Thanksgiving/Birthday

Greetings from Ft. Worth! Everyone knows that last Thursday was Thanksgiving, but yesterday was my 28th birthday. This is significant for a couple of reasons- one, I am now undeniably in my late 20's. At 27 you can at least think of it as mid-to-late 20's, but after this it's 29, then you know what. Two (and perhaps more importantly)- I am now only a year away from 11/26/2008, the magic date when my driver's license will finally expire and I can get a new one with my current address on it. Just like my checks, it still shows the address of my ghetto apartment, where I haven't lived for almost 3 years. And everytime I rent a car or check into a hotel (which is a lot) I have to say "No, I've moved" and rattle of my "new" address. I could just get the new one early, but it's like 75 bucks.

So Thanksgiving went really well. I was very fortunate to have my Mom, Jim, Carly and Daniel come and visit. The food was all great- I even managed to make a fantastic turkey. And by "make" I mean stick it in a broiler and walk away, only to return 3.5 hours later. Since Mom brought me my Grandma's aforementioned old broiler, we were able to stick the Turkey out in the garage and free up the oven for everything else. I'm no expert chef, but holy cow was that convenient! It had the added benefit of making the garage smell like delicious turkey all day, until Friday when it started smelling like old McDonald's grease long after the turkey was gone.

The only real hitch came when we realized I only own 4 place settings, and there were 5 of us. It wasn't a big deal, it just meant we had to do dishes after every meal. Seriously- on my own I do dishes maybe once a week. But I did at least 6 loads in 4 days. Plus, when I'm by myself it's only because I've run out of bowls and spoons, but this time that sucker was packed.

We had a lot of fun- one of the more interesting activities was mass DS games. Carly and Daniel are also proud owners of the Nintendo DS, so were able to have some nice multiplayer Mario Kart action. Now, Carly was never much of a gamer, but Daniel downright never played. In college, he showed a fleeting interest in Tony Hawk 3, but we could never get him in on any other games. The one time I came home and he was playing Nintendo all by himself almost brought a tear to my eye- but I digress. My point is that those two have been practicing, and they were schooling me. I'm not exactly The Wizard or anything, but getting beat by family was new. Of course, this lead to several heated exchanges like "You f**ker that race was mine!" and "I'm getting F'd in the A!" Good times. Of course, it's all wireless, prompting my mom to say "Why don't you guys see if it works from different rooms?"

Mom and Jim caught the train back Saturday and Carly & Daniel left early Sunday morning, so although we had been doing birthday stuff for a few days I spent my actual birthday mostly by myself. Kate did have me over to watch Jarhead and swap holiday stories, which was fun.

So now I'm in Texas for a week, then home for a week, then back to Grand Rapids for a week, at which point I'll just stick around for Christmas. Basically, I'm almost home free for the holidays! I guess I better start shopping.