Weekend at Home
I've had the past few days off work due to the Thanksgiving holiday, which has been nice. On Thursday morning I flew to Salt Lake from San Francisco. It was nice to fly direct - it's been a while since I've flown anywhere direct. While our custom in years past has been to have a turkey dinner on Thanksgiving, things this year were a little different because my uncle is on graveyard shifts and was working on Thanksgiving, so we decided to push the dinner to Friday. This left Thursday fairly open, so my mom and I went to see the movie "Christmas with the Kranks," which had received some of the worst reviews I've read as of late. Now, personally I thought some of the scathing reviews were a little over the top, but I have to admit that the movie wasn't the best film I've seen this year, which is too bad since I really like the people that produced it. I mean, as a fun holiday movie, it was nice, but it probably won't be winning the next Academy Award for Best Picture. After the movie, we had a nice dinner of shrimp scampi at home - certainly not you traditional Thanksgiving feast, but tasty nonetheless.
On Friday, we decided to do a little shopping. To be honest, ours is not a family that has ever been much for shopping the day after Thanksgiving, but there are some great deals to be had if you know where to look and when to go. We made our first stop at J&L Garden where we bought our Christmas tree. Then, we stopped by Fred Meyer where we picked up a new tree stand, since our old one pretty much saw it's last Christmas last year. Once we got the tree back to the house and got it set up in the new stand, we next went to Costco where I wanted to pick up a DVD Recorder. Of course, you can't really go to Costco and leave with just one thing - we ended up getting a cart load of items, including toilet paper, hot chocolate mix, Christmas gift bags, and more. After Costco, we made a quick stop at CompUSA where we acquired a new wireless router for our house. I have to say, I have some issues with wireless, but in general, I really like the convenience that it offer. In fact, I am typing this while sitting on my bed in my room.
Dinner on Friday night was certainly an adventure, as many of our family gatherings are. At the last gathering, I managed to become quite inebriated. Thankfully I was able to avoid that this time, but there were certainly other exciting occurences, such as my uncle Eric angrily storming out of the house, my grandma becoming rather upset, and my mom sneaking around the outside of the house into the backyard. Yep, that's my family.
Other highlights of the weekend so far include getting a haircut, decorating the Christmas tree, going to see the musical "The Producers," and watching part of the ND/USC game in which the Irish were trampled in the last three quarters of the game.