Thanksgiving: The Post-Game

Hope you all had a good Thanksgiving. Mine was one of the better ones I've had lately.

You'll be happy to know that leaving the house before 7 AM worked out just fine, traffic-wise. Some had said that 7 wasn't early enough to beat the traffic. Those doomsayers were wrong.

My aunt and uncle always get up bright and early, so our early arrival was no problem. My baby cousins were another story. The older one had just flown in from Arizona State, where he's a freshman this year, and had proceeded to go out with friends until 3AM the night before, so we didn't see him for a couple of hours. And when he did get up, the following conversation occurred between M and him:

M: [PrettyGirl] is napping in the TV room, so I hope that doesn't interfere with football.
S: Who?

Apparently, all the talk of M being pregnant and having a baby had gone in one ear and right out the other. But having been clued in to the fact that I had a daughter, he was pleased to make her acquaintance. Once she woke up from her nap, of course.

Fun fact: My cousin, who was born a couple days before I started college, has roughly the same age difference with PG as he has with me.

We spent the day throwing around the football, trying to do trick basketball shots (my brother managed to chuck the ball from behind the shed and into the basket right in front of the aforementioned shed - nothing but net - I didn't have my camera with me at the time,) watching football, and playing Guitar Hero. Guitar Hero is sweet. If I had the money, I'd buy an XBox (or PS2/3) just to have that game.

Dinner was awesome. The appetizer soup was excellent. It had watercress and shallots and... well something else that was really good in it. The salad had croutons that had been soaked in bacon grease. So deadly, and yet so good. And the usual turkey, mashed potatoes, etc. were everything you'd want in a Thanksgiving meal. Top scores!

After our lunchtime Thanksgiving dinner, there was more football and Guitar Hero and napping, because, as you might remember, I got up at the crack of dawn and had just ingested a lot of turkey.

M has a friend from college who is currently living in Philadelphia, just 15 minutes from my uncle's house, so the plan was to spend the night at her place and visit with her the next day. The trick was determining how to get there. We had Mapquest directions, but my uncle looked those over and deemed them inaccurate. He showed me the map on Google maps and started explaining to me how to navigate the twists and turns in getting there. He quickly thought better of it and offered to drive there himself and have us follow him.

But there was some question of whether or not we'd find a parking spot close to M's friend's house. Coupled with the fact that she lived in an area that was sketchy (at least, the last my uncle, who used to live in Center City Philadelphia, had heard,) it was finally decided it would be even better if he drove us in our car and then take our car back to his house for the night and bring it back when we were ready to go home the next day. Not liking the idea of driving in an unfamiliar city or trying to keep up with a lead car or leaving M's car parked far enough way to give the scofflaws plenty of opportunities to mug us, I voted for that last idea, and that's what we did.

Of course, there was a parking spot right in front of the friend's house when we got there. My uncle considered leaving us with our car and taking a train back home, but the trains were on a holiday schedule and he didn't bring his jacket to stand in the cold waiting for a train. So we got all our stuff out of the trunk and he left with the car.

About 10 minutes later, I realized that we left our jackets in the back seat of the car. So we had to call my uncle and have him come back so we could get them. It turned out I also forgot my backpack and M forgot PG's bottled milk, so it's a good thing I remembered about the jackets. Would have been better if I had remembered them when we first got out of the car, of course.

We spent the rest of the evening in the dining room talking. Mostly M and her friend talking about their college days and where so-and-so ended up while her husband and I listened. I was so exhausted that by 10 PM, the fatigue was actually painful. But the stories were interesting, so it was a trade-off. PG must have been exhausted too, because she was sleeping in the next room and didn't wake up when the conversation got noisy.

The next day, we went down to Independence Hall to see that and the Liberty Bell. Because there was only one car to work with, and that car's back seat was occupied by a child seat (M's friend's 2-year-old son's) and a baby seat (the 2-year-old's old seat, occupied by PG - we left PG's seat in our car. On purpose,) the moms and the kids went down in the car, and the dads walked to a major road where a cab could be flagged down. We ended up walking a good ways, because the view of City Hall, topped with the William Penn statue, is spectacular on Broad Street, and he thought I might like to see it and get a picture. He was right.

We went to the Liberty Bell first and then got tickets for Independence Hall. Unfortunately, the tickets weren't good for another two hours, and the crowds were growing quickly. So we decided to forget about that. And by "we," I suppose I really mean "me," since I was the only one that had been particularly interested in it to begin with, and it was my call to make. And I made it quite gladly. I can just look at pictures of the inside. I did want to take some pictures around the outside, and it turned out that you can't even be on that side of the street without a ticket. So I took pictures from across the street.

We proceeded to Jim's Steaks to get cheese steaks. Word was that Jim's makes a better cheese steak than most places in Philly, and apparently that word was widespread, because the line snaked outside the building and around the corner. It took about 30 to 40 minutes for us to get to the counter. Not being dummies, M and her friend took the kids home for their naps and left us guys to take care of the ordering and getting the cheese steaks home by cab. We took a cab too. The same one as the cheese steaks did, in fact.

After lunch (verdict on cheese steaks from Jim's: meh) and a quick nap, we called for our car, and my aunt drove it over. We packed it all up, said our goodbyes, and headed back to New Jersey to drop off my aunt. We were on the Ben Franklin bridge when M's friend called me from M's cell phone to let us know that M's purse was still at their house. So we had to turn around, go back to their house, get it, and drive back to New Jersey again. I ended up seeing the outside of Independence Hall four times during my Philly visit, because it's on the way out of Philly (and on the alternate way in, which we chose to take the first time we entered Philly, last night.)

The rest of the trip was blissfully uneventful.

And now I'm going to bed.

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Here's some iTunes for y'all, compiled while I was writing this self-indulgent rambling.

1. "Now They'll Sleep" - Belly
2. "Real Real Real" - Jesus Jones
3. "You Belong To The City" - Glenn Frey
4. "Hash Pipe" - Weezer
5. "Strut" - Sheena Easton
6. "Bittersweet Symphony" - The Verve Pipe
7. "Good Vibrations" - The Beach Boys
8. "Good Enough" - Cyndi Lauper
9. "Rumors" - Timex Social Club
10. "Keep Feeling Fascination" - Human League
11. "Touch of Grey" - The Grateful Dead
12. "Frosty The Snowman" - America
13. "Peace Train" - 10,000 Maniacs
14. "Answer (acoustic) - Sarah McLachlan
15. "One" - Creed
16. "Mississippi" - Sheryl Crow (The Trinity Church Sessions)
17. "Reaching One" - Wendy and Lisa