(no subject)
Dec. 1st, 2013 10:35 pm[Posted after the fact]
Thanksgiving 2013:
Much of the last few days has been spent in the car.
Thursday I got up at the usual hideous hour to help feed breakfast to homeless people (well, and fellow non-homeless-but-poor people), and then drove way the heck up to Alna to meet my Dad. We were all doing Thanksgiving at the farm of some friends of his, who’d invited scads of old friends and new. And me. There were copious appetizers, while the rest of the guests arrived and we sat around and chatted and tried to remember why Hanukkah isn’t happening on TG again for another fifteen thousand years ; the proverbial Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat almost seemed like an afterthought. I sobered up by beating various people at Blokus, and then drove home through the night, stopping in the driveway to look at the stars, undimmed by city lights, and again to move a tree limb off of Hollywood Boulevard.*
Friday, I barely left the house. I object to Black Friday.
I’d been invited down to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sovay’s family’s annual Hanukkah latke-fry, and ultimately opted to undertake the mildly hidjus drive necessary to get there. To make said drive feel less stupid, I combined this with a visit to my Grandparents. Grandma broke her hip a couple of weeks ago, and so was in their retirement community’s clinic/ICU; plus she’s getting early symptoms of dementia, and her short-term memory’s increasingly shot. So going down there is always awkward to depressing. Fortunately, as I discovered once I’d driven down there, my aunt and my uncle happened to be visiting that day as well, saving me from having to find things to talk about with a not-quite-100%-there 89-yr-old; and we got her out of the clinic for a large, late lunch all together.
Then I sat around the library for a couple of hours and banged away at next semester’s syllabus.
At around six, I headed for Sovay’s parents’. And apparently God (or some Hannukah goblin) didn’t want me to get there, because it turned out that I’d left a minor bit out of the directions, namely the fact that I had to get on 95 after (or instead of) 495. So I ultimately got off at the right exit…on the wrong highway. It took me a while to figure this out, and then I couldn’t locate my cell phone to call for help. I wound up retracing my steps, buying a map of Massachusetts,** and figuring out from THAT that I needed to take route 3; and then having done that I got lost again in outer Boston suburbia, backed into a telephone pole (fortunately without noticeably damaging either it or my bumper), and finally found my way to the right street, where I was welcomed and made much of and fed fried things. And I talked to Greer (whose LJ name I’ve forgotten for the moment) about shared experiences in Oxbridge and with its bizarre inhabitants, and Sovay’s brother fried various Things That Should Not Be Deepfried. And I got home at midnight, tired but happier.
But it was a lot of driving. So today, with two services to sing, I’ve opted not to drive home between them. Sadly I can’t seem to access the church wireless, but you can’t have everything…
*Yes, that’s the name of the dirt road on which they live. I meant to ask about the origin of the name, but forgot.
** Obviously I wished I’d done that earlier, but better late than never…
Thanksgiving 2013:
Much of the last few days has been spent in the car.
Thursday I got up at the usual hideous hour to help feed breakfast to homeless people (well, and fellow non-homeless-but-poor people), and then drove way the heck up to Alna to meet my Dad. We were all doing Thanksgiving at the farm of some friends of his, who’d invited scads of old friends and new. And me. There were copious appetizers, while the rest of the guests arrived and we sat around and chatted and tried to remember why Hanukkah isn’t happening on TG again for another fifteen thousand years ; the proverbial Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat almost seemed like an afterthought. I sobered up by beating various people at Blokus, and then drove home through the night, stopping in the driveway to look at the stars, undimmed by city lights, and again to move a tree limb off of Hollywood Boulevard.*
Friday, I barely left the house. I object to Black Friday.
I’d been invited down to
sovay’s family’s annual Hanukkah latke-fry, and ultimately opted to undertake the mildly hidjus drive necessary to get there. To make said drive feel less stupid, I combined this with a visit to my Grandparents. Grandma broke her hip a couple of weeks ago, and so was in their retirement community’s clinic/ICU; plus she’s getting early symptoms of dementia, and her short-term memory’s increasingly shot. So going down there is always awkward to depressing. Fortunately, as I discovered once I’d driven down there, my aunt and my uncle happened to be visiting that day as well, saving me from having to find things to talk about with a not-quite-100%-there 89-yr-old; and we got her out of the clinic for a large, late lunch all together.Then I sat around the library for a couple of hours and banged away at next semester’s syllabus.
At around six, I headed for Sovay’s parents’. And apparently God (or some Hannukah goblin) didn’t want me to get there, because it turned out that I’d left a minor bit out of the directions, namely the fact that I had to get on 95 after (or instead of) 495. So I ultimately got off at the right exit…on the wrong highway. It took me a while to figure this out, and then I couldn’t locate my cell phone to call for help. I wound up retracing my steps, buying a map of Massachusetts,** and figuring out from THAT that I needed to take route 3; and then having done that I got lost again in outer Boston suburbia, backed into a telephone pole (fortunately without noticeably damaging either it or my bumper), and finally found my way to the right street, where I was welcomed and made much of and fed fried things. And I talked to Greer (whose LJ name I’ve forgotten for the moment) about shared experiences in Oxbridge and with its bizarre inhabitants, and Sovay’s brother fried various Things That Should Not Be Deepfried. And I got home at midnight, tired but happier.
But it was a lot of driving. So today, with two services to sing, I’ve opted not to drive home between them. Sadly I can’t seem to access the church wireless, but you can’t have everything…
*Yes, that’s the name of the dirt road on which they live. I meant to ask about the origin of the name, but forgot.
** Obviously I wished I’d done that earlier, but better late than never…
