roundup

The turkey and its accoutrements (side note: spell-check prefers "accouterments", but I refuse) are almost gone. My uncle and aunt have gone home. I have played a fair amount of cribbage (winning only twice, but almost winning several times) and a little bridge (making my own contracts and setting a fair few of my opponents' with clever defense, and usually - but not always - bidding correctly, even, though only once causing confusion with two cards stuck together so my hand appeared to have one less than anyone else's), and accomplished some knitting, and written about a third of my team's final paper for my class, which is due December 10 - a week from this Thursday - or, in fact, actually December 9, so everyone can read it (ha!) before we present it in class that evening. I'm more or less making shit up, but I understand from the general grapevine that that's more or less normal?

( tl;dr - final paper )

The house is almost completely quiet. My parents are off tomorrow to Australia and Other Faraway Places - my mother is giving a paper at a conference in Cairns, and they are quite sensibly not going all that way just to turn around and come home. Cairns, Brisbane, Sydney, (no Uluru, but you can bet when I get to Australia I won't miss it), Kuala Lumpur, Phnom Penh - remember when we wouldn't let them go to Cambodia? Somehow a side trip to Cambodia doesn't distress us as much as a deliberate trip to Cambodia and nowhere else. (Plus, they've taken our concerns seriously and etc.) Anyway, my brother is driving them to the airport at 4am, so all three of them are asleep now, and the house is making the sort of occasional noise houses make - the whir of the appliances, the occasional muffled thunk as something settles somewhere. I'm off to bed now; I'll wake up and say goodbye when they go, and then go back to sleep and wake up when I wake up and drive home again.

Thanksgiving is good. It's my favorite holiday. (This year, also, I get to wish a happy birth day to Young Zaphod, my newest baby friend. [g]) But I'm already ready for Christmas, I think, when most of what is currently stressing me out (to sum up, from the above and what's in my head: class work and the non-teamwork thereof; concert for which I'm not confident enough of us will know the music well enough not to be a moderate embarrassment; curling, which is always good, taking up just a shade more of my time than I feel I have free at the moment; my parents ten thousand miles away where there are, in no particular order, scorpions, land mines, tropical heat and its related contagions, armed gangs - listen, it's not that I don't think world travel is a positive thing, it's just that they are not especially adventurous and I worry about them; did I mention this class teamwork thing?) will be over. Right now I sort of feel like I don't have time to be doing nothing tomorrow but driving. Alas, I'll be in the car by myself, so driving it is.