Thanksgiving

[shannon_a]

Had a big Thanksgiving yesterday, down at my mom and Bob's new San Mar-Teen house. It's the first time that Kimberly & I have been to a big family Thanksgiving in many a year.

It was the usual effort to get down to San Mar-Teen, which is 20 or 30 minutes further south than the old San Jose house. We left for BART at about a quarter to 11, got picked up by Jason in Fremont around noon, and pulled into the house about ten to 1. So it goes. Kimberly & I started a new Andrea Barrett short story while at the BART station, and then I read Moon over Soho (a British urban fantasy) and Spike: The Complete Series (a Buffy comic) on the way down. 

There were 18 people in San Mar-Teen all told: Kimberly & me, the parents, Bob's Dad & Marge, Jason, Robbie, and Lisa, all of the immediate Martinezes, and some friends of the Martinezes (Greg, Deirdre, and their two well-behaved children, who were thus clearly not from the Berkeley-Rockridge area). An awful lot of people, but the new San Mar-Teen house is large enough that folks can spread out and it doesn't seem like such a big mass of humanity. Even more surprising, their dining room is big enough to seat 18(!), with perhaps not enough space between the two tables.

Quite a bit of Ping Pong was played over the course of the day, and much to my surprise I discovered that I still have most of my Ping Pong reflexes, including a wicked ability to drop the ball at the very back-right corner of the table. Mind you, every time I tried to do something fancy like spin the ball or slam it, I came up short. But pretty soon I learned not to try those things, and I won more games than I lost. It was fun and made me want to find a Ping Pong club in Berkeley, as we'll never have enough room for a Ping Pong table in this house. Maybe when I'm done with Designers & Dragons next summer. 

Note to self: Berkeley Table Tennis Club.

Lots of talking. Everyone there is good folks. Good eating with all the usual fixings and tasty chocolate chip cookies for desert afterward. (There were pies too, but chocolate chip cookies are among my favorites.) We have a bit of leftover that we brought home. (I'm actually pretty happy not to have the *huge* piles of leftover that we get when we Thanksgiving at home.)

All together, very nice!

Lisa & Jason gave us a ride all the way home from San Mar-Teen to Berkeley, which makes it only a 1.5 hour or so trek. 

Exhaustion afterward (though I actually managed to edit another chapter of Designers & Dragons in the late evening, the one on Columbia Games for the '80s book).

And here's my list of stuff to do for the holiday weekend:

• Finish current work on TSR article for Designers & Dragons (finished Wednesday night)
• First-draft Leading Edge Games article for Designers & Dragons (got pretty comprehensive notes together Wednesday night)
• Write RQ6 review
• Write Star Trek: Catan review
• Prepare next Knucklebones article for Mechanics & Meeples publication
• Ride bike! (Iron Horse Trail?)
• The Sound of Music (Sunday)

Whew! That Star Trek: Catan review may get delayed, but we'll see ...