forty-eight hours of Thanksgiving

One of the benefits of being an expat residing beyond the International Date Line is that in some ways, I get to enjoy nearly two of the same American holidays. Yesterday, I semi-celebrated the tradition day for Thanksgiving, complete with working during the day and eating turkey and playing games at night. Today, for Thanksgiving II I was able to talk to my family early this morning, talk to Noel for a little bit, see pictures from her time at the grandparents house, and again enjoy another Thanksgiving meal. This time, it was a lunch with all the foreign teachers, and our bosses. Taken together, these two days added up to an enjoyable Thanksgiving. Separated, they would have been below par. It is getting increasingly difficult to stay in the game and not check out with so little time left before I get to go home and see my love.
I will just have to see how tomorrow turns out.

Comments

  1. whitney24/11/06

    happy late turkey day patrick!
    i hope you made that ridiculous turkey gobble sound you're so good at. it'd be funny to see a bunch of shy chinese girls giggle at THAT.
    we got you and noel's WEDDING INVITATION in the mail this week......HOORAY. i can't imagine how hard it must be apart, but think about how wonderful it will be when you get to be together for EVER. but still, dang. i'm sorry :(
    hope you at least got to have some pumpkin pie!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Systematic Cooking and the evolution of phones

Image
I don't mind eating the same thing repeatedly. Egg sandwiches in the morning. Roast beef sandwiches for lunch. Bagel Bites for dinner. All have been eating phases that I have gone through. Now that we are settling into our surroundings a little more here in Orange County, we felt a little more comfortable to just take it easy on the weekends. So, we cooked. I decided that I wanted to make a lasagna (and Noel made a great chili at the same time), which meant finding the top rated recipe on allrecipes.com. Badda bing badda boom-- 'I got me a whole lot of lasagna'. Thus, I get to have lots of lasagna all week long and and all I have to do to cook is stick it in the microwave. In some respects it is like the widow and her miraculous lamp. And on to the evolution of phones. The iconic figure of Zack Morris using his gigantic mobile phone during class sticks out in my mind as the essence of cool. Swing forward to 2001 and you will find Derek Zoolander, the top male m...
Read more

Busy, busy, busy

Image
Memories and thoughts disappear if not stored, recorded, written, or memorialized somehow. Of course, this immediately makes me think of pre-literate societies and what it must have been like to have only a few recorded memories, thoughts, pictures, or keepsakes not yet even 50 years ago. Now, every moment of every day is recorded, synched, uploaded, stored, and searchable to myself (or others). What then is to be done? Shirk the norms? Embrace the present culture? Moderate between the two? And yet, I have digressed . . . Yesterday's trip down memory lane truly allowed me to see the types of thoughts that were retained and more importantly the frequency. What seemed regular and consistent in 2006 and early in China, understandably diminished once marrying Noël, moving back to the States, further diminishing once beginning at PCA, and almost disappearing in Long Beach, and continuing through early Yakima and teaching, until now. What types of memories were retained? Well, I have ...
Read more

Snake

Image
It will have been fifteen years ago this year that I got my first cell phone. It was a Nokia something that had interchangeable faceplates. The phone-brick called people, received calls, and had games buried deep within the OS. My favorite was a this little gem: snake. The game was occasionally played but never mastered. Well, because you always died. The snake would eat too many apples, get too long, become unwieldy, and then you would run into yourself. My score never topped 200 and it didn't even matter. Scores on games on my phone didn't matter, because it was irrelevant to life. The phone barely mattered because I would rarely use it. I had other things to worry about. About this same time, in high school I start playing console games. I can thank Mike Stork for subsidizing the purchase of my first--a N64. That summer Mike gave me to do work around his property. It kept me busy and allowed me to save, and when I had enough money, I purchased the golden goose egg of the...
Read more