I Promise I Will Try to Be Thanks-filled

For those of you who don't know.....and because it may not be evident from this post......I love Thanksgiving with my family. I've never missed a single Thanksgiving dinner with them in my entire life, and I have no plans to start now.

That said.

I'm going to see my family for Thanksgiving. This year brings the welcome relief of a 1 hour flight instead of an 8-hour bus ride, so I've already got that to look forward to. Plus I'm one of those crazies that likes airports on big travel days. Already one up on last year's Thanksgiving "vacation". So what's the seeming problem here? My family.
Remember. I like them.

Here's how this weekend will go. My father has this weird new obsession with owning every single CD ever made. Wait. That's a lie. He has a now increasingly-old obsession with owning every CD from within a narrow range of genera that sound similar to Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, cajun/creole, and old country music. He also really really really likes me to listen to them while I'm home. Loudly. Without doing anything else. Some of it is pretty good. Most of it all sounds the same. Almost all of it is at least 40 years old and I've heard before. So. Most of the waking moments that I've spent at my parents' house over the last year and a half, we've listened to CDs. This year, it gets better. The last 6 months he's spent collecting the concert DVDs of all of these artists. Concert DVDs, generally speaking, bore me. I'd rather listen to the CD than sit down and watch a concert. Especially a concert that happened 40 years ago by a band I don't care about. But, watch them I shall! No matter what.

Thanksgiving dinner will be at my dad's sister's house. This will be fine. I like it. I like the family. The food is good. My cousin works marketing and sales for a beer distributor so there's always good beer. We'll watch football and I may actually know what's happening, though I will spend every ounce of strength that I have trying NOT to talk about this Brett Favre/Vikings situation. Very good. Inevitably, someone will start arguing about something stupid and then 20 of us will all be in a room yelling at each other. Hopefully this year it doesn't involve me having to walk out of the house to avoid telling my grandfather he's stupid. (That was 2 years ago--it involved garter snakes and habitat mitigation projects and in some weird way my dad actually came to my defense.)

I'll also see my friends. My friends from college and high school. That, actually, will probably be fun. Though it's always weird to see a bunch of people I went to high school with who are still living in the same city they grew up in, haven't left, and still haven't necessarily figured out how the real world works. And it's weird that their opinions of me somehow still matter and I just spent like 2 hours this morning picking out outfits to take with me in case I end up going somewhere that they might see me. Weird. And lame.

And that, my friends, will be my weekend. My parents don't have wireless and the neighbors all shun their civic duties and password protect theirs, but I'll probably try to get some things down in word doc form and post them upon my arrival back in TC (the land where things are normal). So...consider me off the grid for the weekend unless you happen to know my phone number. Then......please please rescue me from watching concert DVDs. Please.


At least we're not making a second turkey this year just to have leftovers........