Thanksgiving Part the First

After a long week of working on projects (or procrastinating a little), I was greatly looking forward to Friday adventures. Last Friday was the Young Adult/Grad Student Progressive Thanksgiving Dinner. Glorious.

To start the story, I must comment on my choice of clothing: It was a Friday, and I decided, opposed to my normal view of: "What? A Flogging Molly shirt is classy enough..." I went for a more civilized look for this Thanksgiving dinner. I decided on a clean White shirt with my coveted Red Tie in honor of Gramps. Oh yeah... and my kilt.

For those of you who may not have experienced a progressive dinner, you generally change houses for different courses of the meal. It diffuses the responsibility, and it allows for some fun in carpooling. So the evening started at the Schooley's, where Bri had made some amazing appetizers, ranging from a baked brie, to stuffed prunes (really tasty!), stuffed mushrooms, and a great cheese ball. There were about 20 or so people stuffed in to their small apartment, very cozy, and very fun. Topics of discussion included getting Tucker up to speed on Harry Potter (oh yeah, a group of us were going to see HP 7 after all of this) he had never read any of the books, and not seen any of the movies. We boiled down all of the Harry Potter story to Star Wars, I thought we did a decent job for 10 minutes. This was the first time I wore my kilt with this group of people, so there was discussion about that. I had to justify walking up and down stairs differently (apparently no one knew what I was talking about). A very enjoyable group of people.

We eventually made it to the Church, where we met up with the other contingent of YadGrads who were at another person's house. At the church, in the "fellowship hall" (aka ball room from Beauty and the Beast), there was a great feast set out. Before we get to the food, I have to boast a little. Randy, a man who is impeccably dressed every single time I see him, came up and informed me that I get his vote for the best dressed. One of the highlights of the night. A great honor indeed, coming from him, it meant a lot. There you go mom, I didn't forget everything you taught me. So we quickly dug in to the turkey, potatoes and gravy... mmmm gravy. I sat with Jeff, Randy, and a couple who are both CMU people. I cannot remember their names for the life of me, the guy is a PHD student in the Buisness school, and the girl is in the costume production department. It was rather interesting to hear the other side of CMU, yes they have a strong arts department (speaking of which, I should write about my treak in to the CFA building last week).

After dinner the group split up again. The part I was in headed to William's house for some desert. Decadence is an understatment. There was cheesecake, pumpkin pie, pumpkin cheesecake (which was basically pumpkin pie meshed with cheescake) Red Velvet Cake, cookies, cider, and Ice Cream. So very good. By design, we did not stay there very long, the majority of the group at this particular location were also going to Harry Potter, so we sampled as much goodness as we could, and headed off to the Waterfront for cinematic adventure.

The theater we went to gets props for having great movie posters all over. Instead of having "Up comming events" they had Star Wars, Back to the Future, and Ghostbusters vintage posters. Awesome. They do gets points taken away for "Reserved" seats in the theater. These overly large chairs, with quick access to the bar (yep the theater had a fully equiped bar) were sort of like First Class theater going, and the rest of us were in coatch. Because we got there late we had to split up in to smaller groups. I went off with Sam, Gwyn and Tracy, which was awesome. Tracey has the frightening tollerance of Kirsten, a trait that will always amuse me. So as the movie started, to my left I hear: "Ok, time to assume my movie watching possition." I look over to see Tracey pulling her legs up infront of here, so that she can hide behind her knees. There also might have been some wand fighting earlier in the night, unfortunately by the time we got to the theater, one of the wants we broken (I may have had something to do with that...).

A note about Harry Potter: It was exactly what I expected. I was not overly impressed with this part in the books, and I was not overly impressed with the movie. I am certianly glad I went, it was just a lot being lost in the forest... and wondering around, sort of like Lord of the Rings, but not awesome.

Yet again, great night with great people.

In other news, MY PARENTS ARE GETTING HERE TUESDAY! I am super excited! That is what I did most of Saturday... yep, being excited. That is all. No, I spent a large part of my day cleaning, and getting some work done so I can hang out with them.

Don't worry, there will be more to come later today. I still need to go over Sunday's Thanksgiving Part the Second. But alas, Machine Learning Calls me... A Cruel Mistress.