Well, it looks like poor Spenser might be fully on the road to recovery.
Temperature running steady at 48 degrees, new video drivers and patches for the
motherboard… maybe we are home free. Although who knows, we could freeze
up at any moment here. I keep having paranoid thoughts about that as I
write this. Stay on target… stay on target…

Thanksgiving week was excellent. Not only is Thanksgiving really my
favorite holiday of the year, I managed to get in at least four
homemade meals in a row this year. Always a good thing when you’re a
peanut-butter-on-a-spoon consuming bachelor such as myself.

1. Tuesday night I went over to Brian Gee’s, for some homecooked
   Chinese food. The thing to understand about Brian is, he’s one
   of those guys who moved to the Silicon Valley and was shocked,
   shocked to discover that it’s sometimes kinda hard to meet nice
   girls around here. “Evan!” he’d cry. “This place is a
   wasteland.”

   Well, this year I arrived at the door to his palatial new
   San Francisco pad promptly at 7pm, to find Brian in the kitchen,
   surrounded by at least five or six reasonably attractive
   young women. Clearly Brian is not doing so badly for himself.
   Of course he is handsome, intelligent, funny, ambitious, a good cook,
   blah blah blah, so go figure.

   Anyway, it was refreshing to see Brian. I hadn’t actually hung out
   with him for a long time. How long? Well, when I mentioned to him
   that Amber and I had broken up, his sympathetic, heartfelt response was,
   “Ummm… Amber who?” Somehow I forgot to mention to him that I had been dating
   this very nice woman for the last ten months in the first place. Ooops.

   Apparently he feels this is a sign I need to be
   a bit more communicative about my social life in the future.
   I’m investigating blast-faxes.

2. Wednesday night I had dinner with
   M’ris and Mark and
   Tim. And she served angelsuppa (“angel soup”, I think), which is a
   Norsk dessert of berries (“cloudberries”) and cream. Or for American
   palates, berries and ice cream. Good stuff.

   After dinner, Tim and M’ris and I got into a discussion about Harry Potter.
   Tim and M’ris pointed out that Harry Potter and his friends are all pretty
   one-dimensional — they’re basically good kids, they don’t go through any
   major internal struggles, and they all fit various boarding school stereotypes.
   They’re right — I had noticed this with the unredeemably nasty Draco Malfoy, but for
   some reason I missed it in the other characters. Anyway, on further reflection,
   I think the one exception is Snape. He started out a Death-Eater, but
   had a change of heart; he hates Harry Potter passionately, but dives in and
   saves him when necessary. That’s worth some points, I think.

   Tim also pointed out that J.K. Rowling snubbed
   this year’s Hugo Award ceremony for
   Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. If so, that’s pretty tacky.
   I certainly hope Rowling isn’t one of those authors who thinks she writes
   “lit-rah-chah”, as opposed to that blight on our civilization, speculative fiction.

3. Thursday night was Thanksgiving. This year I decided that it was time for the
   younger generation to learn the family Thanksgiving secrets. I made the stuffing,
   made the gravy, and prepared, stuffed, and carved the turkey. The one thing I didn’t do
   was cook the turkey… so if Dad gets hit by a bus next year, his secrets
   with the Weber die with him.

   The meal was excellent (if I do say so myself). We ate with cousin David and
   some family friends, Susan Hennings and her daughter Anna.
   Anna is two weeks older than Sarah, and about a foot-and-a-half taller.
   They’ve been friends since they were crawling around on the floor… which
   pretty much puts me and Eric to shame.

4. Friday night was Son of Thanksgiving. We finished most of the turkey, although
   we had to invite yet more cousins to do it. And their girlfriends.
   I made pumpkin pie, but unfortunately I misread the recipe and used 1/4c of
   brown sugar instead of 3/4c. Tee-hee! Everyone was polite about it though.
   “Mmmm, yes, you don’t want to oversweeten the pumpkin pie. It tastes sooo
   artificial.” Some of them even waited a full 90 seconds before reaching for the honey.

   I then went and dragged Nancy out of the house, and we hung out at a bar in Campbell
   (Katie Bloom’s) with Randy and Don and Nicole and Monica and Monica’s Boyfriend Who
   I Can Never Remember the Name Of, Even Though He Can Remember Mine Just Fine and
   Seems Like a Very Nice Guy.

All in all, a mind- and waist-expanding week! I suppose I have plenty more to prattle
on about, but I might as well save it for the near future. I’m afraid I’m going to start
sounding like Liz Smith, or maybe
Jackie Harvey, anyway.
Item!