Turkeylicious

I don’t want to jinx anything, but I think we’ve managed to outlast the death plague at our house. After a rough couple of days, The Girl, The Boy and I all seem to have recovered more or less. The Wife never came down with it – something the three of us find to be VERY suspicious.

With the plague gone, we can get back to business as usual around here. Namely, me trying to recount my increasingly fuzzy memories of events that happened weeks ago, but I was too busy/lazy to blog about them within a reasonable amount of time.

And so, I give you now a fairly decent recounting of our Thanksgiving weekend. Much like a fine wine or a stinky cheese ball, I’m sure this tale has only gotten better now that’s had a little time to ferment.

On the day before Thanksgiving, we packed all our crap into our car and headed out to The Wife’s parents’ retirement place in Georgetown, or as I like to call it, Shady Acres. It’s a very nice place and probably quite the hoot if you’re in your early eighties. We’re not quite in our eighties yet, so we had to make our own fun.

With a very minimal amount of assistance from The Wife, a very good traditional Thanksgiving feast was prepared and eaten. I’m not a huge fan of any of the traditional holiday foods individually, but the combination of all of them is perfect once or twice a year. Being a connoisseur of everything edible, The Girl enjoyed her very first Thanksgiving as well, although I suspect she may not have had enough to eat.

The weather was pretty nice all weekend, so we spent a good deal of time outside. Some people would have stayed out there all weekend long if they could have. The Girl was particularly fond of the slide at a local playground. For his part, The Boy gathered up his plastic sword and golf clubs and spent some time playing Zelda in the backyard.

When they were indoors, the kids played games, read books, helped rearrange things and enjoyed dancing along with an animatronic holiday dog that really just defies description. You’ll just have to trust me on that. And since they’re our kids, there was also a fair amount of insane behavior mixed in as well.

The Boy and I figured out that the golf course behind the house was closed Thanksgiving afternoon, so we hit the links for a round of unsanctioned golf. Really we just walked along the course and checked out all of the signs, which The Boy found to be nearly as fascinating as studying maps. During our walk, we also had some encounters with nature – namely a family of deer in a thicket along the path and particularly feisty squirrel.

One afternoon, we headed out to a nearby dam so The Boy could burn off some of his excess energy. When throwing rocks into the lake got tiresome, The Boy surprised everyone by getting all super-adventurous and climbing around on the rocks down by the water. Not too bad for a child who refuses to stand on the couch because of the dizzying heights. The Wife was at first leery of the considerable drop-off at the edge of the pier, but she eventually loosened up enough to get within spitting distance of the water.

On Saturday, we took The Boy to the Inner Space Cavern in Georgetown, which offers a nice hour-long underground tour that we thought he might like. As it turns out, he was really impressed with the love testers they have near the gift shop. I was impressed by the roundness of the urinals in the men’s room. The Wife was impressed by nothing, but that’s just par for the course.

Once we got underground, The Boy stuck close to his mother but he overcame his six-year old fears of the unknown and had a good time. He thought the cave was pretty cool and I have to agree with him. The Wife and I had been there before, but I still found it interesting and beautiful. And like I said before, I liked the urinals.

Somewhere over the weekend, we also shopped a lot. Since I don’t really like shopping, I’ve pretty much blocked it all out of my mind, but I’ve got the credit bills to remind me.

And when we got back, The Cat pretended not to have noticed that we had ever left.

Fries at the bottom of the bag

• Over the weekend, I actually listened to the words in the song “Bootylicious” for the first time. That’s a dumb song. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that “Fergalicious” is also probably pretty dumb.
• Way back when I started writing this post, Reveille VIII had just stopped by our offices at work one morning. She was even nice enough to help out with some of the paperwork.
• One of our student workers transformed my coat rack into what can only be called a Christmas Pole. It surprisingly has not yet caught on fire and is actually very nice to look at.
• Is it just me or is The Price is Right starting to look an awful lot like Mardi Gras in Las Vegas?
• I thought our local FedEx guy’s definition of a parking spot was a bit liberal, but then I saw the DHL guy.
• The CNN web guys had a busy week. Not only did they discover a new Kennedy, but they also invented a new system of counting.