There are two good things about this particular holiday. The other one is the opportunity to consume large quantities of delicious foodstuffs, such as turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, rolls, and pumpkin pie. Mmmm, pie. And rolls. And turkey. And stuffing. And… well, you get the idea.

The first one, of course, is spending an evening with one’s closest family, for whom I am intensely thankful. I’m also thankful for my life, my health, my job, and the handful of truly wonderful people I’ve managed to surround myself with.

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!

I scheduled myself a three-day weekend, figuring I’d catch up on sleep among other things.

Friday morning I slept in a bit, and I assure you I reveled in the luxury. The rest of the day was busy yet fun, including meals at the Hot Cake House and NoHo’s.

Saturday morning I woke up, bright eyed and bushy tailed, at 8am. You know how it goes, sometimes, when you wake up and you know that you are absolutely up-and-at-‘em, not to sleep again until siesta time at the earliest? Yeah, that’s how Saturday felt. I cleaned house, then met up with Wendi & the kids for the previously-journaled dinner and movie fun.

Yesterday morning I woke up, bolt upright in bed no chance of going back to sleep time to get cracking… at 7am. I repeat: I woke up, fully, at seven o’clock in the morning, on a Sunday for which I had no concrete plans until evening. This could count as an injustice, but it gets worse.

Last night I went to bed at a fairly decent hour, knowing that my first day back at work after a three-day weekend is always “entertaining.” I tossed and turned for an hour. I got up again and watched an episode of anime to see if that would help. I went back to bed. At about 1:30am some jerkface down the street decided to honk his horn for two solid minutes. After that, I stopped looking at the clock. I was in full-on, stare-at-the-ceiling insomnia mode.

So today, I was an hour late to work, and I’m running on maybe two whole hours of sleep. Mondays suck enough without throwing sleep deprivation into the mix, dammit…

Wendi and the kids and I got together this evening for dinner and a movie. Mind you, it was later than I originally though it’d be, but that’s understandable considering they all went to the airport (with all of the delays that entails) to see the kids’ maternal grandmother off homeward. We all went out to Applebee’s, then decided to rent a DVD instead of brave the crowds and costs at the cinema. (Besides, we couldn’t all agree on a movie; I’m wholly uninterested in the Potter flick, let alone Chicken Little. Bleah. And the less said about the new Zorro flick the better, apparently.) We picked out two movies, both animated: Steamboy, and Robots.

Tonight we watched Steamboy, and because I have kids with discerning tastes we unanimously agreed on subtitles and the original language rather than suffer the dub. While the voices fit somewhat better, I’m afraid that the movie is only barely improved on account of that fact. It’s still a big, loud, beautiful mess of a film, as I’ve said before (at considerable length).

Maybe I’ll watch Robots when I go visit the kids in a few days. Then again, maybe not.