Every year it's the same routine all over, all over
Oh yeah, I forgot to start writing up Thanksgiving Day. For the first time since the catastrophic tire failure of '017, instead going to bunny_hugger's parents, as they were not sure they could deal with the road construction that's blockaded our home. Fair enough.
Once more we arrived to find her parents had emptied seven family-size bags of potato chips into a bowl to eat while we got ready to eat later, and we ate the whole of it even though we always regret filling up on greasy salt instead of, you know, food. But after that bunny_hugger and I went for a little walk, taking her parents' dog for what is --- for her --- an unusually long walk around the park and a small slice of town. This all went well, and we didn't even have trouble when the dog saw another dog eighty times her size. When we got back her father asked about that house with the projection over the river that got smashed by a tree, and bunny_hugger reported that of course it was in the same shape it has been ever since it was smashed by a falling tree. I had failed to notice, myself.
Dinner was a couple Quorn roasts, which were themselves something of a struggle to get. The health food store we always got them at closed this year, forced out by a Trader Joe's opening right next to the Whole Foods that opened next to them. And turns out none of the other health food stores, nor the Whole Foods nor the Trader Joe's, carry Quorn roasts. Luckily there's ... uh ... the Meijer's chain that's meant to compete with Whole Foods, that forced Goodrich's Shop-Rite out of business a decade or so ago so it could open in that space, and they had Quorn roasts. From what we gather in Internet comments the roasts were rare on the ground this year. Might be a market in drop-shipping them.
Also brought from our house? A cheesecake. bunny_hugger made it from a mix that I bought from the son of one of my coworkers as some fundraising drive. She made it with a store-bought almond-nut pie crust that was fantastic and got better every day it was leftovers. Especially as she made some caramel to drizzle on it and it turns out caramel is surprisingly easier to make than we imagined and incredibly good to have. We're probably going to be making excuses to put caramel on things. Her parents protested that they had store-bought caramel and we didn't need to go to the bother. So it turns out, but we didn't know that when bunny_hugger made the decision to make some.
After the large but, somehow, scaled-back-from-previous-years dinner --- during which her father discussed how he could not believe that two of his friends didn't like Safety Not Guaranteed, a movie he pressed them into accepting the loan of the DVD for --- we got to the annual watching of A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. With her father asking if we'd seen it before. Yes; we're in danger of gathering some traditional jokes to make while watching it.
(On Safety Not Guaranteed: it's a pleasant enough movie that her father's inexplicably a superfan of. He even printed out and pasted to a door a picture of Aubrey Plaza from the film, and it so happens that before dinner I looked at it and wondered if he was still into the movie. Turns out he was.)
Somewhere along the line I found time to call my parents, as it was my mother's birthday. She's doing well, and she and my dad have moved into their new apartment, this time going for as far away from the garden level as they can. They're on the fourth floor in an apartment complex that's almost completely unpopulated. It's a bit wild. The weird off-level place I lived in as my first non-dorm apartment was never more than three-quarters empty.
Also something got bunny_hugger's father talking about his old interest in stereographic photography and he pulled out the viewer and some pictures he'd taken back in the day. Here he told us that the reason he sold off the camera and got out of the hobby was he couldn't find anywhere to develop the photos anymore (besides the trouble of developing film, you also had to have a place that understood no, these were not duplicate prints, they were subtly different ones to provide parallax). I'm aware there are digital cameras that can do stereographic pictures. Back in the glory days of the '000s there were even digital cameras with two lenses at once, but these days I gather you take a picture and then follow directions where to move the camera to take a second picture. That might be fun but I imagine he wouldn't be interested in getting a camera that did that, nor in the trouble of printing out the small-size photographs needed to fit in his viewer.
We ended up leaving a little past 10 or so, surprisingly early for us. This was probably as well; when I got home I staggered around a while and then went to bed for a solid twelve hours, getting up still feeling full. Might have overdone the eating a little, but you know how that sort of thing goes. Can't wait for Christmas.
Next up? We're into May already, and that means Anthrohio! From the Thursday night and Friday of the con:
The night before. In a dozen hours this hallway would be stuffed full of people wearing fake fur.
I forget why there were little plastic ghosts --- they're about the size of a penny --- scattered around as decorations but here's some of them.
And here's a bunch of little ghosts standing in a not at all suspicious circle around two fallen comrades.
I guess this guy's thing was why the ghosts were around. We didn't get to the Ghostbusters panel, though.
Something about the extremely dull, utilitarian nature of this schedule caught my eye. You know what I'm like.
And some more bits of the convention gathering with the promise of imminent fun. I don't think that Jenga tower is supposed to be an optical illusion but it's looking close to one, isn't it?
Trivia: The first edition of The Rough Guide to Greece was dedicated to a nonnuclear future. Source: On The Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks, Simon Garfield. I assume a future without a nuclear war (the first edition came out in 1982) but can't swear it's not non-nuclear-power.
Currently Reading: Poincaré and the Three-Body Problem, June Barrow-Green.