it's a thousand pages, give or take a few

I can barely remember the first half of the day because it was utterly consumed by the flames of the second half. I shall try to reconstruct it for you, though, like a shoddy arson investigator reconstructing a house fire and getting a dude executed for something that likely wasn't arson (see: Texas, several years ago).

I woke up around 10:15, which was actually early compared to when I have been waking up, although that fact didn't seem to be appreciated by my family. So I showered, got dressed, made my bed, etc., and went upstairs to find the entire Wampler clan gathered in the kitchen. I suppose my aunt's scandalous husband isn't a Wampler, but you can tell he wishes that he were (or maybe he wishes he were anywhere else -- it's a little unclear). sssanyway, Uncle Mark, Aunt Kathy, Drewbaby, Aunt Becky, Scandalous Uncle Brian, and Gram were all here, as were my parents and [censored], to belated celebrate Thanksgiving, so we all hung out for a few hours. My mother made another midwestern feast: hamballs (ground ham, ground pork, breadcrumbs, etc); sweet potatoes (with brown sugar but sans marshmallows - we're not savages); cheesy potatoes (self explanatory); pickled beets (ugh); apricot salad (canned apricots, orange jello, cheese - much more delicious than that incomplete description makes it sound); relish tray (carrots good, radishes bad); and rolls (gluten-filled). Aunt Kathy brought cranberry salad (cranberries, celery, cherry jello); Aunt Becky brought a lemon cake that looked amazing but that I didn't eat due to my gluten avoidance. We didn't play Rail Baron or anything else because everyone wanted to leave before dark, when the deer descend on the roads and make every journey a miniature version of Frodo and Sam toiling towards Mordor, where the orcs are replaced by unarmed but suicidal deer who thwart you at every turn.

So it was good to see them all. It's so hard to believe that Drewbaby is a senior (as is my nephew Zane), so I'm planning to come back in May for their graduations. I will see them all again when I'm back here in a couple of weeks, though, so I don't think anyone felt a lot of pressure to hang out. After they left, I basically worked straight through until now, with some breaks here and there to snack, watch bits and pieces of TV, catch up on bits and pieces of the internet, etc. I slogged through another 15ish pages -- good, but still never enough. I'm going to work like crazy this week, so even though I get back to California on Wednesday, expect hermity posts through the weekend.

And now I must sleep before the language processing centers of my brain utterly shut down; that last Mordor reference nearly blew them out. Goodnight!