Entries tagged with thanksgiving

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Ikea love

I got Twitter-mocked a bit yesterday for saying that going to Ikea puts me in the holiday spirit, but it sorta does, ok? Don't judge. Possibly it's true that practically any shopping at all does the same thing - but anyway, I did go to Ikea. I didn't buy much that had anything to do with Christmas, but still, Ikea has cute holiday stuff and it did sort of help put me in the mood.

It occurs to me that some people may think of Ikea differently than I do - i.e., you may think of it as a furniture store. And while I do buy furniture there from time to time, it's the non-furniture part of Ikea that I'm fond of. I think of it more as a really big housewares store, I guess you'd say. I came out of there today with batteries and spoons (for some reason we're always short on spoons) and toys - and frozen meatballs, because I love those darn things, and a couple of other things that I don't recall right now. (Also, Tuesday is apparently a good day to go to Ikea, because they were as close to not being busy as the Houston Ikea ever gets - meaning, near as I could tell, that there were several hundred people there instead of the usual several thousand.)

Let's see, we had a nice Thanksgiving but I don't have all that much to say about it. Nobody got on anybody's nerves to speak of, or got into a fight or anything, and that's what usually makes for a more memorable day, let's face it, so it's a good thing when it's not memorable. I love my relatives, but it's a pretty rare holiday when nobody's fighting.

I'm signed up for the new-version Holidailies, so I should be posting regularly in December. That doesn't start officially until next week, though. (And like last year, I'm going to be in Dallas the day it starts, so whether I'll actually be able to post that day is iffy.)

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Sunday night

I'm still laughing at fake book titles, because I am easy:
Harry Potter and the Deep and Very Special And Unique Pain That No One Could Ever Possibly Understand
(from the same place that the last one was from)

OK, so we went to see Harry Potter twice, and furthermore, Rob let me talk him into going, too, which rather surprised me. I'm much more likely to want to see movies multiple times than he is, and for both of us to see a movie two times in three days is unheard of, that I can recall. So I don't guess it's necessary for me to say that I liked it. It was dark, but not any moreso than the book, you know? And the main reason I wanted to go again was because there was so much detail packed into it. I am not ruling out seeing it again later, either.

I spent several hours chatting with my best friend from 10th grade on Friday night. Very weird. (We had a falling out over a boy - I didn't care so much about the boy, at the time, as I did about the fact that she was supremely catty about the whole thing - and we weren't really friends after that. But that was, god, 35 years ago, so who cares now?)

How can it be almost Thanksgiving? Seriously. It's just not possible. As usual, I have to bring rolls for Thanksgiving, which ought to be easy, except that I'm stressing out because there's no room in my freezer, so I couldn't just buy them yesterday when we went to the store and stash them away til then. At some point I'm going to have to brave a grocery store again. It was already far busier than normal yesterday and it's only going to get worse.

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Twice in a row! Let's party!

Apparently this time of year I get in the mood to post, or something. Hey, two days in a row!! We'll see if this continues, I'm not going to promise anything.

This totally needs to be a t-shirt. Or maybe a band name:
harry potter and the neverending teenage angst
(from Mark Reads Harry Potter)
Actually, I find it hard to believe that there is not already a band called Neverending Teenage Angst, come to think of it.

My class is ending Monday and I am sort of sad. Interaction with real live people twice a week! People that I mostly actually like, at that. (Learning things is just a bonus.)

I can't believe it's almost Thanksgiving already. The weekend after Thanksgiving

antheap is coming to visit (ok, in reality she's coming for work, but I tend to ignore that part) and the weekend after that I have volunteered to drive her to Austin - but not back again, because I have to be in Dallas right after that for a seminar. Hopefully the logistics on this will all work out.

Also, I got a Thanksgiving card from my insurance agent today. I suspect that this is in lieu of a Christmas card, but we will have to wait and see about that. Honestly, I don't remember having ever gotten a Thanksgiving card from anybody before. I knew they existed, in theory, but I don't remember getting any.

Also:
DORA AND MARTEN, OMG!!!! -- Hmm, I suspect I'm way too invested in this cartoon.

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WoW, and other slices of life

Have I mentioned that Col and I are playing WoW again? Well, we are. We were trying to finish Northrend before our memberships expired, but I don't think we're quite going to make it. I'm enjoying it enough that I volunteered to pay for another month, though. That should be plenty of time, near as I can tell. We're most of the way finished with Scolazar Basin (I don't think that's spelled right, but you get the idea) and we've already finished Zul'Drak, so all that's left is Storm Peaks and Icecrown. We are level 80 (woot!) and we both have Explorer titles and I even sprung for a fast mount (4000g for the training. Whew.). Then we're going back to LOTRO when that's finished.

I am about to take my midterm in the coding class. I should be studying right now, actually.

There are a whoppin' 5 items in the Etsy store now. (A couple more may be coming sometime tomorrow.)

Rob's movie report: He went to see The Fourth Kind this afternoon, the alien-abduction movie. He seemed to like it, although he didn't really have a whole lot to say about it. (He did make some comment about whether the "documentary" part of it was fake, at which I tried not to roll my eyes too obviously. Which could be why he didn't say much more about it.)

Oh, we are overloaded with invitations for Thanksgiving - my aunt, my sister, and my dad have all invited us. Daddy was third so he's getting left out, but we are going to try to make two stops on Thanksgiving Day and go to both Bryan and Austin. That should be doable. My sister has another significant other that she thinks is serious - more so than the last one, I hope! - and she's all anxious for us to meet him. Should be interesting.

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Thanksgiving weekend report

We spent Thanksgiving with my dad and his wife. It was pretty quiet, especially since Daddy slept for about an hour after dinner in his chair while the rest of us half-watched the football game and talked. Barbara had bought the dinner someplace, I don't know where - but it wasn't really too great, and I think she knew it. The turkey was pretty good, and the rolls were ok, but most of the rest of it sucked - green beans that didn't really taste cooked, a fruit salad covered with what was supposed to be coconut, I guess, but which tasted like hay... and so on. The sad thing (as far as I'm concerned, anyway) was that the turkey dinner is wasted on me and Rob, in the first place - neither one of us cares a bit about it. Last year I made pot roast and it was a big improvement as far as I was concerned.

We started putting up the Christmas decorations - I figure it's fair game as soon as Thanksgiving is over. I'm not really sure about the solar lights - they look alright but they seem kind of temperamental. I had found a wreath at Target that had lights on it that was battery-operated and we put it on the balcony door and it looks really good. And we had bought two little pre-lit trees - they seem to call them "porch trees" - and we put them inside where you could see them through the french doors, and the whole effect is pretty good. It may not win the decorating contest or anything but I don't care about that, I just wanted it to look nice. Everybody knows everybody here - well, I don't know everybody yet, but Rob mostly seems to! - and so it seemed like the thing to do to decorate since everybody else was. (I guess this is how people that live in subdivisions feel.)

Other than that we haven't done much this weekend - I have to admit that we watched a fair amount of the "Mork & Mindy" marathon on Sci-Fi yesterday - oh hush, it was funny - and there has been some WoW, as well as some game-playing on Rob's computer, too, I think*, and some reading of books, and on the whole it's been a nice relaxing weekend. I would suggest going to a movie tomorrow except the reviews for "Australia" don't really seem to be that great and I can't think what else we would see.

* Rob was a bit astonished to find that his games - he mostly likes combat flight-sim things - run better on the laptop than they did on the old computer. Considering that the old one was my mom's which might have had 512mb of memory but more likely had 256, while the new one has 3 gigs - and presumably a somewhat better video card, too - I don't find that quite so surprising. But I guess he thought that a laptop would automatically be slower, somehow!

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Gray Friday

I don't have much to say because I didn't really do much today. I played GuildWars with

columbina and folded fabric. (You can see pictures of some of the fabric on flickr.) It really is an obscene amount of fabric. I am going to have to try to figure out how many yards it is, when I get done. Although I probably don't want to know.

( I'll spare the uninterested the GuildWars part! )

I called this entry "Gray Friday" because there was no shopping going on here and it was a gray, gloomy, chilly day. It's been chilly since Wednesday but today I finally turned the heater on for the first time and the smoke alarm promptly went off. (It stopped after a few beeps, though, which is good because it's on the ceiling and I certainly can't turn it off easily.) Did you see the pictures of all the fools fighting to get in the shopping malls? Honestly, it's just nuts. Rob did actually go in Wal-Mart to pick up a couple of things late tonight, and he said it was pretty empty. I said, well, that sorta made sense because the crazy people came early and the sane people wouldn't go near the place today.

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The giving of thanks, and all that

I have what appears to be Spanish comment spam on the quilt weblog. I can't recall having ever had that before. Actually I haven't had any comment spam at all in a good while, which is nice. Maybe Blogger's been doing something that catches more of it. (Well, come to think of it, they're owned by Google now, and Gmail already had the best spam filter I've seen yet, so maybe that is not a coincidence.)

We had a very nice and stress-free Thanksgiving dinner. The one entree I can cook well without looking at a recipe is my mother's pot roast, and that's what I made. (It's very simple. You take a roast - we found a nice little Angus one - and you set it on a big sheet of foil inside a pan. Then you dump a whole package of onion soup mix on top of it, and add some salt and pepper, and then put a can of cream of mushroom soup on top of that. Then you fold the foil up around it to close it up. Bake for a couple of hours, open up the package a few minutes early so the top will brown, and voila! Roast in its own mushroom-and-onion-flavored gravy!) We had roast and salad and rolls, and Rob decided he wanted stuffing and mashed potatoes - talk about starch overload - so he fixed those himself. The stuffing came in a plastic container; I think it was Country Crock brand, and he said it was good. And we put it all on Grandma's china and sat down at the table with a tablecloth and everything and had a lovely meal. We were very happy with it, and when Rob loaded his plate up with all those multiple starchy things it looked like Thanksgiving dinner, too!

And we went to see Beowulf. Now, I'm ashamed to admit this, but I've never actually read the thing - and don't ask me how I managed to major in English without reading it, because I don't know. So I have no real idea how close they stayed with the story. (Hmm, going by the story summary in Wikipedia, parts are close and parts, not so much.) But it was certainly watchable and interesting, and oh my god, the animation was gorgeous. Honestly, from time to time I forgot it wasn't live-action. (Which is sorta odd, when you think about it. If live-action and animation become indistinguishable, what's the point, exactly? Well, except for cool underwater fights with dragons and things, which would be a bit difficult to do live-action.) And I have to admit that a tear might have been shed at the end. Just a tiny one.

Current Location: home

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I was intending to write a long entry today but I am tired and sick and grouchy and it's probably best that I just keep this short.

My mom is in the hospital at M.D. Anderson (that's the big cancer hospital in Houston). She is not really any worse than she was, except that they doubled the dose of steroids she's on and now she can't talk coherently at ALL. She seems to understand what you're telling her perfectly well, but when she goes to answer you the wrong words come out. You know how sometimes you mean to say one person's name and you say somebody else's instead? Well, she does that every single time. Like, when she means to say "Art" she says "C.L." instead (that's my dad), and when she means to say my sister's name she says mine, and I decided the other day that she may be messing up "yes" and "no" also. I think tomorrow when I go I'm going to make her nod or shake her head instead, and see where that gets us. I know I'm frustrated and I can just imagine how she must be feeling.

There is a ray of hope - or I'm choosing to take it that way, anyway. They are talking about doing surgery again. I figure if there was no hope at all, they wouldn't be considering it. I will probably have the final say on it, since she can't really tell them and I'm the one with power of attorney, god help me. I am going to ask a LOT of questions before I say yes, I know that. I'm hoping I will be able to tell how mom feels about it, too, even if she can't actually say so. Up to now she has been consistently in favor of the agressive approach. (But look where that's gotten us.)

We ended up having a decent Thanksgiving. We got invited to horn in on somebody else's dinner - one of Art's kids - and we accepted gladly. We were still invited to my aunt's in Bryan, of course, but I just didn't have the energy to go up there. The worst part was that we went to see Mom first, and she wanted to come with us to dinner. I felt so bad leaving her!

I have been sick all week - either a cold or allergies, it's hard to tell. I probably shouldn't even have been going to the hospital at all in that state, but I wasn't sneezing or anything, and I washed my hands a lot. (And how am I going to tell my mom, sorry, I can't come see you, I have a cold?) I think I was choosing to tell myself it was allergies, although the way it's been steadily progressing from runny nose to sneezing to cough all week, I suspect that I was probably wrong about that. Anyway, now I am to the coughing stage and I'm really tired of it. I did stay home and try to rest today but I don't know if it helped that much. I still feel exhausted.

(This was longer than I intended but it all poured out pretty fast. I've written much shorter entries that took much, much longer to write.)

Current Mood: relieved

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Thanksgiving

OK, this may get a little complicated.( Read more... )

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More on Ohio

I'm getting further & further behind.

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