Thanksgiving

How to impress your girlfriends' parents at Thanksgiving:

You go out and drink on the back porch with the host, a big, burly, lumberjack, Santa Claus looking fellow who's house is perched in the foothills of the Cascades.  Now the host, Heidi's uncle, is a whiskey drinkin' man.  You're not really, but what the hell?  So after a couple glasses of red wine with dinner you find yourself outside at night with the host, the father of your girlfriend, and another guy, all over 55, sipping on shots of Jim Beam, Jack Daniel's, and Seagram's VO Gold.  At least that's the last thing you remember...  Sure you have a foggy memory of drinking a bottle of Arrogant Bastard Ale and reading the label off the bottle to the family in the living room late that evening.  And you kind of remember that once you make it back to the home of your girlfriends' parents house at midnight, you had to run outside and puke.  This all comes back to you as you peel yourself off the living room floor at 5:10am in the morning, pillow and blanket in hand (which were so tenderly given to you after you passed out on the floor) and swagger over the hide-a-bed.  Later that day before going out to lunch, your girlfriend and her father try to help you out by giving you a couple of Rolaids tablets to chew on and wash down with some whatever.  After a statement of, "oh boy, that didn't go down good", you run out the sliding glass door for the 2nd time in the last 12 hours and fertilize the lawn a little bit more.

Yea... [in my best Lumbergh impersonation]

Anyway.  So besides my drunken story that I'm hoping will generate laughter and stories down the road, I had a pretty good time at Thanksgiving this year.  We drove down to Heidi's parent's place for a couple days, leaving on Thursday and coming back Saturday.  Thanksgiving was actually at her relatives house in the cascades, only a dozen or so miles from the mountain bike race in Oakridge I did earlier this summer.  I learned at dinner that you can't drink the water in the mountains there because it contains arsenic.  So even though you can use it to do dishes or take a shower, you have to drink bottled water.  I got a little, overserved, that night and paid for it the rest of the weekend.  Honestly, I'd rather have pain inflicted on me than be nauseous like that.  I can count on one hand the number of times I've puked in my life; and 2 of those events were from drinking hard liquor.  I just thought those dry heaves all those years ago was because it was Yukon Jack and I was barely 16.  I guess hard liquor and I don't agree with each other.

We went out to watch the "Civil War" game Friday afternoon between, Oregon State and Oregon.  A hard fought game that Oregon State barely won and came down to the last play.  I suffered through it only being able to eat french fries even though my burger was looking good.  I just couldn't stomach it.

That Friday night we went out for Sushi, which is very good on the west coast here, and Eugene has a good spot called Sushi Station, with a couple of additional girls meeting up with us.  Even though I love sushi, I stuck to the cooked stuff, chicken teriyaki as my main course, because I didn't think I could hold it down.  I did sneak in a few tastes though.

We took it easy the rest of the weekend.  I was still kind of hurtin on Sunday even...  played a bunch of Battlefield 2142 with the old man over Ventrilo.

Later