November 28, 2000

One year ago: I made a Flash movie, but had to delete it from my server back when I was running out of file space. I have since purchased more speace, so I guess I could upload it again. Except I deleted it from my hard drive. Oh, and my Thanksgiving list.

So this picture is where I spent my Thanksgiving. Yes, it is small. Yes, it is in the middle of nowhere. Yes, it was interesting. Jim and I left here Wednesday night to get to my parents' house. The weather was fine until we got off the Thruway in Rochester. We stopped to buy some more windshield washer fluid, because cruddy, snowy weather means you run out faster, and when we got back on the road it was a whiteout. It wasn't so bad when we were in town, but once we got out where there were no streetlights, it was awful. We couldn't see anything. Jim pulled over three times. The worst part was, we were only a few minutes from my parents' house, so we wanted to just get there and get off the road! Finally, we made it. We hung out and watched TV with my mom and dad, and ordered pizza subs from the best pizza place in the world, Pizza Land. Mmm, pizza subs. Jim had never had a pizza sub before. What is he, some kind of Communist?

This is my mom and dad. Don't I look just like my dad? With the big pumpkin head? Anyway, Thursday was obviously Thanksgiving. We got up fairly early (by my standards, that means "before noon") and drove down to the Southern Tier of NY, near the Pennsylvania border. We stopped in at my grandparents' house first (these are my mom's parents). I don't get to see them that often, and in fact hadn't seen them in over a year! We helped my grandmother finish her cooking. She was cracking me up by showing me her pumpkin pies and how one of them was so terrible she was almost too embarassed to take it to dinner. Meanwhile, I thought they both looked pretty much the same. She insisted that one of them looked like a mouse had run over it. She's funny. It still tasted good. My mom took Jim and I down to the basement to show us this contraption my grandfather built. You know on TV, where they sell those inversion things so that you can lay on it and then tilt so you are upside down, and it's supposed to help your joints because it takes the weight off them? Well, my grandfather built one! It kind of looked like something that Frankenstein's monster would lie on, and then tilt up with arms outstretched and say, "Raaarrrgh!" I made that joke to my grandfather and he looked at me like I'm crazy. I thought it was amusing. My mom said that my grandfather should have been an inventor, and it's true. He comes up with the craziest things. My mom is the same way. She's so crafty. I don't think I inherited that talent.

This is about the most unflattering picture of me, ever. But it's the only picture I have of me with my grandmother, so I'm sucking it up. After about an hour, we headed up to the cabin with all the food. There was a lot of family in attendance, but not as much as we had planned for -- one family (six people) had many sick members and didn't come. So it was much less crowded than the last time I went -- look how tiny that place is. Last time I went, we had something like 25 people in there. This year, there were 17 or so, and 4 of those were little kids. There was actually room to move about the place. Jim and I had a great time talking to my aunt's dog, whose name is Moses. He's a good dog, and he really took a shine to Jim. All though dinner, he kept putting his head on Jim's knee. Jim swears he wasn't even feeding him table scraps. Dinner was great, as usual. After dinner, we chatted with my relatives. My uncle just became a realtor this year, after retiring from Kodak, and we were talking about the possibility of me making him a website. One of my cousins has been researching the family genealogy, and he brought all the charts and stuff, so that was interesting too. He has one branch researched all the way back to the 1600s! Now, he's in the process of looking into when and how they came over to this country, and where they came from. Well, we know it's England, but I don't think we know where in England.

This picture is my grandfather petting Moses, my aunt's dog. Anyway, after a few hours of chitchat, Jim and I headed out. We had a three-hour drive ahead of us and wanted to get home before it got too dark. We came home through the Finger Lakes and it was weird to drive through there not in the summer. It looks so different! It's still beautiful, but in a much more stark, desolate way. As we drove through small town after small town, I kept saying to Jim, "Can you imagine living out here?" I'm not a city girl by any means, but I also like living within about half an hour of an actual city with malls and restaurants and such. Oh, I suppose I should have said with museums and theaters and such. But come on, I'm just being honest. Anyway, we got home and checked on the cats, and then headed over to Jim's parents' house and I'll have to tell that story on a later date, because this is too long already.