This year Thanksgiving was quite a small affair for Anastasia’s immediate family. Usually it’s a big todo, but this year Anastasia and I, Anastasia’s mother, grandmother and a family friend had a cosy dinner (lunch) together in Ocala. Sleep was fairly so-so, I kept on waking up, but I figure that’s just getting used to a new bed. Anastasia and I pottered around for a bit before taking supplies upstairs to the room with the oven so that the cooking could start. I head back downstairs at this point, as I was going to be spending a good chunk of this time trying to get some webwork done. After various attempts to try and get some work done, I keep getting interrupted with requests to bring various things up and down the two floors separating the rooms, so I limit myself to reserach into web hosting for the site that I’ve been working on for the sushi restaurant in Gainesville.

After a while, it was time for the actual meal. It was very different to previous Thanksgiving dinners in that only Anastasia and I ate at the table – the others set up on the couch and chair by the tv and watched football the whole time! As I understand it, they were very important games to watch that day… anyway, much more casual than I’m used to for Thanksgiving.

Afterwards, Anastasia and I head back downstairs and I put her to bed for her post-Thanksgiving-meal-nap (something 98% of Americans seem to do) and I jumped back on my computer to do a bit more work. I eventually found a good webhost that I could use that had everything that I wanted for the sushi site, and ought to set me up fairly well for other US-based sites in the future as well. I ordered the hosting and worked out the various costs for managing it. I talked online to Nik, wrote a whole bunch of emails and just surfed around for a little while. Anastasia meanwhile has finished her nap and been upstairs most of the time having a long catch-up chat with her mother. After that, everyone goes to bed.

Friday was a good day, spent lazing around with Anastasia, just relaxing and enjoying a day off from everything. Played a few computer games, watched some anime, generally just mucked about. Leftover Chinese for lunch, leftover Thanksgiving food for dinner, a lazy day with the only harder bit being packing up as much as we can into the car at the end of the evening in preparation for leaving the next day.

Yesterday morning saw us pack up the last of our stuff, then head off to Gainesville. We managed to get back early enough that we missed the traffic going mental for the University of Florida vs. Florida State University football game. I’ve been told that this is a huge rivalry and is one of the most attended games out of the whole season. I went along with Anastasia to the game, and had a good time. There was a guy the section over from us who was dressed up like the Heisman trophy, which was really, really cool. It’s a pretty big deal to win the Heisman and this year the quarterback for UF, Tim Tebow, is a very strong contender for it, even though he’d be the first sophomore in history to get it. Anyway, good times at the game, then today was mostly recovery.