Giving Thanks

 

Most Arroyo houses were way better than this

Thanksgiving Day I slept in as long as the cats would allow, then went over to Julie and Hannah's for our morning walk an hour later than usual. We drove to the Arroyo area which had intimidating slope down to the beach, but going back was not that bad really. Perhaps we are in training from the Frontenac route up to Highpoint, perhaps it was the novelty of the scenery.

I intended to do the Thanksgiving Zumba even but napped through it, oh well.

Around lunchtime I opened up Zoom for the Bloat - an annual tradition of the "MSU Hobbits" group of friends I'd known since college. Many of them ended up in NYC and lived in the more affordable Hoboken, and though we'd all drifted through the years, still on Thanksgiving several dozen gathered there for a feast. That was not possible this year so Sandy, our den mother, proposed a zoom meeting and gaming. There were 6-8 of us at any one time, which is way down from the face-to-face events but not bad, all things considering. Early on it was just Sandy and me talking while she baked pumpkin bread in her kitchen and I scanned my 25 year collection of business cards. We arranged to try game night Friday.

View From Alki

Friday was another walk, this time up at Alki which had beautiful views of the water, mountains and city as usual. I did about 40 GOTV letters while listening to TED talks, having resolved to use up all my stamps. I have to Dec 7 to do another 100 more, which seems quite doable. I then opened zoom for gaming, mostly Codenames since it hits the sweet spot of being challenging enough to be interesting but not so messing in the scoring system that one has to spend too much time thinking about mechanics. My absolute favorite clue was Stewart's "Frappe 2", which I correctly guess as "milk" (d'uh) and "helicopter" (because frappes are made in a blender and a helicopter was the closest thing to a blender that was on the board.) The mental process may seem odd but that's much of the fun of the game!

I didn't get a heck of a lot else done today but I suppose that is part of the point of taking a little time off.