Thanksgiving 2021

So, I am back home in Ithaca! Friday was a LONG day on the road -- about an hour longer than expected, actually, because of snow and sleet and such, starting in eastern Ohio. But we made it and got Chinese takeout for dinner, so that was okay.

Thanksgiving itself went pretty well. We had reserved a takeout order from Maggiano's (which is apparently a chain of moderately upscale Italian restaurants -- this specific one is in the Westfield Old Orchard Mall) that supposedly fed four or five people. Honestly, it would have fed eight with no problem, and quite possibly ten if no one got greedy. So we had lots of leftovers. :)

We picked up the order at 1:30pm and ate around 2pm.

Um. It occurs to me I should describe the hotel a little, yes? Yes. So, we got one suite and one regular hotel room, which were connected via a double door. The suite had a kitchenette (full-size fridge, dishwasher, some cabinets, a two-burner stove with a provided pot and pan), and a small table with two chairs. The living room had a sofa (with a pullout bed), an armchair, and a sort of worktable area. That table turned out to be an exact match for the dining table, so we combined them to make a five-seater table and set up a card table (ours) and an end table (the hotel's) to make a serving area.

Nick and I shared the suite -- he slept on the sofa bed, and I slept on one of the queen beds in the bedroom -- and Mom and Dad shared the regular room.

Aunt Cara arrived around 11am for hors d'oeuvres and conversation, which was nice. I hadn't seen her in... I think going on three years? We cancelled Thanksgiving last year (it would have been this same plan, but the Covid vaccines weren't available yet so we decided better safe than sorry) and in 2019 she got the flu or something of that ilk the day before she would have started driving to New Jersey.

After the Thanksgiving meal, Dad and Aunt Cara took a short walk around the hotel (Dad has been having issues with one of his feet for going on two years, and Aunt Cara has some general mobility issues) while Mom, Nick, and I took a ~1.25 mile walk in a local park next to a tributary of the Chicago River. It was chilly, but not too bad if you had gloves and some kind of head-covering. The path died at a bridge where a local road/highway crossed the stream, and it was starting to get dark so we turned back rather than go exploring.

In the afternoon and evening, we packaged and divvied up leftovers, and then played two rounds of Chronology (specifically the old version, not the 20th anniversary version) and two rounds of Uno (we play old-school, none of this customizable card and special rule card nonsense).

We also drank a possibly unwise amount of wine (I think 4.5 bottles, two of which were champagne equivalents), but that was spread over about nine hours and five people, so eh.

And that was my Thanksgiving. :)

cars, church, and apartment blueprints

Things about today:

1. Mom and Dad left some stuff in my apartment and refrigerator overnight, and came by around 8:40 this morning to pick those items up and also help me with a car issue. See, a few weeks ago a warning/maintenance light came on, which I determined (via checking my manual) was the low tire pressure alert. So today Dad showed me how to check my tire pressure, and then we headed to a local gas station and he showed me how to refill them. It cost $1.50 for five minutes on the air machine, which is not bad. It turned out all four tires were about 10lbs low, but we got them all up where they should be and the indicator light duly turned itself off. And now I know how to handle that in the future. :)

2. Zoom church Board of Trustees executive session meeting at 11am, which I attended in and around answering various emails. We don't actually vote on anything during executive session, so this was mostly to discuss a situation and get a feel for everyone's perspective, in case there turned out to be an obstacle to a planned course of action. In the event, we are moving forward with that action.

3. I had one apartment showing in the afternoon, which turned out to be two apartments rather than three because one of the tenants had not received any of our notification emails, because they'd changed their email and we didn't have the updated address in our system. Alas! But I think it went reasonably well, and now I do have that updated email address for future use.

4. I spent a while pulling old architectural blueprints out of a cubbyhole filing structure and figuring out if they might be useful for my ongoing floor plan and building key plan project. A lot were useless, but I did find good plans for all floors of one of our main buildings, and moderately functional plans for three floors of another building. I still have not found ANY plans for the second floor of the latter building, but I found a good diagram for one individual apartment on that floor, which I guess is better than nothing. *sigh* I'll continue looking, and will bring a bunch of paper, tape, and a pen with me to label a lot of the currently anonymous rolled documents.

5. Listened to the latest Enthusigasm episode, about writing. :)

And that's about it.