Thanksgiving 2022
Nov. 24th, 2022 10:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sorcyressFor the Thanksgiving break this year, I am doing Many Hours In Car.
The journey began on Wednesday. I finished out the school day, walked home with workbestie, and then had just enough time to finish packing and wash a few dishes before my parents showed up and swooped me into the rental car to drive to Connecticut. We grabbed fastfood lunch along the way, and had a mostly uneventful trip (mild traffic, I suppose, but it was the Wednesday of the holiday long weekend).
Grandpa Gus1 had surgery earlier this week to help his general "being old" stuff go better, so we are not staying in their house like we normally do when we visit. It's a little weird not sleeping in the Haunted Bedroom2 but we're instead staying a few miles down the road in a twee little airBnB. It's got gorgeous lake views, an enthusiastic duck motif in the decor, and a pretty wonderful little gas fireplace that me and the parents are currently quite enjoying.
Anyways, we went over last night to get dinner and hang out with Uncle Tim3 and the grandparents. Tim is also a teacher, so he and I spent a _bunch_ of time talking pedagogy which was *great*! It felt super respectful and wonderful to get to share teaching stories and be treated like a peer and an expert. If we're doing really-small-Thanksgiving this year, I'm thankful for that excellent connection.
Tim and the parents and I played a few rounds of Splendor (of which I won two of three, after loudly declaring during the first one that I was pretty shit at the game. I got a lot of well-deserved razzing for that. My record today was much poorer, but I still got in a couple good hits!). Eventually, we went back to the lake-cottage and mom joined me in my weekly "watch-taskmaster-with-Tailsteak"4 which was very cozy!
Today we ambled over by way of a quick hit at the grocery store (breakfast! car snax! chicken stock! bubbly non-alcoholic sparkle drinks!) and once again spent a long and lovely day. The six of us hung out, chatted about various things, mom did some techology-help for St. Grandma5, played a lot more splendor, went on walks, and of course ate a bunch of food. I ate considerably more pie than turkey, as is the right and proper thing to do.
I also got to go out with St G'ma to help feed the horses. She appreciated having an assistant who could both follow instructions and figure out obvious things (like how to close the hay-bags, which seemed _extremely_ obvious to me but she mentioned having some assistants fail to do it well) and I appreciated getting to meet the current two. Toby is her horse and he is an absolute angel, all Companion-white and placid and lovely. Ernie is a boarder and has an impressive set of burrs in his mane right at his forehead, giving the appearance of a unicorn horn (with lovely autumn brown colouration). He's dumb as a rock, and I was explicitly warned to bed careful of kicking.
I never really got the horse girl gene that shows up intermittently in the Lastnames, but I do rather like getting to meet the beasts occasionally, in much the same way as I enjoyed spending time with the three giant dogs. I am obviously biased forever towards Belle, who is tall enough to rest her head on the kitchen table (and mostly well trained enough not to). I don't want me a dog, but _gods_ do I like me a big friendly older dog. Too tired to jump but spry enough to lean against you and get thumped.
In the early evening, Tim's wife Lynn showed up and chatted enthusiastically with mom about the new house while Tim tried desperately to win a game of Splendor against me and Da. (He did succeed! We're all very proud of him!). Eventually that wound down and I got to retreat to the couch with my book --Shannon once described our family events as "and we all wolf down the meal so we can get to the good part of the afternoon, where we all ignore each other and occasionally eat pie".
Tomorrow we'll go back over for a nice bit, and then eventually me and the parents will get in the car and drive to Maryland, so they can wake up much too early on Saturmorn and look at the potential new house and do inspection and paperwork and pre-purchasing nonsense. I am going to steal the rental car and go harass Veronica. I am _very_ excited about it.
I hope whatever sort of rest you got today was fulfilling.
~Sor
MOOP!
1: His given name is not actually Gus, but apparently when mom was courting da, she asked what to call him, and he told her of a patient he'd had whose daughter-in-law called him Gus, as a good father-in-law name. So thus!
2: It's the one with the most beds, so we usually wound up in it since there are more of our-fork than any other part of the clan. Especially this year, in which we have had a maximum of seven people, three of whom are the soon-to-be-once-again Maryland-Lastnames. ((Yes, us kids count as the Maryland branch even though we currently live in, respectively, Boston, Seattle, and Rome.))
3: Dad is one of five. Him, Pete, Jenny, Tim, Chris (with the last two being identical twins). Pete, Jenny, and Chris have a spouse and two children each (and Pete is the show-off of the family since now he has a ~grandchild~ but the Maryland-Lastnames of my generation are _definitely_ black sheep), Tim has a spouse and a really friendly dog and is the one of the five who actually lives near the farm.
4: I dunno if I've ever mentioned that we're doing this? I started him on series 5, on account of that being the best series, and he enjoyed it enough that we went back to series 1, and charged our way through. When we finished UK13, we popped over to NZ1, which we have just finished up with. Next is UK14, then NZ2-3, and then we probably start getting into the non-English stuff, none of which I've watched. I'm quite looking forward to it!
5: So named because she absolutely is, but the clincher was her managing to stand in exactly the right spot in all my parents' wedding photos such that she had a lovely candle-sconce halo.
The journey began on Wednesday. I finished out the school day, walked home with workbestie, and then had just enough time to finish packing and wash a few dishes before my parents showed up and swooped me into the rental car to drive to Connecticut. We grabbed fastfood lunch along the way, and had a mostly uneventful trip (mild traffic, I suppose, but it was the Wednesday of the holiday long weekend).
Grandpa Gus1 had surgery earlier this week to help his general "being old" stuff go better, so we are not staying in their house like we normally do when we visit. It's a little weird not sleeping in the Haunted Bedroom2 but we're instead staying a few miles down the road in a twee little airBnB. It's got gorgeous lake views, an enthusiastic duck motif in the decor, and a pretty wonderful little gas fireplace that me and the parents are currently quite enjoying.
Anyways, we went over last night to get dinner and hang out with Uncle Tim3 and the grandparents. Tim is also a teacher, so he and I spent a _bunch_ of time talking pedagogy which was *great*! It felt super respectful and wonderful to get to share teaching stories and be treated like a peer and an expert. If we're doing really-small-Thanksgiving this year, I'm thankful for that excellent connection.
Tim and the parents and I played a few rounds of Splendor (of which I won two of three, after loudly declaring during the first one that I was pretty shit at the game. I got a lot of well-deserved razzing for that. My record today was much poorer, but I still got in a couple good hits!). Eventually, we went back to the lake-cottage and mom joined me in my weekly "watch-taskmaster-with-Tailsteak"4 which was very cozy!
Today we ambled over by way of a quick hit at the grocery store (breakfast! car snax! chicken stock! bubbly non-alcoholic sparkle drinks!) and once again spent a long and lovely day. The six of us hung out, chatted about various things, mom did some techology-help for St. Grandma5, played a lot more splendor, went on walks, and of course ate a bunch of food. I ate considerably more pie than turkey, as is the right and proper thing to do.
I also got to go out with St G'ma to help feed the horses. She appreciated having an assistant who could both follow instructions and figure out obvious things (like how to close the hay-bags, which seemed _extremely_ obvious to me but she mentioned having some assistants fail to do it well) and I appreciated getting to meet the current two. Toby is her horse and he is an absolute angel, all Companion-white and placid and lovely. Ernie is a boarder and has an impressive set of burrs in his mane right at his forehead, giving the appearance of a unicorn horn (with lovely autumn brown colouration). He's dumb as a rock, and I was explicitly warned to bed careful of kicking.
I never really got the horse girl gene that shows up intermittently in the Lastnames, but I do rather like getting to meet the beasts occasionally, in much the same way as I enjoyed spending time with the three giant dogs. I am obviously biased forever towards Belle, who is tall enough to rest her head on the kitchen table (and mostly well trained enough not to). I don't want me a dog, but _gods_ do I like me a big friendly older dog. Too tired to jump but spry enough to lean against you and get thumped.
In the early evening, Tim's wife Lynn showed up and chatted enthusiastically with mom about the new house while Tim tried desperately to win a game of Splendor against me and Da. (He did succeed! We're all very proud of him!). Eventually that wound down and I got to retreat to the couch with my book --Shannon once described our family events as "and we all wolf down the meal so we can get to the good part of the afternoon, where we all ignore each other and occasionally eat pie".
Tomorrow we'll go back over for a nice bit, and then eventually me and the parents will get in the car and drive to Maryland, so they can wake up much too early on Saturmorn and look at the potential new house and do inspection and paperwork and pre-purchasing nonsense. I am going to steal the rental car and go harass Veronica. I am _very_ excited about it.
I hope whatever sort of rest you got today was fulfilling.
~Sor
MOOP!
1: His given name is not actually Gus, but apparently when mom was courting da, she asked what to call him, and he told her of a patient he'd had whose daughter-in-law called him Gus, as a good father-in-law name. So thus!
2: It's the one with the most beds, so we usually wound up in it since there are more of our-fork than any other part of the clan. Especially this year, in which we have had a maximum of seven people, three of whom are the soon-to-be-once-again Maryland-Lastnames. ((Yes, us kids count as the Maryland branch even though we currently live in, respectively, Boston, Seattle, and Rome.))
3: Dad is one of five. Him, Pete, Jenny, Tim, Chris (with the last two being identical twins). Pete, Jenny, and Chris have a spouse and two children each (and Pete is the show-off of the family since now he has a ~grandchild~ but the Maryland-Lastnames of my generation are _definitely_ black sheep), Tim has a spouse and a really friendly dog and is the one of the five who actually lives near the farm.
4: I dunno if I've ever mentioned that we're doing this? I started him on series 5, on account of that being the best series, and he enjoyed it enough that we went back to series 1, and charged our way through. When we finished UK13, we popped over to NZ1, which we have just finished up with. Next is UK14, then NZ2-3, and then we probably start getting into the non-English stuff, none of which I've watched. I'm quite looking forward to it!
5: So named because she absolutely is, but the clincher was her managing to stand in exactly the right spot in all my parents' wedding photos such that she had a lovely candle-sconce halo.