Happy Thanksgiving! Well, it was a week ago, anyway...

It has been brought to my attention that I only update my blog about once a month.

Sorry about that. It's because I'm in high school and I have homework to do and YouTube videos to watch and stories to write and books to read and random stuff to draw. And also I can be kind of lazy on the writing front.

I'm setting a goal, as of right now, that I am going to do a blog post at LEAST every two weeks! If not every week! I am going to do this! It is a thing that I am going to do! Yay!

(Yeah, that'll totally happen...*can't keep a straight face*)

Although I will say that I'm doing all right so far. It's been slightly over a year since I started this blog. To be precise, it's been 378 days. I think. Ish? The first post was on November 23, 2012, so...378-ish days. And I have 38 posts published so far (this being the 38th), so that's actually a bit over one a month. Yay!

My Thanksgiving this year was decent. I got a few funny stories out of it, so here they are.

My dad's brother, Gregg, and his wife Coral came down from Sacramento and stayed in a hotel near us for a week. I was gone the first two days they were here, actually, on a retreat with my junior class. Ooh, maybe I should blog about that...it was pretty spectacular. It was an awesome overnight.

Anyway, on Thanksgiving my family piled into two cars to head up to my dad's cousin Paula's, just like last year. Only this time we had Gregg and Coral, so Dad and Gregg were in one car and Mom and Coral and I were in the other.

Mom and Coral and I got there fine. We got there at about the time we'd expected to get there (1:00-ish, if you were wondering). It turned out we were the first ones there. Dad and Gregg hadn't arrived yet, and neither had Ruth and Stewart, Paula's parents.

Well, Ruth and Stewart showed up pretty soon after that. Mom and I helped Paula with the mashed potatoes while Coral talked to them.

Half an hour later, we started wondering what had happened to Dad and Gregg. We knew they wouldn't starve, because they had the gluten-free dressing in their car, but I kept picturing the vultures circling a dusty Toyota parked next to a cactus in the desert.

Ten minutes after that, Mom's phone went off. It was Dad. He knew they were lost because the whole trip was supposed to be about 130 miles, and the odometer said 130 miles but they hadn't reached the exit yet.

Mom tried to give them directions, then gave up and handed them to Paula. Paula seemed to have a hard time figuring out exactly what had happened, but she eventually told them where to go and how to get there and hung up.

"They're halfway to Arizona,"she told us, shaking her head in despair. Apparently they missed the turnoff and wound up somewhere in the mountains. Brilliantly done, Dad. Brilliantly done. *Applause*

Dad and Gregg got there eventually, about an hour after they'd planned to. Just in time for lunch, actually. As we sat down at the table, I looked around and realized something.

I was literally the only person in the room without a subscription to AARP magazine.

Yay.

It was kind of a loud dinner. Not because there were a lot of people, but because Ruth and Stewart couldn't hear well and everything had to be repeated, twice, with gradually increasing volume. I said pretty much nothing and just let the adults talk. But the food was tasty and overall it was pleasant enough.

After lunch Paula dragged me over and gave me rather a lot of jewelry. She's been cleaning out her jewelry box for a while now, and since I like wearing interesting earrings and she wants to get rid of them, the arrangement works well. She sent me lots of stuff last Christmas too, including my all-time favorite pair of earrings ever. They're petrified wood and they look a bit like Nausicaa's in Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. 

That movie has the best flying machines ever.

We drove back at around five and I fell asleep in the car. I was listening to that U2 album The Joshua Tree, because there were actual joshua trees all over the place and I just couldn't not listen to it. One minute the opening chords of "Red Hill Mining Town" are playing and the next I open my eyes and think, "What the heck happened to the song?" I looked at my iPod. For some reason it had gone back to the list of all the songs. Then I looked at the clock on the dashboard. I'd been out cold for an hour!

It was pretty uneventful after that. We just went home and had a light supper and then went to bed. We stayed inside for all of Black Friday, too. As someone who hates crowds and lines, Black Friday sounds quite a lot like the eleventh circle of Hell to me.


So now it's the holiday season and my school is beautiful. I love the giant Christmas tree.

Happy belated Thanksgiving/Hanukkah, and happy whatever-the-heck-you-celebrate-in-December!

(I will totally update again before Christmas...)