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Thanksgiving Summary

Jason — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 03:22:04 +0000

Well, Thanksgiving has come and gone and it was definitely an enjoyable one this year.

As per usual, I woke up bright and early to head over to my parents house for our traditional putting up of the christmas tree and such. This year, I helped with thanksgiving dinner again (assembling the lasagna and making the lemon meringue pie were my tasks). Unlike last year though, we didn’t do turkey. But that was perfectly fine with me.

My mom had a migrane headache the day before so she was running a little bit late with preparations so we ended up starting doing the tree after the Macy’s parade started. But it seems like everyone was running late (since they changed the parade route this year) so it worked out. The christmas tree has seen better days. Some branches are a bit droopy this year and some parts of the top are being held on by zip ties. The thought was that it’s going to have to be replaced soon. Dah. Especially since all the trees out there are pre-lit which seem to break more often.

The afternoon lead to some Madden with my Dad. I finally broke my horrific losing streak and we *almost* got our franchise mode game up to the playoffs. One more play and we’ll be there, but it’s harder to organize now that I live further away than I used to.

Dinner time arrived and with it came my roommates (along with the Strawberry Shortcake Cake that Wassy made to bring over. Mmmm) and my sister and her husband. The rest of the evening was thoroughly enjoyable, I thought. Dinner was tasty and fun and after we broke out Apples to Apples and played a game which ended up being a really really fun time.

As per usual, I know I left out a bunch of stuff, but the most important bit was that it was a great start to vacation. Lots of fun hanging out with my friends and family.

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

Jason — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 21:26:56 +0000

4:00. The day before Thanksgiving. Sitting at my desk at work…watching the clock tick slowly by…

Yep, it’s that time again. The long wait before vacation begins. And after what I did today at work I could really use all 5 days that I took off (took off Monday just for good measure) to recover.

I had to delve into one of our old programs that’s technically unmaintained (it was never migrated over to our new development platform) but still in use to add a feature somebody requested. This program is held together by the coding equivalent of duct tape and chewing gum. In fact, when it was overheard that I would be working in this program, I was instructed to not go anywhere even remotely close to the printing code. Because, and I quote this exactly: “You’re just better off not going there…” spoken in a tone of voice suggesting some deep rooted trauma, suppressed by the ages suddenly bubbling to the surface.

So after getting the morning trying to get the program to actually run properly on my machine (setting the tone for what was to come), I set about trying to wedge a new feature into the 5 year old, horribly documented and strung together code.

Can I go home now?

I spent last night poking around photoshop and trying some things out. I ended up creating a neat looking (in my opinion anyway) outer space nebula/star field background that I’m not quite sure what to do with. I was thinking of trying to transform it into some sort of desktop wallpaper for the heck of it. Maybe put in a (bright) star and a couple planets or something. See if I can turn it into an artsy type project as a break from bashing my head against the wall with web design things.

It’ll expand my photoshop skillz at any rate, even if it ends up sucking. I’m already using some stuff I never got into before (adjustment and clipping layers, specifically. Extremely useful little features). I’ll probably spend some time over my vacation poking away at it and seeing what I can do.

Turkey Day Plans (Minus The Turkey)

Jason — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 14:00:34 +0000

It looks like plans are beginning to shape up for Thanksgiving this week, and it couldn’t come soon enough for me. I’ve used a vacation day to turn the 4 day weekend into a 5 day weekend and I could use the time off.

As per tradition, I’ll be heading over to my parents house early on. This year to help prep the lemon meringue pie and the lasagna (we’re having a non traditional thanksgiving dinner this year. No turkey) and put up the christmas tree like we do every year. New this year though my roommates are going to be joining my family for dinner later on (and bringing a tasty strawberry shortcake cake for desert. Mmmmm).

As far as what I’ll be doing in the meantime, I’ve been feeling the itch to start working again on some of my personal web design type projects that have been floating around in limbo for a while. I opened up the work that I was doing on my mom’s website last night and I’m not really sure I like where it’s going anymore. Sigh. This project is becoming epic.

Too…Much…Food

Jason — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 13:30:34 +0000

Thanksgiving was yesterday, and I spent the day mostly over at my parents hanging out with the family.

I arrived a little bit before 9 for the traditional putting up of the christmas tree thanksgiving morning. We were a bit worried that my parent's dog would try to eat the tree, but she actually seemed to be ok with it for the most part. The tree was put up without much incident. I didn't even have to take it apart and put it back together again because I screwed up which is something I normally do. Usually after it's all done somebody says "Hey, that looks a little weird" and it turns out I screwed up one branch somewhere in the middle requiring me to take the whole thing apart to fix it. But no problems this year!

After we put the tree up there was a break for lunch and dinner preparation. Had to finish off prepping the turkey and then it was shoved in the oven. There was a little…incident. The recipe we used called for stating the turkey in the oven at 500 degrees for 30 minutes (to get the skin nice and brown) However…when we were doing that the house was starting to fill with smoke. And we set off pretty much all the smoke alarms in the house. My dad wandered in and wanted to see what was wrong. We thought we were doing things wrong, but as it turns out, that's exactly what was supposed to happen, according to Wassy who was my go-to turkey consultant for the day.

Sleepy Sleepy Dog

The time between lunch and dinner was taken up by decorating the christmas tree and letting the dog sleep on my lap while waiting for the turkey to get done. As evidenced by the picture on the right there.

The turkey ended up being really, really good. Exactly as it should have been, all tender and good tasting. All the rest of the thanksgiving food was good as well, so it turned out being a really nice meal. So nice that I ate way too much. But that seems like what you're supposed to do on Thanksgiving, so that's a good thing!

After we ate, my sister and her husband came over and we played Apples to Apples. And after a fun game of that…there was pie. We were a bit worried about the pie, especially the lemon meringue because when my Mom was moving it from the kitchen counter to the fridge, she tipped it a bit, causing some lemon flavored liquid to run out…which should not have happened. After draining the pie in the sink and putting it in the fridge it looked like everything was ok… But the mysterious pie leakage was never really explained. It ended up being a good pie. Lemon meringue is my favorite pie type.

All and all a very good Thanksgiving I thought. And now I have the remaining 3 days of the long weekend to hang out and get some stuff done around the house. I still need to do a little tidying in my bedroom after getting most of the cleaning done the other day.

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I'm Thankful For Exploding Pies

Jason — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 16:32:38 +0000

Well, another fun thanksgiving this year. As always, we like to keep things fairly small and just have a nice dinner with the immediate family.

Before the activities officially started, I was watching the Today show on NBC and it quickly became apparent they had run out of stories to cover. They were doing a story about a kid (couldn't have been more than 7-8 years old) who choked on a cheez-it at school and his best friend saved him by performing the Heimlich maneuver. The bad part about this story was the fact they had both the kid and his friend on to interview them. It was…painful. Both kids were camera shy and had a hard time saying anything. I had to turn the channel for a bit since I couldn't watch the trainwreck any longer.

The day officially started out around 9-10am when the traditional assembling/decorating of the Christmas tree while watching the Macy's Thanksgiving day parade took place. As always, my dad supplied the "It's too early!" comments as we were putting up the tree and my mom continued to want to put the lights on as we went which is totally against the tradition. Dunno how much longer that tree is going to last though. Getting kinda ragged and the base is a bit tippy this year. We also watched a little of the National Dog Show (long enough to see the dog that looked a lot like a mop) before switching over to football for the rest of the afternoon.

I ended up falling asleep during the Green Bay/Detroit game because it was kinda boring. Apparently, I slept through the interesting part of the game where Detroit tried to mount a comeback. I woke up a few minutes into the Dallas/Jets game to find that my sister and her husband had arrived. We hung out around my parents house for a bit and then we headed over to my place (minus my dad who was watching the jets get creamed) for some Wii bowling.

We headed out to Buffalo Head, the traditional Thanksgiving dinner location when we eat out (which we did this year, as opposed to my mom cooking last year). The roads were a little icy as my dad found out several times We thankfully arrived in one piece, but it was scary there in a few spots. True to past thanksgivings, nobody had the turkey special. I ended up with some stuffed shells that were pretty good. Somebody else in the restaurant had ordered a slice of lemon meringue pie for desert which got me wanting some pie. Apparently my mom wanted some too since she said she'd make one when we got home.

I hung out at my place for an hour or so before heading back to my parents for pie and to watch Grey's Anatomy. The pie was a little more eventful than expected. A couple bites into his, my dad doubled over and made something of a surprised noise. I can't remember exactly what he said, but when he straightened up again it had looked like his pie exploded all over his shirt. We're not entirely sure what happened, but it was very entertaining. Well, for us anyway. It's not like he shoved the pie towards him when he was taking a bite. Straight down fork movement. The best theory we could come up with is some kind of sabotage.

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Thanksgiving And More

Jason — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 13:45:55 +0000

I’ve been a bit busy/too lazy recently to update here, so I’m going to catch up on a couple days worth of activities here.

Thanksgiving was fun. I woke up that morning with dreams of getting myself a $100 XBox 360 from amazon.com due to a promotion they were running. Unfortunately, that wasn’t to be. The load crashed amazons servers for about 15-20 minutes and by the time I got in, it was sold out since they were only offering 1000 of them. Oh well, it was worth a try. Both my helpers came up empty too. (I had my dad and a friend of mine madly refreshing as well).

So I went over to my parents house in the morning to do the traditional Christmas decoration setup. We get the argument portion of the holiday over and done with there by arguing about the most efficient method of setting up the tree (as mentioned before, it’s a nice artificial one. Looks pretty real until you get close to it). During which, we watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade and then I somehow convinced my dad to watch a little of the national dog show. Not that I really wanted to watch it myself. I just wanted to see if I could get him to do it.

Dinner was good. It’s been a long time since I’ve had turkey that wasn’t in a sandwich. My mom didn’t enjoy the cooking quite so much as we enjoyed the eating though. I have a feeling we’re going to be going out to eat again next year.

So Black Friday rolls around and I get the stupid idea to go out later in the afternoon to pick up some items, as well as check around and see if there happened to be a Nintendo Wii out there that had been overlooked in the mad rush. Of course there wasn’t. And it was still a mad rush out there. According to my sister who works at the Staples across the street from Best Buy, people were lining up there starting at 6PM thanksgiving day and by the time she got into work in the morning, the line had already gone way past several of the other stores in that same section of buildings. That’s just…nuts.

So this afternoon I’m going to a little gathering with some friends where we’re going to test out the party abilities of the Nintendo Wii. Been looking forward to this for a while. I guess we’re going to have 4 controllers and a bunch of game type things. My arm is going to be sooo sore tomorrow.

Time Stopped

Jason — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 17:55:48 +0000

Time slows down when you’re waiting for a 4 day vacation to kick off. 3.116 hours to go.

I’m going over to my parents tonight to have a pre-Thanksgiving dinner (homemade pizza, mmm), and to discuss what we’re actually doing for Thanksgiving tomorrow. We obviously love to plan things in advance around here. I think it’s just going to be figuring out when I’m supposed to be coming over, but I can’t turn down pizza, so over I go.

3.066 hours to go now.