We had mom & dad out for Thanksgiving this week, which was great. Food-induced coma yesterday, followed by running around today not shopping so as to avoid the Black Friday insanity. First, requisite pictures of the food:
It was Amanda’s first Thanksgiving dinner, in that we have always been visiting someone else on Thanksgiving and she might have brought something along, but hadn’t done the whole meal herself. She was definitely happy about it.
We had some time to kill between the turkey going in the oven to start cooking and the time when she’d have to start the rest of the food. Mom wanted to go for a walk or a drive around the neighborhood to see what it looked like (strange subdivision in the middle of the desert thing…), and I managed to get her on the back of the V-star for a short ride. First time she had ever been on a motorcycle! We got her buttoned up in some of Amanda’s gear, and away we went:
Afterward she said she had been terrified, but excited at the same time. As I described to some of the biker-folk at BBO my inner hooligan was handcuffed, muzzled, hog-tied, and stuffed in the corner… mom being on the back and all…
Back to cooking, and I took the opportunity to mess with the dog. Resa is bad about only licking one side of her nose, which then causes the other side to dry out and crack. How do you get a dog to lick their entire nose? Easy: peanut butter!
After the preparation, the consumption began:
And den?
And den we wented to see da hippies! As I said before, we tried to avoid the post-Thanksgiving shopping stupidity, and mom wanted to go see ‘dirtbag houses’ as she described them. A more specific description would be alternative housing constructed with packed earth using polypropylene bags. She mentioned that there was a house constructed out of said ‘dirtbags’, somewhere here in Tucson, but couldn’t find it online. A bit of Google-fu, and I managed to come up with TerraSante, a small community out west of town that had a number of these alternative buildings, so we went to check the place out. The folks there were very polite and asked how we had heard of the place (the internet), and one of the men there explained a little bit about the two completed houses. Apparently they are both under 200 square feet, which exempts them from needing any building permits or meeting building codes, which I understand would be prudent when working with experimental housing construction. I’ll just let the pictures do the talking at this point:”
I think dad’s comment that ‘It’s like being in the ’60’s again…’ was rather apropos… But they were nice folks, and it was interesting to see the finished product that can be created from packed dirt, sandbags, and stucco. We left there and headed into town to check out a woodworking supply store that dad had seen online so he could see some of what they had in person. If you’re ever in need of exotic hardwood this place should definitely be on the short list.
After the wood shop, we headed over to Bookman’s to show mom. It’s a pretty cool store (used books), and was far less crazy than the mall or Best Buy would have been. Not ‘looking for the deals’ or ‘shopping til you drop’ on Black Friday affords quite a bit of peace in the ‘just go look at stuff’ process. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure Bookman’s is more busy on an average day than it was today, because folks were out doing that insane-o shopping elsewhere.
And of course a first visit to Tucson would be incomplete without a jaunt up Mt Lemmon to see the view from the Sky Islands:
And then we came home again. Didn’t get around to it last night or this morning due to food-coma, but this evening we got the tree out, and Amanda got it decorated. It’s officially the holidays!
Leave a Reply