I'm feeling pretty thankful this Thanksgiving. I know - I know, our ancestors slaughtered the natives and took their land. It's a wet sack of lamesauce that it's become a holiday but I'm choosing to be positive about it for now. Me, I'm thankful for being surrounded by great people on all sides. My family, friends, neighbors, and even co-workers are all such outstanding people who do nothing but enrich my life.
Ashley and I spent our last-thursday-of-November at my aunt and uncle's place in Beverly where 12 of us devoured a 25lb turkey AND a ham. There were carrots, squash, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and umpteen other sides including a green bean casserole that Ashley made which was a hit. Good job, fiend! After dinner, my cousin Jayme made an appearance thanks to Google's new video chat. She's been stationed with the airforce in Korea for a while now. It's crazy to think that my brother and I used to play "kitties and doggies" with her and her sister when we were little. Now she mans a machine gun that fires about 800 rounds/min.
Last night Ash and I had a sequel Thanksgiving dinner with our neighbors in Salem. The food was delicious, but nothing compares to the conversation had when we all get together. Everyone comes from such diverse backgrounds, it's like having a conversation with a walking, talking, 5-headed encyclopedia. We capped the evening with a game of Balderdash, and I learned that the only thing more intellectually stimulating than factual trivia is convincing bullshit.
The game goes like this: Players take turns being the "dasher", who picks a card and randomly selects a topic from : words, dates, movies, people, or acronyms. They then read the corresponding item from the card. Eg. "Nov. 10, 1958" for a date, "Agillo" for a word, "Bjorn Leirvik" for a name, "Fast Forward" for a movie, or "L.A.P.M.S." for an acronym. The remaining players then write down a bullshit description of the item (or the actual description if they think they know it). The dasher then reads all of the descriptions aloud along with the actual description. The players finally try to guess which is the real definition. Players move their pieces on a board for each person that thinks their description is the real one. If no one gets it right, the dasher moves his piece.
For the date "Nov. 10, 1958", the real answer might be "Birth of the Bossa nova in Rio de Janeiro"
, but someone might write "Birthdate of Chip Kass, funny car racer." When you get a bunch of clever people together, this game becomes incredibly difficult and hilarious. The real answers are always a challenge because they can be completely ridiculous, or utterly uncreative. They key is to play off the other players knowledge and listen carefully to the wording of the descriptions.
One last thing I'm thankful for is a new bedframe that Ashley and I bought yesterday. Our previous frame had wheels and a center-support that was too high, so when we got in bed, the whole bed wanted to rotate like Austin Powers'. Getting the new frame home from Ikea was a miracle. We had to take it out of it's box and cram it in between my front passenger side seat and the back seat behind the driver. I drove home with my steering wheel about 4 inches away from my stomach, and my knees bumping the underside of the dashboard. When we got home, we discovered that we trashed the manual along with the box back at the store. Thankfully, Ikea posts all of their manuals online, and the frame came together beautifully. No more skating across the floor in our sleep!
It was a nice ego booster to hear that people appreciated the work I did there, but then I stopped. "Award-winning?" Last I checked, I hadn't heard anything about winning any awards. When I checked back with her on it, she explained that our device won the bronze International Design Excellence Award (IDEA) which, according to 3M anyway, is one of the worlds most prestigious design competitions sponsored by Business Week magazine and the Industrial Designers Society of America.
