist on paying with a check anyway? (Answer: because the store doesn’t want to lose that sale, so they call over a manager to take it, and thereby inconvenience all 12 people waiting for the process — which takes 10 minutes instead of 1 for some reason — instead of inconveniencing the one person who really should have been in another line in the first place. Thus do we reward people being either clueless or inconsiderate.)) Helped Katie a bit w/ baking.

Thursday: Thanksgiving lunch w/ Katie’s family. Worked out pretty well, since it meant neither of us needed to eat dinner.

Friday: Holed up in the apartment, venturing forth only to run by the pharmacy. Re-read first 3 volumes of Scott Pilgrim & read the new one. Still holding up.

Saturday: Drove out in the Tustin Foothills/Lemon Heights area to take advantage of the really clear air and see what I could see. Got to see Catalina Island from about 10 miles inland. Also between this and a similar drive early in October, I have some interesting before & after pics of some of the hills touched by the Santiago fire. It got a lot farther north than I thought. Edit: Forgot to mention, got a kick out of driving around the wealthy enclave with “Sinister Ducks” playing on the iPod. Gotta love random.

Then afternoon & evening for a secondary Thanksgiving dinner w/ my parents & brother, who’s out visiting from Florida (but moving to San Fransisco next month). Haven’t seen BSG: Razor yet. Will probably watch it tonight.

Sunday: Ran errands, went to see Beowulf in 3D. Sushi & tempura for dinner (Maki Maki has a teriyaki chicken roll, plus everyone has veggie rolls), then minor shopping.

Monday: I think we may have finished off the leftovers, except for a turkey leg.

Somewhere in all this I took a few hours to pare down my inbox from ~650 messages to ~250, mostly by filing and deleting things I’d already dealt with or didn’t need to (though I replied to a couple of things). Probably around 40 of the remaining items are to do/to read items I sent myself. At some point I’ll need to do this with my work mailbox.

Current Mood: 😴sleepy