Thanksgiving 2016

Ah, I didn’t want it to end.

First, a preliminary. Last Wednesday I got accepted by a major company to prepare tax returns on a part-time basis. Yay. Now perhaps I can earn some extra money in the free sixty or so hours I have every week (they can’t all be devoted to child care). However, I do have to pass the somewhat strident final exam I took earlier today. And to help with that I studied a little over ten hours over the four-day long holiday weekend.

As usual, after work got out on Wednesday, the wife and girls and I motored up to my parents’ house in northwestern PA. The weather was cool, a few inches of snow in mid-melt, creating some dense fog at times. Light, sporadic drizzling one or two afternoons. The house was cool in the mornings but warmed up nicely during the day, perfectly mirroring the weather outside.

Thanksgiving saw my brother and his family join all of us there. My nephew, a mathematics prodigy high school senior, is in the thick of college entrance exams and essays. I contributed some probably non-appreciated opening sentences completely out of left field. It was fun – perhaps I’ll blog some of them later this week. We all ate and drank, and ate and drank some more. I particularly enjoyed sampling some Zambuca, something I haven’t had in twenty or thirty years. Watched Planes, Trains and Automobiles later on, before tucking the little ones to bed.

Friday I took a solo drive into town – a forty-five minute excursion – and bought two used paperback Westerns for a buck. More on them tomorrow. And over the course of four days I put away 228 pages to finish Shelby Foote’s mammoth first trilogy on the Civil War. (It roughly covers the 20-month period from Fort Sumter to the Fredericksburg prelude in its 810 pages.)

We dined out on wings in the late afternoon and returned home to celebrate my mother’s 70th birthday. Since I’ll be 50 next year, the running joke is for her not to expect me to take care of her when she’s elderly and infirm – I’ll need someone to take care of me. Patch made a poster and Little One wrote a page of appreciation. And we ate more.

Saturday we went to brunch at my parents’ golf club and – surprise! – Santa merrily stopped by for a quick chat and sit with all the young’uns present. Later I took the girls to the indoor pool for two hours. Also took a scolding from the teen-age lifeguard for playing in the water with Patch on my shoulders. In the evening, after eating some more turkey leftovers, we indulged in an annual post-Thanksgiving tradition – watching Christmas Vacation. I stayed up late after everyone went to bed, watching Impractical Jokers and reading past midnight about the events of September 1862 around Sharpsburg, Maryland.

A nightmare woke me early Sunday morning and I continued with the morning study sessions. Me and Patch repeated our two-mile walk from Thursday morning. After lunch we enjoyed the Giants defeat of the hapless Browns. Packed all our gear up – not quite the logistical debacle Napoleon dealt with during his excursion to Moscow, but seemingly almost – loaded it into the SUV and bade goodbye to the parents and to our long holiday weekend. Sad, to quote our President-elect’s tweet sign-offs, though sad in a bittersweet as opposed to judgmental way.

Once home and once the little ones were in bed, I subjected myself to the Walking Dead with the wife – though I still have the show on notice and am watching it for her, not you, Walking Dead show! (Side note: I keep typing, freudianishly, Walking Dad instead of Walking Dead.)

Didn’t want the long weekend to end, I must echo, so I stayed up well past my bedtime, and now I’m suffering for it.

Anyhoo, a great four days!