Thankstaking

I had already met Marlo’s parents last Christmas, albeit only for a moment, but on Sunday I spent many hours in Langley with them, along with aunts, uncles and grandparents, for Thanksgiving dinner. They were very nice, I like them, and I had a good time. They set up a kiddie table for me and Mar-Mar, which I was really excited about, but when I got back from washing up before the meal we’d all been switched around, and I was disappointed. The food was good though, especially the cheese before dinner. Marlo got bored of what she rightly called “old person conversation” which consisted of a lot of complaining about automated phone services, fascist strata councils, and the like. All universal and justified griping that (generally) people of any age can get behind, but somewhat drawn out and with a decided lack of the fanciful anarchistic “what if” scenarios and unforgiving sarcasm that we are used to in our circle of friends. I weathered it without much difficulty but I didn’t add anything to the conversation. Instead we asked Grandma for some drawing implements and started our own crafts table. Earlier in the day I had introduced Marlo to my childhood comics of “The Amazing Sming” so we wrote and drew up a new issue while we were there, with a rather morose ending. We also gave Sming a cat named The Remarkable Nif and I drew up a comic of her exploits as well. After dinner (our yam dish turned out so-so) we played a game called ‘Fictionary’ (http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~axellute/fictiony.html) in which, briefly, players make up defintions for a real word and then guess which is the real one. We didn’t keep score but I will go so far as to say that I spent the most amount of time on my bogus definitions and it paid off. By the way, a nixie is an undeliverable piece of mail, and tragacanth is the gum from an Asian or middle eastern plant. So don’t say I didn’t tell you so.

So that was Sunday. I don’t even remember what we did on Saturday now. But today we went to Aberdeen mall and I got some cutesy little orange gloves and a plate and various candies, and…what else? Oh yeah I got some portfolio type binders. Most of that at Daiso. Marlo got some cool stuff too but she’ll tell you on her blog so I won’t waste my precious letters. Especially not ‘g’. Oh how I love that precious lower case ‘g’. They have a large fountain that fires streams that dance to lots of gay (not ‘gay’ in the good sense) music like “It’s a Small World After All” with coloured lights and everything. It’s very Vegas, and keeps the consumers enthralled and excited. They also have lots of loud, hard-selling salespeople and tantrumy kids. My lunch was not very good, but it was interesting and cool to be in a place for hours where hearing someone speak English behind me made me turn my head in alarm. We came home, Marlo made yummy stir fry, we finished watching Ringu and Marlo watched The Maltese Falcon while I drew. Now if anyone wants to ask me the difference between the Japanese and the American version of The Ring, I am as equipped as I’ll ever be.

Oh I just remembered what we did on Saturday. We went swimming at the Percy Norman pool, but we were both feeling under the weather so we didn’t stay very long. Apres that we went downtown and looked around Act One for some pointy vulcan ears. We had dinner at Roxy Burger and I wasn’t really impressed with the experience. The food was overall pretty good (I had a veggie burger), but I found that paying 8 bucks for a goodly-sized burger and an average-size serving of blandish fries, then on top of that having to pay 50 cents each for cheese or mushrooms or even dijon mustard (although I appreciate them even having the dijon option – also they had mustard at every table along with the ketchup so that was cool) to be a bit silly. Plus the ketchup was off and they didn’t have malt vinegar for the fries. We did get 10% off because of the bad ketchup, but I don’t count that as a plus, I count that as neutral. If they didn’t offer some kind of token material apology for a bad ketchup experience that would be a definite strike against them. This Roxy rant is going on too long. Suffice it to say my expectations were too high, but I would give them another try. I think I will try a chicken burger next time. Oh oh oh – remember how I just said that the Roxy rant is going on too long? Well another annoying aspect was that they had baseball on the TVs which is annoying in and of itself, but it was also several notches too loud. I really don’t understand why people congregate in bars to watch sports. Did the jocks already kick in their TVs at home?

Tomorrow is knitting in the buff. Join us, won’t you?