errrrr.

I was going to try to post more in November, but then work got insanely busy. Isn't that the story of my life?

I'll do a quick re-cap of the holiday break. First, I LOVE 4 day weekends!!!! All weekends should be 4 days. Wouldn't that be grand?

Thursday, one of my brothers flew in to see us. He and I cooked the dish Dad always made--eggplant. It's so good. I ate way more of that than I would have eaten if we'd made turkey. I'm not a big turkey fan. I used to make turkey fajitas, and I thought that would be our tradition, but now, I'm wondering about that. I'll probably keep switching it.

Anyway, I figured out how to make sauce with the new tomato products. Basically, it just needs salt, oregano, basil, parsley and garlic, and lots of the tomato paste. It came out super yum.

My brother brought down lots of video footage of our lives. He's always taken video at all of the family gatherings. He had my graduation from graduate school and I got a copy of it. Graduation was a great day. It ranks up there as one of those really great moments. I was so young though.... 12.5 years ago.

And, my brother also had footage from a Christmas 20 years ago. OMG, I was so very, very young. The crazy thing was, as I watched, I really didn't remember *anything* about Christmas that year. I remember all of our Christmases were fairly similar, but as I watched the video, I had NO IDEA of what would happen next. It was surreal, knowing that was me, but feeling like it was someone else. It's not my life now. When I was young, I remember wanting my life to be very different than it was. I love my family, but I didn't feel like I fit.

Recently, I became friends with a person I was friends with at college (in facebook). She went back to her home town after college, got married and had a child fairly quickly. I have no idea, but I'm guessing her life is fairly similar to her life as a child there, except now she's the grown up and has the children. She hangs out with her sister and I'm guessing with friends she has had most of her life. I didn't want to be a grown up like that. I had good friends in High School, and I would love to be in the same location as them, but alas, we went to many different places. Very few of the people I was really close to are in the place where we attended high school. We clung together in high school because we felt different from most everyone else. I hope they all found their happy places too. Unfortunately, ten years ago, we found out about one good friend. She'd stayed where we grew up, and she wasn't happy (M).

Anyway, back to the video, I remember that Christmas (1989) was one of the last Christmases that I was home. I was home the next year (1990) and then I was home again in 1996, and 1999. MWH and I went to his family for Christmas in 1998. I probably should have taken everyone back there last year for my Dad, but I just couldn't. Okay, getting depressing now... I'll come back to this later.


I'm working on #2.
Loft progress

Sorted through 7 boxes
22 boxes left
This isn't counting the 3 boxes of out-of-date, hard-back text books that we need to donate/recycle
Nor the 5-ish boxes of electronics/wires that we need to sort/recycle/donate
Nor the suitcases to find a home for somewhere better than the loft.

We might make it through most of it by the end of the year--or not. We'll see.

The rest of the weekend... Friday morning I got to do Zumba--I had to work off the four bowls of pasta and eggplant from the day before. That afternoon, we had our friends for dinner. Super fun. Our friend L, though I'm not sure I should call him that any more (heh), brought a whoopee cushion for the girls. Oh my. The hijinks and hilarity. Enough said.

Okay, this is way longer than I expected it would be... I'll do Saturday and Sunday later.