Filed under: board games, family, food, politics, rest & relaxation | Tags: Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving is over, and I can finally say enough, already …
1. Pumpkin dessert. M made her beloved (by my family, anyway) pumpkin bar dessert to take with us to my parents’ house, but we left it on the kitchen counter. Consensus among family members dictated that a redo was in order, so she remade it. And I ate it. A lot of it. Including two large pieces topped with a mighty dollop of cool whip at midnight right before going to bed.
2. Carcassonne. I never thought I’d say this, but I don’t want to play any Carc for a few days. I introduced the game to my family, expecting a lukewarm acceptance. Well, turns out they loved it. We played about six games in two days.
3. Board games, in general. We also played three games of Ticket to Ride and a rather roundly disliked match of Cranium.
4. Firewood. As is typical when I visit my parents, I helped my dad fell a tree. He has a wood-burning stove in the basement and the shed. That means he has a need for firewood. In my own house, so do I. So in exchange for a trunkload of firewood, we got to work.
5. The paper thin walls at my parents’ house. Seriously. You can hear everything, everywhere, which makes sleeping in those extra 30 minutes nearly impossible.
6. Breakfast. Yuck. My family hearts a breakfast of soupy-egg casserole.
7. Long walks. How did I get corralled into taking a 45-minute walk in the 40-degree cold immediately after Turkey Dinner? I’d rather fall into the typical post-dinner comatose, thank you very much.
8. Conversations about the bailouts with my family. Simply bizarre.
9. Movies. The process of selecting a movie that might appeal to (mostly women) ranging in age from 12 to 73 produces … wait for it … Baby Mama.
10. Gas. My family knows how to bring it.
But a few highlights exist from this go round …
1. Ping pong. I still got game. And the same paddles my friends and me played with in high school — even the paddle that Dustin stripped of its padding on one side and replaced with a NIN sticker.
2. Pumpkin dessert. I may be sick of it, but there’s a good reason I ate so much.
3. Chloe the dog. She’s an English Springer Spaniel and a constant reminder that I do love dogs, too — especially their eternal energy.
Oh how I go through serious withdrawals if I’m away from mom and dad’s dial-up connection for too long. It’s been months, and now that I’m here using said internet connection, it feels like years as I wait for pages to load. Here’s what I’m doing right now:
1) Signing up for a Twitter account, at Chris’ urging. I feel deeply ambivalent about this, but whatever. You can choose to follow me if you wish. I must say it seems simpler to follow me via Facebook’s variation on the Twitter theme. Doesn’t everyone log in to Facebook 2-3 times per day anyway? But I suppose if you’re already using Twitter, feel free to add me to your watch list.
2) Listening to the new Dungen album, which is good but lacking any standout HARD rockers. Oh, how I wish they would just write an album full of “Panda”s, the lead track from Ta Det Lugnt.
3) Shopping for cheap fall clothing at Old Navy(dot)com.
4) Transfering a photo from my camera to my computer’s hard drive to a flash drive and finally to this computer’s (my dad’s) hard drive, so I can upload it. (It’s what you now see above. I painted my parents’ laundry room yellow yesterday.)
5) Creating this post, obviously.
6) Playing Hearts, which I haven’t enjoyed in some time. Since my parents have a PC, it’s one of their preinstalled Windows games. It’s been so long since I played this game that it took me losing an entire game before I realized that it’s the QUEEN of Spades, not the Jack, that you don’t want to end up with at the end of a hand.
Of course, I can do all this at basically the same time because mostly what I am doing is waiting for web pages to load. Yay rural technology limitations!
As soon as I’m done wasting away online, I’m going to go sort through several thousand of my old baseball cards, which my mom has been kind enough not to throw away, yet.
It’s been a long time since I’ve been to one of these.
I’m glad I wasn’t running. But my nephew, running in his first 8K as a freshman in college, finished seventh on his team. He ran quite splendidly.
