B. E. M.

Ah, Thanksgiving break. A time to sleep until noon and eat until you never want to look at a yam again.

This year, my dad's girlfriend offered to cook for all of my extended family, so we could do just one meal instead of two. Because she can never do anything halfway, and unless I'm much mistaken, she actually started preparing things on Sunday. Mind you, the bulk of the cooking, including all of the hot stuff, was done on Thursday morning, but the days leading up to it were crammed full of cleaning and fretting. She cooked two turkeys and had a third on standby, just in case. And that's just one dish. Shall we talk about her homemade stuffing and her orange-flavored yams? So much yum.

Around noon-thirty, my flavorful assortment of cousins and such began arriving. It was a joyous afternoon. The Thanksgiving meal is definitely a marathon, not a sprint. It's all about pacing yourself. I only gave up halfway through my third slice of pie. I felt like a failure, but the wise man knows when to admit defeat. Once everyone could eat no more, we sat around talking and laughing until we couldn't breathe, the mashed potatoes a painful stabbing in our guffawed-out sides.

I always find the TV schedule on Thanksgiving supremely odd. One channel was playing Ghostbusters. Another had an all-day marathon of Bones. I vividly remember a Thanksgiving several years ago when some channel had a Home Improvement marathon. Who decides these things?

Through the succeeding days of the break, I woke up later and later each morning. On Friday, I only ventured out of the house once for an hour or so of girl time (pedicures). I don't understand the Black Friday phenomenon. Black Friday makes me want to bar the doors and board up the windows and stay huddled on the couch with a shotgun and a box of Twinkies.

Football: I am not happy with Dennis Erickson being fired.

I spent the rest of the weekend reading The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson, which I highly recommend, and playing games on Neopets. Represent, yo.

Monday morning was tough. Somehow I managed to do exactly no homework over the break, so I had to hurry and cram it all in before Institute. The eye strain from having to read the aforementioned book on my computer was not helping. I don't know what went wrong, but when it came time for me to check out my digital library loan, it turned out that my hold had been placed for an Adobe EPUB book, even though I am dead positive I clicked the button for the Kindle format. Ah, well. Such is life. And that dang novel was worth it, let me tell you.

I feel like the end of the semester has snuck up on me. I got back from Thanksgiving break, and suddenly my teachers were announcing crazy things like there were only three class periods left before finals. I still don't quite feel like the semester has really begun. It can't be time for it to end already. I'm not saying I won't thoroughly enjoy the time off. It's just that my brain is not adequately processing this information. What is time? Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff, that's what it is.

Excuse me. Netflix is calling.

Listening to: Doctor Who
Reading: North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell