Thanksgiving 2009

Well another delicious Thanksgiving has come and gone. It started Wednesday when the lab closed early. Yesterday (T-Day) was just gorgeous, as most days are in Boulder. We slept in, didn't do much for most of the morning, then spent the better part of the afternoon biking around town. Yesterday evening we had dinner with our friends Christine and Mark and a few other couples. Let me tell ya, that girl can cook. Christine is a professor at the University and her husband Mark is in high tech. They have no kids, unless you count Monroe their 13 year old lab who they treat like a child. Mark is a vegetarian with a ponytail, and Christine is the very incarnation of Lilith from Cheers, with the exception that she's a less masculine and much sweeter. They both dress in black and live in a beautiful mansion on Mapleton Hill, and they have the most eclectic assortment of interesting friends. They're pretty awesome.

We slept off the turkey and wine, and today Gerard worked on homework and I spent most of the day just roaming around Boulder on my bike. It was another stupendous, sunny, 70 degree day with ten percent humidity. Since Boulder is completely surrounded by Open Space (that's park land in Colorado), you can bike nice, paved trails west all the way up the canyon and into he mountains, or east all the way out onto the grasslands. Or you could just mill around downtown among the coffee shops, bookstores, art/craft stores and high end clothing stores. The thing is you never have to bike on a road. The trail system here is amazing.

Naturally during all of my roving I took a few moments to ponder all that I have to be thankful for: Gerard, my mother, my friends, my job, my city, my life. I'm not rich but I want for nothing. I don't have my cabin (yet) but I can't complain. Sometimes it makes me feel guilty. Why should I have a great career and have the privilege of living in a city as beautiful and bike friendly and progressive as Boulder? Why should I have so much when so many suffer? I'm not complaining, mind you. Just thinking.

I read in the news today that Boulder is about to get one of the very first carbon neutral neighborhoods in the US. How cool is that? But at a cost of just under a million bucks per house, I won't be moving in anytime soon.

Tonight I was craving turkey and dressing and all the fixins, so I went down to Whole Foods and bought the whole spread already prepared. Gerard and I had a second, quieter Thanksgiving, and now he's passed out on the sofa. I'm sipping eggnog. And blogging.

Tomorrow we head to Rocky Mountain National Park with a friend for some snowshoeing. Think about that. It's Thanksgiving weekend, and on a whim I can go snowshoeing in Rocky Mountain National Park for the day and be back in time for dinner. I remember a time when mountains and snow were an exotic fantasy, just something on PBS. Now they are my world.

I do have a lot to be thankful for, so thank you. Thank you thank you thank you!