Turkeys. And those who eat them.

Like many of you, I sat down to a Thanksgiving dinner with friends and family, and a table of nutritious, beautifully presented savories and sweets that could easily feed our group twice over.

On Tuesday The Pinks and I volunteered at the Monument Crisis Center handing out turkeys to families who might not otherwise have them on Thanksgiving. This was different than most of the volunteer work we do. It wasn't taking care of The Bounty Garden, which grows vegetables that benefit the food bank. It wasn't building homes for people who might not be able to afford them otherwise. It wasn't baking cookies for a community theater performance or washing rubber ducks.

We interacted with the people who will be cooking those turkeys. There were easily 300 people lined up around the block when we arrived. Most expressed their gratitude verbally, some just took their turkey, eyes averted. Some had babies on hips and toddlers by the hand, others wheeled oxygen tanks behind them.

I thought about those people Thursday night.

Pre Ski

I'm up at Tahoe with three twins and one more. Each of my twins brought a friend, one of whom is also a twin.

We drove up last night in a rental car, a Chevy Tahoe that we call The Island. It is the largest thing I have ever driven. One of our cars is in the shop because Eldest Daughter was rear-ended in front of the high school two weeks ago. This stuff happens. I could have driven the Volvo but it has 98K miles on it and our tendency is to replace our cars right before they reach 100K miles. There's no sense in rushing that.

Today has been very peaceful. The kids have been in and out of the hot tubs, (In case you wondered how many pool chairs could fit in one, the answer is eight.) in and out of Starbucks and Soupa, and in and out of our condo playing board and card games. I love this age.

It's raining here in the valley and snowing up top. The temperature is dropping and it will be snowing down here any minute. The fall colors are stunning adjacent to the tall green trees up the mountain and the falling snow line. This picture doesn't do it justice.

Dave and Eldest Daughter got a tour of Evanston, Illinois today courtesy of my aunt and uncle. Tomorrow is shopping the Magnificent Mile and Monday is the official Northwestern campus tour. From there they head to Ann Arbor. I find this all horribly unsettling since I basically birthed her yesterday.

My father recently put together a blurb book on the summer of 1987, when our immediate family moved from Alaska to California. The book covers our trip south on the Alaskan Marine Highway and ALCAN. I journaled during this 6-week voyage and went back to my journal to fill in some details for him. Looking back through those entries was a scary thing in so many ways. In retrospect, the trip itself was really dangerous. Second, I was a selfish terror at age 20. The comfort in journaling is the writing, not the re-reading. Funny, though, that I don't feel the same way about this blog. At least yet.