Our Thanksgiving Weekend

For the first time in several years, we were on our own for a holiday.  We used to always spend our holidays in a quiet way before we lived near family.  Occasionally we would travel to Denver or someone would come visit us to spend a holiday with us but that was pretty rare.  And occasionally we would celebrate with friends.  But with Beverly passing away, we were faced with our first holiday without her.  We have spent all our holidays with her these past 14 years--mostly cooking at her house.  We kept thinking about how we wanted to celebrate Thanksgiving this year.  We wanted to do something that would get us out of the house.  When our friend, Diana, invited us to her house, we were thrilled.

The only thing she wanted was for me to make a dessert so I made some pumpkin bread and a chocolate pecan pie.  She was making the rest.  What a wonderfully decadent and elegant meal it was.  After dining in such an elegant way, it was quite the contrast to play Redneck Life after dinner.  Oh My God!  What a fun game!  We laughed so hard.  The goal of the game is to have as many teeth left as possible.  You get married and have younguns--not necessarily in that order.  You get married and buy a car or cars depending on how many younguns you have and have to replace them in you blow them up.  You get divorced and remarried and take on a lot of stepkids.  And you are constantly getting into situations that you lose teeth.  I managed to have no teeth and was still in debt at the end of the game.  I did better than Chris though.  He lost 17 teeth more than he had to start with.

Diana made a whole extra turkey for us to take home.  Plus leftovers so we are set for food for a few days.

The Vancouver Rotary Festival of Trees is always Thanksgiving weekend and Bill is always in charge of judging.  We bought several raffle tickets this year but we didn't win a tree.  So I will be putting up the new one that I bought at the after Christmas sales last year.

Jeff and Julie usually do a dinner for veterans on Veterans Day Weekend but they decided to go to Florida for a veterans event down there this year.  So we celebrated a little later this year--November 30th.  We went to a different location this year too--Langdon Farms Golf Course down in Aurora. There were 10 of us this year.  Ernie brought his brother, Bob, who was also a pilot during WWII. They went to flight school together.  Jeff's parents were also there as well as another couple that we hadn't met before.  It was a very nice evening with friends and meeting new ones.