Happy Thanksgiving!

So yesterday (for those of you outside of Canada) was Thanksgiving here. Jeff got a long weekend and we all enjoyed some down time.

Friday night I went over to EB Games and found a used copy of "Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance II" for Xbox so Jeff and I happily spent many hours playing that in between getting the house ready for our student (who arrives on Friday) and putting together our low-key Thanksgiving dinner.

Our one interlude of chaos in the middle of this lovely three day oasis was when we had to go over to Metrotown, the big shopping mall here in Burnaby, so Jeff could get his BC driver's license. It's known to be the largest shopping mall in the lower mainland and it really is remarkably large, but I personally don't consider bigness to be the #1 criterion in deciding where I am going to do my shopping. The place is like a cross between Heathrow Airport and a rabbit warren and... and... well, suffice it to say that whoever designed this place deserves to be forced to navigate between two stores (say, Chapters bookstore and the ICBC driver licensing centre, where Jeff needed to go) on a Saturday afternoon with a bored 9 year old and a 3 year old in a stroller, who wets his pants half way through the shopping experience. The mall is a perfect example of too much of a good thing. It's like they took four completely different design concepts for a shopping mall, smushed them all together into a relatively small urban space, and then dug out a similarly confusing and chaotic mixture of underground parking garages underneath for good measure. It is really hard to find your way around in there, so hard that they have hired young people to rollerskate around the mall to give directions to confused and overwhelmed people.

What really baffles me about this place is that it's considered a desirable location to live. Rental ads in the newspaper frequently boast about the home's proximity to Metrotown, and you can see many people think it's a great place to live because from the hill near our house you can see all the high rise apartment buildings clustered around the mall off on the horizon. Truly wacky!

Anyway, aside from those very headache-inducing three hours at the mall (at the end of which Jeff did have a driver's license in hand, hurrah!) it was a wonderfully relaxing weekend. It was the first time in ages that we haven't had friends or family to spend Thanksgiving with so we kept the meal very basic. This suited me just fine since I haven't really been into cooking lately and didn't want to be in the kitchen for hours working on a fancy meal. In the end we were all very happy with our nut loaf, roasted root vegetables, salad and pumpkin pie, and we went around the table saying what we were thankful for. I wish I'd written these down because I have already forgotten most of what we said...