TBA
Thanksgiving
aka, I think I spent every day in a car for at least two hours...
Wednesday: drove to the Bay Area with Viet. well, he drove. Left about 10pm, didn't get in til 3am Thursday morning.
Thursday: woohoo. Thanksgiving! Nothing too interesting til we headed over to 2nd family's for Thanksgiving dinner. Erik and Katie both made it down from University of Oregon-- Erik, to everyone's surprise, grew a beard! Craaazy. As his mom said, "I sent my son to Oregon a banker, and got back a lumberjack." HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. The extended family (of the Melins) was there, too-- Maggie had a friend visiting, plus her parents. Kinda cool. As usual, far too much delicious food. Stuffed turkey (mmmmm), ribs (mmmmmmm), sweet potatos, green beans, mashed potatos, two pies plus cheesecake... We browsed Black Friday ads, watched a movie, let Katie carefully distract her dad from putting on any Christmas music, and did the usual Thanksgiving activities.
Jimmie and Ian came over after dinner, too. More snacking continued til I left to stand in line at Fry's for Black Friday (about 1am).
Friday: in line at Fry's for 4 hours. Ran into a high school friend (Terence) I hadn't seen since graduation, which was entertaining. We probably annoyed his girlfriend and her little sister (and friends), being the old farts reminiscing about high school and what'd happened in the intervening 9 years. o_0 Once we got into Fry's, it was nuts too. Ended up about number 400 or so in line, I'm guessing-- from the front entrance to about 2/3rds or 3/4ths the way down the side, which meant once we got inside, it was huge lines just getting to individual service counters to pick up things like CPU's (Intel Q6600 + MB for $199, woohooo!). Crazy. Doors opened at 5am, got inside about 5:15am, checked out at 6:15am. That hurt. We thought about grabbing breakfast afterwards, but sanity set in and sleep became the priority.
Slept for a few hours, then drove up to visit (actual, by blood) family. Immediately noticed how much cooler it was in the Central Valley; the wind made the real difference. We skipped a 2nd turkey (!!!) and went out instead, but we did do dessert at Auntie Lori and Uncle Craig's. Not that I can complain too much about missing the turkey, since I do love sushi...
Saturday: Cousin Jason's wedding banquet was the next day. Ended up surrounded by relatives at the banquet-- we haven't had such a comprehensive gathering of all of the uncles, cousins, and the cousins' children (aka cousins-once-removed, or my nieces and nephews*) in a long time.
(only if you want to think of it that way................. I'd rather not! o_0 )
Sunday: after driving back Saturday night, Sunday was a pretty slow day. Thankfully. One restful day over the whole Thanksgiving weekend wasn't much, and it wasn't even all that much time spent resting-- Viet and I headed back to Los Angeles that evening.