No natural ingredients here...

Man, what a weekend. If it weren't for a very, very comfortable bed and a very, very love-of-my-life someone being in it with me, I don't think I would have survived the great devouring of large bird festivities, but I did, and it was good.

Lemme break it down for you:

- Wednesday evening was spent....well, to be honest I don't really remember, but I do know that it involved some vodka and\or rum and varying degrees of stress, the least of which stemming from the impending doom of the "T-Minus 18 hours until Turkey Day with Crazy Family" countdown. I am forever thankful that hanging out with my family is so NOT stressful..I really felt bad for Amy, having to face that down, but like the bad mother-trucker that she is, she soldiered forward and managed to survive the Thursday to end all Thursdays. More on that later...

- MY Turkey Day started off relatively simple enough - Amy and the kids shuffled out of the house earlier in the morning, heading off to Mom's like beaten prisoners of war, dragging their feet through insurmountable bouts of 'I don't wanna go!'...my heart wept for all three of them, darnit.

I, on the other hand, had to make final preparations for the annual Orphans Thanksgiving down at Gary's in the U-District. The Orphans Thanksgiving may sound a little down-trodden, but it most certainly is not; essentially, it's a place for anyone that either doesn't have family around for the holiday, or doesn't WANT to have family around for the holiday. Either way, it's an excuse for all of us to hang out together, have some great food, and drink ourselves silly.

I was up for doing the deep-fried turkey again this year, and once again, I proved myself a culinary genius.

Well ok - to be honest, it's pretty hard to completely fail at deep-fried turkey, but I was rather proud of myself and how the big bird turned out. The whole thing got devoured inside of an hour too, so the meat-eaters in attendance seemed to agree on the quality of the thing. The anti-meat hippies did also provide some insanely good food as well; Shawn made the best biscuits I've ever tasted, and I'm from Texas so that's saying a lot; Keith whipped up some incredible mushroom gravy and the most interesting and tasty mix of mashed 'taters mixed with sweet potatoes...incredible.

Bizkit offered up the fresh cranberries and bread pudding, and Wes's jumbaliya (sp?) was amazing as always.

So all told, we ate ourselves completely retarded, and topped it off with Skippy's giant cooler full of jell-o shots in assorted flavors. I started to get extremely tired around 6'ish and decided it was time to roll on out, and I wasn't sure what Amy had planned for the evening. No, balls are NOT in the purse (yet) but we had been planning on getting out in the brisk 3am air of Black Friday and maybe snagging a gift or two for the kids on the cheap - as luck would have it, Amer's mom volunteered to quarter the kiddos for the night....hoo-fucking-ray!! So off to the bar we went, finding that the 'Shoe does have one redeeming quality - it was open on Thanksgiving!

We settled in, had our beers in hand, and I wanted to play pool. There was a couple on the table already, and as to be expected, Amy wandered right on over to them, struck up a conversation and before I knew it, we had two brand-new shiny friends\drinkin' buddies named Eddie and Ami with an 'I'.

Eddie and Ami with an 'I' were up from Portland for the holiday visiting friends and family, and they must've completely stumbled across the 'Shoe, as it is most certainly NOT the type of place you actually decide to go to, unless the following apply:

- you are or were an employee of BD&A
- your name's Buzz.

Either will do. As luck would have it, Eddie and Ami were both very punk\retro stylie, complete with badass tattoos and very skinny jeans. Both were originally from Philly and had that great east-coast Philly accent...it's not quite "Baah-ston" and not quite "New Yowk"...somewhere right in the middle and I could listen to them curse at the pool balls and their beers for hours.

As the evening progress, the super-rad Kelly arrived, albeit briefly since we had just discovered that the sign on the door to the 'Shoe did NOT read open from 6pm to 2am. No no. In fact, that '2' in question was a rather poorly drawn question mark, loading heavy on the confusion and several slightly-drunk bar patrons not wishing to have to leave at 11:20pm.

But, such is life. We headed up to Big Daddy's, which wasn't open much longer than the 'Shoe was, but it did give us time to have another drink, decompress from the Thanksgiving Day chaos, and hang out with Eddie and Ami with an 'I'.

Interesting side-note: turns out that Ami's father is none other than Randy "The Natural" Couture, one of the greatest MMA\UFC fighters ever. She even had their family name tattooed on her arm...how fucking cool is that? :)

Well into the evening, very tired, kind of drunk, the decompressing stages of the day's events starting to catch up with both of us, Amy and I had our first real "battle of bands" so to speak, and...well. Won't bore you with the details, but everything worked out, and proved yet again that the inane stress and chaos of the holiday season can take its toll on any and everyone no matter how hard you try and fight it. The ironic plot-point of note is that at roughly 5:30 Friday morning, both of us exhausted, she having just returned from a failed attempt at Black Friday consumerism...I felt even closer and more in love with her than ever before. It's a pretty retarded way to reach those kinds of milestones, I'll grant that - but sooner or later, the first 'big fight' is going to happen. There's no point in fighting the inevitable - what matters is how you survive it, and hopefully come out the other side with a clearer understanding and even more common ground than you had before...which is exactly what we did. Kind of trial by fire, I suppose. Either way, it reaffirmed just how strong my feelings are for that woman, even when she's being Ms. Crankypants. :)

- Friday morning, with slightly less than 4 hours of actual sleep, Amy was out the door again to gather up the children and hopefully spend a relaxing Friday off catching up on sleep, and I think she did just that (thankfully). I packed up my shit and headed to my mom's beach place up north to go hang out with my family who'd arrived cold and road-weary the evening prior. For those that haven't mushed through that particular trek, the drive from Spokanistan to Seattle is both mind-numbingly boring and excruciatingly painful at the exact same time. Their trip was worsened by the craptacular weather that we've had rolling through the passes, and Snoqualmie Pass was all kinds of fucked up by the time they hit that milestone. But, long shitty drive aside, they arrived in one piece and in good spirits, and when I arrived early Friday, Benny and Luke both had beer in-hand and big smiles.

Also in attendance was my sister Molly and her progeny Hayley, who just keeps getting cuter and smarter every time I see her. All told, we had a great Friday\Late T-Day gathering, and my third attempt (twice in as many days) at the Deep-Fried Turkey Project was a massive success yet again. I'm getting the whole art and science of deep-frying large quantities of poultry down pretty well, but I do need to work on the cajun rub a little more for next year. I think I went a little heavy on the cumin and cayenne pepper this last time around, but it still turned out really well.

After a lengthy battle of food-devouring, we all settled in for the afternoon, watching the waves splash up the breakwall, picking at leftovers and just enjoying each other's company. Later in the evening, as with any Pate holiday gathering, beer + food coma + brothers = feats of strength and stupidity, and Darby promises to send me the pictures ASAP. I've also got some pretty good video footage of the day's events, but I need to rip it from my phone and convert it to a slightly better format. It'll be worth the wait, I promise.

Later in the evening, I was just flat-out exhausted, given the combination of drink, great food, and having only slept 3-4 hours within the past 35 hour time frame. We were playing some Cranium game and I was literally falling asleep at the table, barely able to keep my eyes propped up. Normally I would've just crashed out there at Mom's, but having 5 other people there already, things were getting a little crowded as it was, and I desperately wanted to crawl into my own warm bed [aka The Optimus Prime], so I headed out for the evening.

- Saturday I slept in, and after slowly creeping back into the land of the living, I gathered up supplies and headed over to Amy's to spend the afternoon. Andy was in town for the weekend, having hauled a load of sugar to Tacoma and to spend Thanksgiving with family, so we got to hang out and help work on some chores for Amy while we were there.

What? You really think she'd let us get away with sitting around drinking beer all afternoon eh? Uh-huh.

So Andy was on cleaning duty while I repaired minor door issues and some furniture malfunctions, and Amy started prepping a beef & curry over jasmine rice dinner that just absolutely kicked ass. Ended the evening just hanging out and talking, saw Andy off to go see his friends in Seattle, and then got the kids to bed and we hunkered down and watched 'The Boondock Saints', which my dearest had never even heard of.

I know, I was just as shocked and appalled. But have no fear, the situation has been rectified.

- Sunday I headed back up to hang out with the family once more, thinking they might be able to push off for Spokane that afternoon. When I arrived, though, it turns out that the passes had been getting hammered with snow all weekend and they weren't going anywhere any time soon. So, calls were placed and arrangements made, and they all settled back in for another day\evening at Mom's.

My family's big on several things: we laugh, drink, smoke, eat\cook, and play games. Our usual games are things like Cranium, Scattergories and the like. Darby picked up two new games, both of which turned out to be incredibly fun.

The first and most enjoyable was CatchPhrase, the point of the game being a very charades\10,000 Pyramid kind of team game, where the little machine gives you a word or a phrase and you have to think of ways to get your team mates to guess it without saying any of the actual words. Insanely fun, especially with the likes of my brothers.

The other game was ImagineIF, another very fun game, but I think it was subject to not being as fun as CatchPhrase, so the shiny fun-ness was somewhat diluted.

Amidst our rollicking of beer, food and games, a massive weather system moved in from some deep wintery part of Hell itself, and it began snowing. Like, a lot. Watching it come down in big, slow puffballs of frozen driving doom, I figured it was time to hit the road or get snowed in myself, which truthfully wouldn't be a horrible thing, but a very beautiful woman and extremely warm and comfy bed sounded a great deal more appealing than sharing the floor with my brothers.

The snow came down in large billowing walls of white, and it wasn't sticking heavily to the roads, but enough that it made everyone nervous, and I never got out of 2nd gear the entire trip home from the beach to Woodinville. Doing most of my growing up in Spokompton, you just learn to deal with snow - shoveling it, driving in it, throwing it at your siblings as hard as you can. Here in Seattle, home of the "An SUV for Every Yuppie!" political agenda, you'd think the drivers and snow would get along in some fashion, but no no no. The mere sight of the stuff sent some folks into a complete panic, pulled off to the side of the freeway with their hazards blinking away. Not I, oh no. I'd survived driving through one of Utah's worst blizzards in the past 10 years, at 2am, while driving OUT of the worst road in the greater Grand Canyon\Mount Zion Nat'l Park on a one-lane road towing a 10' trailer. That's driving in the snow...this was just an excuse to power-brake around corners and rally the Blue Bomber in the Staples parking lot like I was back in high school.

I only wished that my brothers with me to properly snow-jog on the bumper of the car. :)

All told, great, great weekend...I hope everyone else's was as eventful and relatively safe as ours. Next stop: Christmas!

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