11/23/2006 : PART DOOX

technically, since the night is still middle aged, i should work on my novel or whatnot, but i still need to documentarize my thanksgiving visit, since it is, after all, the last of my "visits". and a blog entry is easy to write, right? oh, no, it isn't, since my novel, if it turns out to be that, will be written in the same voice as my blog voice. so what's my justification? ah yes, the ardbeg which shattered my no-buy month has rendered me incapable of serious writing, and since i'm only writing, after all, about meeting for the first time the parents of my wife to be, i needn't avail myself of my full, sober faculties. i am hard pressed to think of a fluffier, non-demanding topic than that.

so, as i was saying... wait, what was i saying?

PLEASE PAUSE AS I RE-READ MY PREVIOUS POSTING.

oh right. twas the day 'ere thanksgiving, and all through missouri, not a creature was stirring, not even that one what rhymes with missourri.

on the evening of 11/22, being the evening of our arrival, 203 and i engaged her parents in a quadruel of wits: a four-way scrabble game. at least, i think thats when it was, some of the days have blurred together already, and as we all know, a well peated scotch is really not the best tool for unblurring memories. so: scrabble. i was still stinging from my humiliation at her hands in front of my own folks, and she went and did it again in front of hers. and afterwards, though not soon afterwards, she had the gaul to tell me she loved me.

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT:
my usage of the word "gaul" back there was 100% intentional. i can do shit like that because i'm a writer and writers make puns.

WHERE WAS I?
Oh yes, I was abusing my caps lock. funny story: I dont use capslock, i just hold down shift and type along. LIKE THIS< SEE? YOU CAN TELL I"M NOT JOKING BECAUSE SOME OF THE CHARACTERS ARE WRONG.

now, after she proved to her folks that i wasn't half as smart as she'd led them to believe (that is, if the scrabble game did indeed occur that night, which is not at all clear in my mind. other things that are not at all clear in my mind: "young americans" is by david bowie, not elton john. color me informed!) we went to bed, after which, we awoke the next day, which, since time flows in missouri in the same direction that it flows in california, happened to be 11/23/2006, the titular date of this rambling posting. her dad, a spry <VERY BIG NUMBER> year old, had cooked cinnamon rolls for our breakfast, and by the time 203 and i hauled our poor, chronometrically displaced arses out of bed, the cinnamon rolls were halfway consumed by 203's siblings and her in-law, who had arrived as we slept. they marveled and jeered at the complexity of our coffee making procedures, but we had the last laugh.

HA HA HA HA!

There it was, the last laugh. Stop that! No more laughing or that won't have been the last!

Since we woke up late, we only had time to shower and brush our teeth before it was time for turkey and stuffing. That may not be strictly true, but it's how I remember it, and that's much better than true anyhow. Accompanying the turkey was ham, stuffing, pineapples (evidently for the ham), some vegetables, some squash (both squashed and whole) and a yam dish. Also some other stuff, including 203's dad's from-scratch rolls. 203's peckishness is evidently genetic and i did not want to embarrass myself by eating more than the crowd. well, that's not strictly true. i did not want to embarrass myself by eating more than 2x the table average, so i did not. i stayed right at 2x. it was all yummy.

THEN CAME THE PIES.

i had forgotten about the pies. fortunately, since i hadn't pigged out to my own genetic potential, i had plenty-o-room for pie, but i pretended i didn't, to fit in. the fitting-in was going really well, too, until i expressed a desire for ice cream with my pumpkin pie, which, while a perfectly reasonable request in my estimation, is apparently an outrageous proposition in 203's family. i got my gorram ice cream but it was hard and i took a lot of guff to get it. the pie was yummy but not as yummy as the pie that i was to have later on... but i digress!

THIS JUST IN: i remembered a couple of things just now. actually i remembered the couple of things before i wrote "THEN CAME THE PIES", but I planned to put "THIS JUST IN" in all caps and putting two capitalized exclamations adjacent to each other would really bugger up the flow, so i waited until i had a paragraph to separate the two blocks.

THIS JUST IN: sometime between awakening and eating turkey we called my folks to find out what birhtstones are which, on account of 203's parents have no internet. also, we went outside into the forest/yard where sister #2's husband, a seasoned hunter, gave us all a lesson on tracking deer. i learned many things, including: how to track deer. i would have tracked one that very day, but alas, hunting season had come to a close, which was the other thing i learned that enabled me to claim having learned "many" things instead of "just the one" thing.

after that, we went and had turkey. well, probably we did a lot of other things in the interim but maybe you're just not getting me when i say I DONT REALLY REMEMBER. it'll come back to me, i'm sure of it.

now, after we had the turkey, we went for a walk. 203 had been telling me for months how her ma and pa walked a mile after each meal, and, although the previous day i had not gotten a thorough tour of the property, on account of it was dark, by thursday post-turkey, i had seen enough to realize it was possible to walk a mile as long as one took the road. like, maybe a half mile walk down the road, then a half mile back. but no, no sir, no sir indeed, this was not the way it was done.

her parents have a track on their property, an honest-to-graud track. we did laps. six, to be precise, i think, was the number of laps required for a mile. so we went out and did laps. 203 and i walked for a while with sister #2's son #2, until he couldn't keep up and stopped. 203 and i took this opportunity (since we did not all walk in one group) to take some seemingly-inconspicuous smooches at the far end of the track. sister #2's husband, with his zoom lens SLR camera, soon after the walk, revealed with a sly comment that he knew we'd been smooching. caught!

203's sister #1 is in the air force, and sister #2 is in the army, unless it's the other way around, but i honestly do not think it is. they walked together, and skin me if they didn't march. i joked to 203 and sister #2's son #2 as we did our laps that they (sister #1 and sister #2) should be marching, and then i looked at them, and what do you know?

no really, what do you know?

not much, eh?

one thing i know: sister #1 and sister #2 were marching. in lockstep. it was later revealed that they didn't realize this at the time. ho ho ho!

after the laps we all gathered around the porch and threatened to descend the bluffs behind the property in search of a fabled cave. finally sister #2's husband got tired of our boastful claims and 203, myself, sister #2, and sister #2's husband all set out, not along the threatened route, however. we took a different route that led down a rather steepish gorge lined with slippery leaves and rocks and discarded metal things such as a fridge and a tire. ha ha ha! it's all fun and games until someone gets the lockjaw.

finally we arrived, after everyone (i think) had fallen at least once, at the end of the gorge, to discover that there was indeed a cave-like structure beneath us, but we couldn't get at it on account of we were directly over the 20-30 foot mouth of the cave and didn't have a rope. i located a side route and while i was discussing how we ought to take the side route to reach the ground near the cave, sister #2's husband took the side route. soon, we were all taking it, and after several hilarious close calls with rusty barbed wire, and one very close call where 203 hurled a boulder at me (foolishly forgetting that she was not yet entitled, as an unmarried person, to my life insurance policy) we made it to the bottom, to find that it was more of a big indentation than a cave. no matter, though, for we were within close walking distance of a big field which we surmised would lead us back home -- nobody wanted to ascend the slippery gorge and i certainly didn't want to be on loose footing with my wife-to-be hurling boulders at me.

so along the brambled fields we walked, until we spied along the bluffs what appeared to be a cave, moreso than the cliff-face indentation we'd just come from. the four of us ascended a briary slope to get to it, but only 203 and i had the will to enter the small crack at the back of the cave. we traveled in this fascinating cave for a solid 10 to 15 minutes, crouching, crawling, sliding on my stomach (203 was able to stay fully upright the entire time). there were parts where i could stand up all the way, but mostly i was crouching. there were stalactites and stalagmites. it was super cool. there were monstro crickets the size of small rats, and small rats the size of burlingame. no, actually, there were no rats, but there was a pile of poop that probably belonged to a bobcat, which neither of us, crouched over in a cramped cave, would have been capable of startling.

after a while, we reached a point where 1) forward movement would have required prolonged stomach-crawling and 2) i had to rip a turkey fart. we decided on these grounds that we should depart, post-haste. we had only one flashlight between the two of us, and this slowed our retreat from the relentless pursuit of my tryptophan explosion. still, we made it out of the cave before the exhaustion of our oxygen, none the worse for the wear. we made it to another cave a bit later, where i managed to fall and scrape my tender elbow in full view of 203's laws and in-laws. oi! after we made it back home, the three of them complained of perceived itchiness on account of all the grass and bugs we'd been exposed to. lightweights! i wasn't itchy. just another day in the bush for me.

some things happened which i do not recall.

then, more things happened which i do not recall.

somwhere in there i had more pie. tart cherry pie from 203s parents cherry tree (i think. have i mentioned that my memory is fuzzy?). and more cookies. and fudge. and coffee cake (BREAKING NEWS: COFFEE CAKE DOES NOT CONTAIN COFFEE. why the heck is it called coffee cake, then? search me. HEY NOW! not without a warrant, you fascist!) and probably other bad stuff but NONE OF IT HAD SUGAR ONLY SPLENDA so it was healthy. or, at the very least, it left a healthy aftertaste.

and then, when the others had left and it was just the four of us, we played scrabble once more and I won, reclaiming my lost image from the bowels of apparent stupidity. or, as 203's mom put it (to paraphrase), "pshh, six points is barely winning". yeah, well, it's true that i didn't have a 400 point lead on 203 like she had on me at my parents house, but a six point win is still a win, gorram it! and i did it without cheating or taking pity words.

then we went to bed, or maybe we did some more stuff, or maybe we didn't even do that stuff until the next day. hell, i dunno. i do know for sure the following things:

- we did go caving on thanksgiving day, making 11/23/2006 the coolest TG ever as far as spelunking goes
- the next day i carried 203 for part of our final lap around the track
- i didn't have any ticks from our cavort through the bush
- i had a heinekin, for the first time ever, after our post-turkey adventure. it tasted just like a rolling rock, as far as i could tell, which is to say, it met the barest minimum of requirements to be classified as "beer", but just barely. last night i had one of my own from batch #4 and i must say, batch #4 and heineken really aren't in the same universe. maybe not even the same multiverse. i mean, one is slightly carbonated, slightly bittered, danish horse pee, and the other is BEEEEEER. i leave it to the reader to discern which is which. HINT: mine is the one that isn't horse pee.

all right, that's enough for now. in fact, that might be enough for good. so that i dont have to write another big-old-long-old post, i shall now summarize the remainder of the trip:

- 203 finished my hat. it rocks. i've worn it every day since she finished it.
- we had a nice, big, long layover in PHX on our return trip. the arrival gate was no more than ten feet distant from the departure gate. nice.
- we did some laundry.
- we bought some lumber and some bananas. no gelatin-free yogurt in missouri, at least not in the boonies.
- i will miss oreganos. i wish there was some equivalent here. still, flagstaff has no "tabla", so i guess we're even.
- i ripped one in front of 203's roommate. a big one. a loud one. one that she could not have failed to notice though i hope to god she did fail to notice it. i forgot where i was. i'd just gotten off a plane and i was tired and disoriented. it was past midnight. i'm such a bad person.
- i had a crazy-ass british expat as a cab driver from SFO. he was new and didn't know what to charge. he wanted to run a red light to make an illegal u-turn after he took the wrong exit. i told him i wasn't in that kind of a hurry.
- i horrified the 203 family by eating my leftovers cold. dammit, i like cold TG leftovers! except for peas. bleah.

there were many other great things that happened but alas, i cannot remember them right now, and even if i could, i really ought to get to bed. suffice to say: this was my first TG away from my own parents, but i certainly felt right at home the entire time. and that's what TG is about.

one more thing: in my own family, TG is a somewhat solemn affair, with a familial ceremony of thanks, where we each state a thing we're thankful for before we commence feasting. 203's TG dinner lacked this formal solemnity, but it did not lack the none-too-subtle bonds of familial love and fellowship that TG is all about. TG is my favorite holiday, because i'm not a xtian, and were i one, i'd be peeved that xmas is more about santa than the jesus. but i don't have to deal with that baggage on account of santa and the jesus are basically the same in my book, so that leaves xmas as a redundant TG. since TG is an american holiday, i can feel all patriotic in celebrating it. so score on that one.

in any case, as i was saying: 203's TG felt much less solemn, much less of a production than what i'm used to, and yet, it lacked none of the beautiful meaning that i've grown used to. my entire visit was entirely enjoyable (even the embarrassing bits -- they were all part of the hazing) and i still get smiles when i remember it.

16.5 days.

SIXTEEN POINT FIVE DAYS.

holy crap.