Blogiversary

It is Thanksgiving (which I am now celebrating for the second time this year), and that means this blog is one year old. Happy birthday, blog! I just looked back at my first post from last Thanksgiving, and the main difference I see between then and now is that I was much more verbose then. Not that I have less to say now, but just less time to say it, so I seem to be relying more on pictures to tell the story, with brief explanations in between. This is becoming more of a scrapbook and less of a journal.

And along those lines, here's a photo journey of a very busy Thanksgiving weekend 2009:

I think this is a hysterically bad photo, but it's the only one with all of us in it. Us and the cranberry juice and various bottles of alcohol in the foreground. I guess I couldn't be bothered to clean off the counter before setting up the camera because it was time to EAT! We had three couples over for Thanksgiving dinner this year, one with their little daughter, our Berkeley friends that had stayed in town over the holiday. Danny and I realized Thursday morning that we had made no plan for how everyone was going to fit at our table, since our table, while cute and funky, is an odd shape that seats at most 5 people. After a brief argument wherein Danny refused to bring one of the outside picnic tables up and I refused to allow him to try to wedge a card table up next to our funky odd-shaped table, Danny had the bright idea to take the closet door off and lay it over the table to create a much larger table that we could then just cover up with a table-cloth. It worked perfectly! This is what marriage is all about, I told him! We do things better together than either one of us would alone!

This year was so different from last year, when we had hosted a similar party for the in-towners, who happened to be a completely different set of people last year. Last year everyone came and cooked all day and we made some pretty ridiculously gourmet things (like coq au vin, which involved some flambe-ing that may have singed our ceiling or Danny's eyebrows, I'm not sure). I didn't know how we were going to top that. But this year everyone brought dishes from their family traditions, without which Thanksgiving wouldn't be Thanksgiving to them, like green-bean casserole and mac-and-cheese and bacon-rolls, and that was wonderful and meaningful in a whole different way. And delicious-- gourmet's got nothing on down-home cooking, I have to say.

Look at me, making fun of myself for being all long-winded last year and here I am going into extraordinary detail about closet doors and dinner menus. Back to the photos or I'll never finish this!

Jack really liked to hold his drumstick. I tried to get him to gnaw on it but he wasn't having it. Banging it was okay, but he wanted it nowhere near his mouth. Which is funny because he'll put just about anything else there.

Speaking of barnyard birds, the day after Thanksgiving we went to take care of Tuesday Mom's chickens. Jack loves chickens. He kind of loves birds in general, which I imagine will please at least one set of grandparents greatly. I've never understood the infatuation, myself. It must skip a generation.

Anyway, Jack loves his feathered friends, and expresses that love by trying to grab them, as shown here. He has not been successful yet, on account of they can fly and he can't even walk. But I will keep you updated on his progress. After Jack had his fill of chicken-watching, he got to go visit some seagulls at the beach. We had a picnic at Muir Beach with two-thirds of our previous evening's party, though it was threatening to rain on us and was kind of cold and windy.

You can't even tell we're at the beach. We could be on a Hollywood sound stage with that background, but you'll have to just take my word for it. We sat in the grey and cold for a while, huddled together enjoying our wine and cheese, and then once it was time to leave, of course, the clouds suddenly evaporated and the day looked like this:

Typical California teasing winter weather. Rain or shine, though, Jack enjoyed himself (I think mostly because of the seagulls. And maybe because of the brie. He is developing quite the sophisticated palate.)

Onto the next chapter, we headed further up into Marin where we had gotten a place to stay for the weekend in the redwoods, so Danny could be closer to his race on Saturday. His race being the main reason we had stuck around for Thanksgiving and also the primary motivation for the marathon last month (he would train with me for the marathon, and then he would be in shape for his race the following month... assuming he kept training, which he didn't). His race being the QUAD DIPSEA, a name that may ring a bell from Double Dipsea fame, which I remarked on in a previous post as a real benchmark in our training for the marathon, 14 miles from Mill Valley to Stinson Beach and back, over the mountains separating bay from coast. The Quad Dipsea is, of course, doing that twice. Four Dipseas. Ten thousand feet total elevation gain (and also loss, since you're finishing where you started). Twenty-eight miles. This is how Danny wanted to celebrate Thanksgiving. Insanity.

As I mentioned parenthetically, Danny didn't have time to train much since the marathon. He was feeling a little underprepared. So the one thing he did do in anticipation of his race was to carbo-load.

With beer! (We helped him out of course.)  (Jack is my favorite part of this picture. How did he know to turn around for the camera?)

I was feeling nervous for him, and I'm sure he was wondering why on earth he'd gotten himself into this, but he did unbelievably well. We went to see him at Stinson on his second turn-around and he was just beaming. I couldn't believe how much energy and enthusiasm he still had. That was supposed to be where he was hitting his wall, but he never seemed to hit it. I wonder where Danny's wall would be? Maybe 40 miles? We hung out on the beach for a while so Jack could play in the sand, since it was a much nicer day than the previous one.There were plenty of seagulls to admire, again. One befriended us as we ate our lunch, which Jack was delighted by. As Danny was running miles 21-28, we were eating burgers and shakes on the beach and learning that seagulls can catch french fries in mid-air. If you're not going to run more than a marathon, you might as well be as lazy and gluttonous as possible. That's what I always say.

We rested for a while from our arduous lifting of food to our mouths after a busy morning of doing nothing at all, and then it was back over the hills to Mill Valley, where we watched Danny finish his race, where he was too fast for the camera, even with a flash.

Now that's fast! Good work, Danny! You have earned your thanksgiving dinners for the next decade, unlike some of us, who should probably give a few back. Now please take it easy for a little while, huh? You're making the rest of us look bad.