Saturday, 24 November 2007

• Thanksgiving!

  Aha! I promised I'd post something without a rant! ...Actually, this is kind of one, but it's a good one! :P ;) I'm going to talk about my absolutely awesome Thanksgiving with my cousins! :D

  See, every year, my family goes to my cousin's house, or they come to ours. With an exception two years ago (it was my grandparents' 50th anniversary, so we went to their house), that's what we've been doing for years. This year, it was our turn to go there...which was fine by me. I sometimes like long car trips, for some weird reason, for about the first and last hour of the trip (plus any time after we've been out of the car for a while, i.e. after eating). Not to mention I was just too happy about seeing them to be unhappy about anything!

  We'll start on Wednesday. It actually started out kind of bad, because I was up at 2:00...AM. You read that correctly. My mind is REALLY mean to me; I had been working a 4-hour shift on Drive Thru at my job the night before, and it had been a particularly insanely busy night for the first three hours, meaning I did more Drive Thru than ever before...and since the person I was working with was almost as new to it as I was, we had plenty of pile-ups and other stuff like that. So, my brain decided it'd be mean to me and make me dream about being stuck on Drive Thru when it was a particularly insane time and nothing was working right and the entire system had changed and all automation had just down and...you get the idea. It was actually kind of funny when I first woke up, since I went for a while thinking "Oh great, this is a nightmare!" to realizing, "Wait a minute...this is a nightmare! Literally!" I'm serious; I actually thought, in my dream, "This is a real dream". That's also almost exactly when I woke up. So, why didn't I fall back asleep? Well, for one thing, I didn't really fully wake up for a while. There's this lovely little thing known as half-dreaming; every time I tried to go back to sleep, I started slipping back into the "Crazy Drive-Thru" dream. The other reason was that I had discovered, to my horror, that I was beginning to get sick. I had a sore throat and I was stuffed up. Since I have asthma, when I get either of those symptoms, it's likely to turn into something worse...and I was NOT going to get sick the day before Thanksgiving with my cousins. I spent about (about; these are approximations) 15 minutes willing myself to be not sick (yeah, I had a good laugh at myself later), a halfr-hour trying to decide whether or not I should get up and take a hot shower, drink a warm drink, or something like that to make it feel better, another 10 minutes of "I'll just go back to sleep", then finally getting up with a "I'll just take a painkiller or something" mentality.

  Of course, I did more than take medicine. I also took the said shower and drank said drink, but it took a while to drink the drink, so I started playing a video game. BIG MISTAKE. For some weird reason, I kept putting off going back to bed....Finally, I just said, "Okay, I'm about to go running around in circles for a while anyways; I mind as well actually go back to bed." I was hoping that I'd get some more sleep and the sore throat would go away. Hehe, no. It was still there, but I was willing to ignore it from the time my mom woke me up a few hours later (later than everyone else; it's funny, since I think most of my family thinks I was just being lazy and sleeping in...) to when we were in the van. Then I caved and took some cold medicine. The trip was uneventful, sans a traffic jam about a half-hour before we reached my cousin's house, and we finally arrived nearly an hour earlier than my brother and I had been prediciting---which was good, of course. We spent the rest of the day (*coughnightcough*) doing...well, honestly, random stuff. This was the point in time when my cousins introduced my brother to a program that reminds me of Paint in 3D. (It's different, but it reminds me of it). BIG MISTAKE; my brother+any Paint-like program=DISASTER! (:P ;)) Juuuust kidding; he has already gotten semi-"attatched" to it, but at least he isn't making realistic-looking Master Chief helmets from scratch yet....

  Wednesday night, as we did every other night, we watched a movie. The first night, we watched Ratatouille---it was my third or fourth time, but I'm pretty sure it was a first for my cousins. However, since I was sick and never really made up for the hours I missed earlier that morning, I went to bed about half-way through the movie---regrettably so, since I've actually only seen the ending once (I keep getting called away!) and I like the movie. Then, of course, I slept until 10:00. :P

  Anyways, let's move on to the next morning. My sister got me up at about 11:00 PM, and my cousins and I had fun playing around for most of the day. At about 5:4- (something), we started watching Amazing Grace---first time for everyone but my parents, and maybe my sister and her fiance. I was completely blown away by the movie; it was amazing. I was particularly happy that they didn't gloss over or leave out the Christianity, but even without that, it was a really good movie. After the movie, since there were still a few hours left, I spent some more time with the "younger" cousins ("younger" since it consisted of most of them from the second oldest down), then I eventually (somehow; can't remember exactly now) worked my way into my oldest cousin's room, where she, my sister, and my brother-in-law-to-be were all discussing stuff (we later had my second-oldest and second-youngest cousins join us). It was interesting; we went from school in general to specific stuff (as you can guess, I got in my share about how bad the school is ;)) to talking about friends to talking about...well, you get the idea. However, eventually, we got into the subject of the Big Bang Theory, and how it could work...or how it was impossible, which was how most of us were trying to play it. Unfortunately, my brother-in-law-to-be likes to play devil's advocate, AND he knows significantly more about physics and theories than the rest of us in the room. That was actually a little annoying, since we all knew that he didn't believe it, but if he did, we wouldn't have been able to convince him because he sounded so RIGHT. GAH!

  Thankfully---or maybe not so---we had to move. The other cousin who sleeps in that room wanted to go to bed, so we had to go downstairs...where my dad was. My dad is a very strong creationist, and he knows quite a bit about the Theory of Evolution (Big Bang included) and how to refute it. My sister's fiance started the conversation up again, and my dad joined in...or took over, whichever way you want to look at it. They spent about a half hour talking mostly about stuff that no one else in the room understood before we were finally able to break it up a little bit and change the subject towards politics. Haha, that was fun, since we mostly stuck to issues we agreed on. :P And we're all pretty solid in our political beliefs. I won't get into what we discussed since it IS political (and I can't remember exactly how we got onto some of the subjects....), but suffice it so say it was interesting. Then my cousins had to go to bed, but my dad let me, my sister, and her fiance stay up. We then discussed things such as the proofs that Noah's flood was indeed global, not local, why it wasn't likely anyone was ever going to find Noah's real ark, etc. It was really fun. After a while, though, my dad decided we needed to go to bed, so we did.

  I actually got up at 11:00 and had a day similar to Thanksgiving, minus the interesting conversation (I did have one with my oldest cousin and 3rd-youngest cousin, but it wasn't as long since we were supposed to be falling asleep at the time, nor was it as in-depth with the science and all because neither of us were as science-y as my dad and brother-in-law-to-be). We watched Bridge to Terabithia that night---my 4th time, but it still...invoked an emotional reaction. (If you've seen it, you know what and why, though I can't say either without giving away some spoilers.)

  Then, there's today. After a very sad farewell (*sniff* I miss them already! :P), we started heading back. The trip was shorter on the way home, but at least I got some sleep in on the way. :P Then I came home to all 282 NarniaWeb e-mails (alone!) and all the stuff I have to get done by Monday and....*sigh* Oh well. :P ;)

  I'm just tooo happy. :P But now I'm just too tired to keep this up, so I'm going to bed....

  ~Ryadian/Elicael, Fire Sarien/Ashareya ThirdCrystal~

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