Friday Five: Turkey Talk
1. On what day do you celebrate Thanksgiving? The last Thursday in November, same as the rest of the country. Thanksgiving isn’t like your birthday. You can’t just celebrate it on the weekend because the real day was a school night.
2. How do you traditionally celebrate this food-filled holiday? Since we moved back stateside, we’ve gone to my grandma’s house to meet up with some other extended family.
3. How do you like your stuffing cooked (in the bird, separately in a dish, store bought, etc.)? I don’t like stuffing, actually.
4. What is your favorite dessert to eat on Thanksgiving and who makes it? I like cake and ice cream. I’m good with store-bought cakes as long as they’re not frosted.
5. Can you name five things you are thankful for? God, being back at Church, my awesome friends, Harry Potter, and my infinite patience.
I didn’t do much of note last weekend. I unexpectedly got to lector on Sunday. I don’t know whose turn it was, but I don’t have any more Sundays until next semester. I was totally unprepared, but there were no difficult words, just really long passages. Thanks for not letting me stumble, Holy Spirit.
This has been a strange week. We haven’t had a day off since Labor Day, so everything seemed all topsy-turvy this week. I’d forgotten I didn’t have to go to 280 on Monday, but I stayed for the review session anyway. I had a question and got it answered, and then I had lunch with Andrew and Jen, so all was not wasted.
On Monday, I went with Sara, Grace (Sara’s GoF trip friend), Scott, Andrew, Hana, Dan, and… the last person, who’s name I can’t remember, to Adele’s. Sara had a ton of points to blow, since theater keeps her from eating at the Diner. It was an awesome time. I love my friends.
Apparently all our audience analyses for Comm sucked. He had them scored, but decided not to give them back so as to not crush us all. I thought I did better on this one than my last one. I avoided analyzing the audience as “twenty-four eighteen- to twenty-one-year-olds,” so there’s a point in my favor. The biggest problem I have with not getting them back is that I don’t know what exactly I did wrong. How can I do better if I don’t know what to do better than?
I was running insanely late on Tuesday morning. Luckily, 301 was in the library, so I could stay in for Honey Nut Cheerios instead of trying to run to the Diner for a bagel and then back around to the library. I live far too close to McKeldin for that kind of mad dash. It was also raining that morning, but class in the library was vaguely interesting. Auerbach invented a group presentation for us to do on Frankenstein. I’m covering contemporaneous reviews, which doesn’t sound hard at all. Then again, I got another B on my last paper, so I’m pretty much guaranteed a B in that class. I can live with that, but it’s frustrating to have done (what I think is) good work and get straight B’s. I feel like I haven’t even improved.
Tuesday night I went on yet another Adele’s trip. Most of us opted out of focus dates this semester, so we got a $40 spending cap for the last few weeks instead. It kicks in on Sunday, so the people with huge surpluses rushed for their last chance to take half a dozen friends to Adele’s. Sara covered Monday, Dan had Tuesday. Guy came on Tuesday, which was awesome because I finally got to see him. I hate losing track of people over time. We had ten people that time. As it turns out, Adele’s doesn’t seat groups over eight, so we split into two tables of five. My table had Hana, Dan, Guy, and Nick (a first-year from Wicomico). I finally had something other than a cheeseburger, since I’d had that Monday. I like habits; they’re comfortable. Again, dinner was an awesome time.
Wednesday was an odd day. I stayed on campus, but I didn’t leave my room until about noon since 280 was canceled outright. I met Scott and Andrew at the Diner, where we also ran into Cassie and Nick (from my astro lab last semester). Then Cassie’s boyfriend and Guy joined us. I never would have thought I’d like being with big groups so often, but group meals are some of my favorite times, period. I bought lunch for Andrew and Scott, which put me back on track since I’d spent no points Tuesday. We had to cut lunch short because I had to get over to Jimenez for my Spanish interview.
The interviews were up on the fourth floor, in my TA’s office. Man, that was a lot of stairs after a fast walk. The first interview took a while, which made me nervous. I went second. I was nervous, and told her that (in Spanish!), but I could tell she was impressed. So I nailed it. Yay me. (Does that translate?) Andrew came over after I got back and packed my last few things. He’s the first non-relative I managed to rope into watching Joan of Arcadia with me — and he liked it! We were in the middle of the second episode when my mom showed up. He helped me carry my things down, though I’ve managed my mammoth bags by myself before.
I got back and unpacked a bit. My mom, the rugrats, and I went to Ruby Tuesday for dinner. Our server reminded me a lot of Greg’s friend David. It started to snow while we were eating. Of course I left all my heavy gear at school when it got frigid down here. Campus is not that far north of here!
Thanksgiving was the perfect lazy day. I woke up late, found some breakfast, and got dressed around 1pm. We left for my grandma’s house around 3:30. The food was fabulous, as always. My grandma can cook. I’d had a feeling my mom would try to talk me into saying grace. She’s done it every single year, except last year, and then she picked on my dad because he was in RCIA. She tends to volunteer other people to do things. That’s not to say that she never volunteers for things, but I get tired of her volunteering me. At least my intuition is aroused easily lately, so I was prepared.
Yesterday, I did some homework so I wouldn’t feel I’d wasted the whole weekend. Megan and Stephanie are home for break, and wanted to do something, but they couldn’t figure out what, so I went out with my family… again. We had dinner at IHOP (so much yay!), then went to see GoF… again. I’d never seen a movie more than once in theaters, but I knew I didn’t quite get GoF the first time, so it was a good chance to break that habit of mine. It was so much better the second time. I cried. Since I already knew the major things, I had a chance to look around and listen for things I’d missed the first time. My family enjoyed it. Ryan was really tired, but not scared. I wrote a personal review for my LJ (if you’re not on my flist, or on LJ, go do it, and let me know so I can friend you). Now, about that series re-read….
I have done mostly nothing today. I cleaned my bathroom and did another load of laundry. I hate chores, but I love being clean and having clean things, so I do them anyway. I really like Nickelback’s “Photograph” and Gorillaz’s “Feel Good, Inc.” but I am hearing them far too often on the radio this weekend. Nickelback gets seriously overplayed. I like the radio, but there should be more variety than that among the four stations I listen to.
Thursday night, I think, I decided that, since the Good Ship redesign is finished, I should go back to my personal blog archive project. I only got through about 200 entries, but it’s just copying and pasting now. The problem is the framework. The GS redesign was my first attempt at XHTML, so now I intend to use XHTML all the time. That means I have to convert almost 200 files. I knew there had to be something I could download to do it for me, so I Googled and discovered HTML Tidy… but only as a Linux program-type-thingie. (All I know about Linux is it’s an OS and has that cute penguin logo.) So I did some more Googling and discovered HTML-Kit. Oh, dear. I was IMing Sara at the time, but I was very interested in our conversation, so I pretty much drowned in it. HTML-Kit, as I told Sara, is the Firefox of Notepad. It is at once the simplest and most complex source code editor I’ve ever seen. I love it. It has HTML Tidy, so it’ll convert my HTML files to XHTML with only a few mistakes. I still love Notepad, but whoa. It can do everything for you, or only what you want it to. It’s just… I’m geeking out. Check it out for yourself.
No plans for tonight, but I might give Megan and Steph a call. Or maybe I will watch Finding Nemo. Decisions, decisions.
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