Thanksgiving Act I

Ah, Thanksgiving. The time for family and binge eating. Very few holidays bring the same joy as this most sacred celebration of the Native Americans saving the original settlers from starvation. A quick aside, Lies My Teacher Told Me has a great breakdown of how the original Thanksgiving actually went down and is a great book if you want to learn what your US History textbook should have taught you.

I digress. For me, Thanksgiving is a pain in the ass. It's gotten better over the years, though, so I guess I shouldn't complain. Most Thanksgivings I will celebrate three times - my Mom's house, my Dad's house, and my fiance's house. Prior to this year the schedule went something like this:

• 9:30 - Wake up
• 9:30:04 - Shut eyes tightly and hope today is not Thanksgiving
• 9:35 - Hear beginning sounds of Thanksgiving Mother Edition
• 9:40 - Call fiance make sure we are still doing this
• 9:45 - 10:00 - Shower, select pants and shirt with most breathing room
• 10:00-11:00 - Parades, dog wrangling and table setting. At some point fiance arrives with great gift my mom loves.
• 11:00-12:30 - Thanksgiving Mother Edition
• 12:30-1:00 - Drive to Dad's
• 1:00-4:00 - Recovery. Watch football, nap and set the table for Spicy Thanksgiving
• 4:00-5:30 - Eat Thanksgiving classics so spicy you long for thai food to break the heat
• 5:30-6:00 - Drive to future in-law's
• 6:00-8:00 - Football, small talk, prayer to a higher power that if I survive I promise to live life differently.
• 8:00-10:00 - Thanksgiving Round 3. Struggle through a plate of food.
• 10:01 - Slip into a food coma on the couch

This year is different, though. I spent yesterday with my Mom and today will be spent with my fiance's family. So far it has made Thanksgiving a much more enjoyable experience.

Solid Speech, Little Dude.

This has been all over the web, but in case anyone missed it...

A teacher in Howell, Michigan, the current home of the KKK, kicked a student out of class for making anti-gay comments. The teacher told him to shut it and get out of his classroom. Anywho, the teacher was later suspended without pay for the day. At a hearing regarding all these shenanigans a 14 year old openly gay student gave a pretty impressive speech in support of his teacher.

Follow the link for the video. It's well worth the two minutes it will take from your day.

http://tv.gawker.com/5689407/openly-gay-student-defends-teacher-at-school-board-meeting

Pickles and Python

Every week I try something new for my Creative Thinking class. It started simple. I brushed my teeth with my left hand. From there I progressed to more serious topics like Thai food. This week I doubled up and tried two new things, homemade pickles and Python programming.

First, the pickles. I had a list of 10 things I wanted to learn/try before the end of the quarter and make my own pickles was number 6 on the list. Lucky for me I was trolling through old Men's Health magazines to clip ads when I found a recipe for not one, but three different types of pickles. Being a big wuss I started with the classic pickle. Boiled up 1.5 cups of vinegar, added 1 tbsp salt, 1 tbsp sugar, 1.5 tbsp pickling spice, 15 peppercorns, 3 cloves of garlic and a dash of crushed red pepper. After 24 hours of marinating in that batch of miracle juice I crunched in to the first spear. Holy Jesus! Why did I wait this long to learn how to do this. Not only do they have a better crunch than store bough, but they taste better, too. I'm definitely doing this again next week and tinkering with the recipe. Sweet and spicy is on the way!

Now for the nerdery. Since our creative brief was for ThinkGeek.com I figured I would get in to the spirit and try my hand at a little programming. There are two free introductory books on Python and it's supposed to be one of the easier languages to pick up so I'm giving it a shot. Four lessons in I'm enjoying the challenge, but not much else. The deeper I dive in to the language the more I have flashbacks to multivariable calculus cram sessions in my dorm. Oh well, at least at the end of this I'll be able to say I gave it a shot.

Next week holds another challenge for something new and I have a few ideas. I'm not going to drop them here, but if it goes according to plan I should have something fun to write about next week.