When I was a kid, we always went to my aunt's in Sacramento for thanksgiving dinner.
Then it was my cousins Margaret and Dave's place, after it got to be too much for Aunt Barbara and Uncle Bob. After Margaret passed away, it was Cousin John's house in Antioch.
This year, Rachel and I worked in the morning, and went to the Jewish home for the afternoon. We hung out with Dad for a few hours, talking, just doing stuff. It was nice.
Unfortunately, that was the extent of his Thanksgiving holiday. None of the other putzes visited. I don't know why I'm surprised. They're all basically assholes. Barbara and Paul had a party that evening; Rachel had run into Barbara previously and suggested that Dad would really enjoy attending, but that was that.
Rita, who had in the past, invited Dad for dinner where she is living, didn't even stop by. We found out the reason later; she has a new boyfriend.
When Dad went for dinner, Rachel and I toddled off to GrilleyVille. We were picking up John, Gemma, and Cassie to go over to Diane's for her Thanksgiving dinner.
That was enjoyable. Steve and Terri were down from Sac with the kids, so Cassie, Jessica, and Andrea spent the evening running around together. There was the usual Turkey, stuffing, and mashed potatoes. I brought sauteed vegetables which were eaten, even though I burned the heck out of them.
For dessert, Diane had her Egg Nog cake, and Steve had made a Pecan pie. I had some of each, and both were excellent. After dinner, the talk turned to football at one end of the table and education at the other. The former is pure ennui for me, while I get plenty of the latter at home.
That's one big difference from my youth. I guess one gets spoiled when one has a rock star, a clown, a quaker minister (ministress?), a couple of sheriffs, and a whole passle of lunatics in the family.
Friday, Rachel dragged my sorry ass out of bed at something well before 6am to go shopping with her and Gemma. She wouldn't have bothered me, except that Gemma is six months pregnant, and Rachel didn't want anyone pushing or shoving her.
We hit Toys R Us (at the old Sears store in San Francisco) first, where they were giving out some sort of Pokemon thing. I'll be straight with you -- Pokemon sucks. The premise, if you haven't taken the time to figure it out, is to capture wild animals and train them to fight each other. It's basically animated cock fighting for kids.
Last time I checked, cock fighting was certainly frowned upon in this country, if not outright illegal. And still, you have parents all across the country getting up at ungodly hours to fight other parents for pokemon stuff that their kids will either steal or get into fights over.
And you thought we were civilized.
We picked up a few toys at Toys R Us, mostly for Cassie, and headed over to Mervyn's. Mervyn's was giving out some sort of penguin thing which caught my attention, but when we got them it turned out to be not even close to Tux.
While we were standing in line, waiting for Mervyn's to open, I got this image in my head. It was from Stripes, where Bill Murray was doing his particular brand of encouragement and tells his squadmates "There is something wrong with us, something very, very wrong with us."
Something about all those people shivering as they stood in line in a cold San Francisco parking lot, waiting for a low-end department store to open made me think of that scene.
After that, we took Gemma home to rest since she had to put in a 10 hour day later that afternoon. Rachel and I continued on to Tanforan where we Sears to look at Entertainment centers, and Target to get wrapping paper and a few other odds and ends.
We also went to K-B toys, but since they were out of the $20 game boys, the check-out line stretched -- literally -- from the front of the store to the rear and back again, and all we wanted was Simon (for Rachel), we turned around and left.
We had better luck at Radio Shack where they had almost too many sales people. We got plenty of help, and picked up a couple of $5 remote controls and a cordless phone for Dad. (We would have just brought him the one from home, but it was a regular 25 channel model and we didn't think it would fare so well at the Jewish home. This was a 900mhz model for $20.)
We also got a couple of winter gifts for other people at RatShack, but since they might happen upon this page, I'll avoid any details.
Lastly, we hit ChumpUSA where they had a 10GB hard drive for $99 -- not a bad deal in all. (Of course, on Sunday, their ad featured a 15GB drive for $129.) I also picked up an 8MB video board and a 10/100 network card. As we were checking out, I decided to get another PCMCIA network card, especially after I found out that a basic Linksys card could be had for $35.
After that, it was home to fix the problems at Long's I had been paged about, and check on the construction. That didn't take long, so Rachel and I headed back out to Stonestown.
We got to K-B just before the early bird deals ended, but after the crowds had mostly disappeared. Rachel finally got her Simon. Then we wandered around, ending up back at Macy's where we picked up a few gifts and a bit more Calphalon for us.
After that it was lunch time, so we headed off to the Bashful Bull on Noriega at 19th. Then it was back home to work some more and then off to visit dad. We got there shortly before the shabbat service started, so we chatted for a while and then went downstairs. Rachel and I stayed for the first part of the service, then went to Games night at Del's.
We nearly gave Del and Billie a heart attack by showing up before 7:30. In fact, we were the first ones to arrive. Others started trickling in as we played a game of Royalty. Rachel won handily, wounding my conceit.
After that, we got into a game of Five Crowns which I started off winning, but quickly fell behind after a few high-scoring hands. Allen showed up at the beginning of Five Crowns bringing not only the pictures from our wedding that he had taken (and subsequently duplicated and enlarged for us) but also a killer pumpkin-pecan pie.
Lastly, we played a rousing round of Scattergories, a perennial favorite, although Del was not so outlandish as usual -- perhaps because of the late hour.
We also queried Allen about the Harvest Festival in San Jose -- it turns out he was going the following morning. We invited ourselves along and planned to meet him in line between 9 and 9:30. Alas, as Saturdays often encourage, we slept in a bit and didn't arrive until about 10:30. Needless to say, we never did meet up with Allen and family.
We did get some nice gifts, however, including some that are simply perfect for the intended recipients. We also picked up a great puzzle consisting of a bolt with a lock washer and a nut. The nut is welded to the shaft of the bolt, while the washer is loose, but trapped between the nut and the head of the bolt. The object, naturally, is to remove the washer.
It is possible, and no, I'm not going to tell you how it's done.
I will tell you, however, that I didn't figure it out.
That afternoon, we went over to the Jewish home to watch a movie with dad. We had rented Blast from the Past with Brendan Frasier (Adam) and Alicia Silverstone (Eve). It looked like a fairly original story idea, and Alicia Silverstone can actually be a half decent actress when she's not playing a clueless valley girl.
The surprise treat, however, was Eve's gay roommate, Dave Foley who did so great on NewsRadio. He is reason enough for me to want to check out more of the Kids in the Hall series. He was excellent in this, displaying a maturity well beyond his years.
Unfortunately, we weren't able to finish it before Dad had to go for dinner, so we decided to come back in the morning to watch the end. We were supposed to watch Cassie until Diane got off work, but it turned out that John and Gemma decided not to go to the wedding they had been invited to.
So we went over there anyway. We (Rachel, John, Gemma, Cassie, Craig, and I) all decided to go out to dinner before doing a bit more shopping. We ended up at Chevy's, where they of course told the waiter that it was my birthday (the 30th) so I got sung to. I gave Cassie the hat and ate the free ice cream.
Later I was told that the assembled masses had been trying to make it a birthday dinner, but being so disinterested in my own celebrity, I had completely missed it.
Afterwards we discovered that Serramonte wasn't open very late for a Saturday night during the holiday season -- they were closed by the time we got there. So we headed home instead.
Sunday morning we watched the rest of the movie with Dad and then went to Joe's for lunch. Dad had a good time, though he did forget to eat slowly. In any case, it was good food and good company.
That afternoon we went shopping for groceries and supplies for school. Rachel was doing a unit on the five senses and needed Lemonheads for the taste part of it. Luckily, I remembered seeing (relatively) large boxes of such candies at Target; sure enough, they had them.
It's amazing how excited some people get over little things like Lemonheads in large quantities.