We had some people over for Thanksgiving last week:
- two of my high school friends, Ari and Geoff
- the wife, Michelle, of another high school friend, Obie, who is now in the Peace Corp!
- Robin’s mom, Diane, and her mom’s friend, Larry, who stayed until Saturday
- Dennis, a friend from the college of ed, and his girlfriend, Joy
Fun was had by all. The food turned out well, though I haven’t checked with everyone to make sure no one got food poisoning. Robin felt nauseous in the middle of the night, and we used a new recipe from Alton Brown which calls for much less time in the oven than all the other recipes we could find, so we were worried for a bit. But his is based on perfect temperatures… the problem was that our thermometers suck. But the meat was super, super juicy. I guess there’s a fine line between juicy and disease. 😛
We made a ton of gravy, served in our new gravy pitcher from IKEA. That was good.
On Friday, we took Diane and Larry around town, doing the touristy thing. First we went on the Theo chocolate factory tour. Theo uses all organic, fair trade ingredients. No soy lecithin or other crap, which is good for Diane since she’s allergic to soy. She ended up buying a ton of chocolate bars. 🙂
Larry and I went up to the Space Needle’s observation deck, and it was a perfectly clear, crisp day for it. I wish we got there a little earlier, though, since we had some major glare off the water from the mid-afternoon sun. The view of downtown and Mt. Ranier was pretty impressive. I’ll post photos later. Robin didn’t go up with us due to her continued nausea, and her mom didn’t go up due to her extreme fear of heights (she even avoids some bridges which makes traveling up through Portland and Seattle a little difficult given the high number of rivers and canals and such here).
Then we went to Pike Place, though most things were closing, so we ended up just getting dinner at The Islander. We spent a few minutes trying to figure out what Diane could eat (soy allergy, remember) and ended up getting her Honey Walnut Prawns, completely forgetting that mayonnaise often has soy in it, being so focused on avoiding soy sauce… oh well… Also, Robin somehow managed to order something that resembled our turkey dinner the day before. Woops. Larry doesn’t get out much and ended up getting fried chicken, but then wishing he had Diane’s prawn dish, but she loved the taste and ate it, regretting it later (she does that a lot–still eats Oreos, etc.). What I had was great (Pad Thai).
On Saturday, we went to Gasworks and then checked out the UW campus. Crazy day at UW, as we were hosting the Apple Cup, the annual football game vs. Washington State. I hear we lost. 🙁
After checking out the campus, Robin, et. al. dropped me off at Greenlake and went home. I had to go to Amit and Kate’s wedding! It was good.
All this weekend, I was slightly antsy since I had just installed the new hardware on Wednesday, but didn’t get time to check it out until Sunday. The CPU is about twice as fast as my old one (according to 3Dmark06), and the video card is about 3 or 4 times faster than my old one! This basically means that I can turn up the graphics effects and enjoy modern games in all their glory, though I wouldn’t be able to do this at super high resolutions. In a year or two, I’ll do a real upgrade to a completely new system.
Aaron gave me a nice present last week in the form of the original Half-Life 2 and Episode 1. After installing the new hard drive (and dealing with some issues about cloning the OS and boot system, etc.), I finally had enough free space to install it and other games I’ve been holding onto, including reinstalling WoW. Now to just find some time to play…