Well, I think I can fairly safely say that this has been about the best Thanksgiving weekend I can remember in quite a long time.
Wednesday night, after I put the ‘night before Thanksgiving’ post up on the page, Candice and I got talking online, and she ended up coming over and talking for a few hours. I missed this week’s Enterprise episode, though, so no writeup of any thoughts on “Fortunate Son” this week — but I figured it was a good reason to miss an episode.
Thanksgiving day was nice. I spent the first part of the day just puttering around the house, then about four or five that afternoon Tim picked me up. He, Rick and I spent a very pleasant evening having dinner and relaxing at their apartment, then Rick ran me back home around nine-ish or so. After I got home, I got online again (yeah, so I’m a bit of an online junkie…after 5 months of exile from regular ‘net access, I’m having fun — so there), and up popped a message from Candice saying hi. She’d gotten back from her Thanksgiving dinner with friends a bit earlier, and as neither of us had big plans for Friday, we decided to head out and kill some time. She came out and picked me up and we went out to the Hurricane, a diner a few blocks away from the Seattle Center. Not a bad little place — it’s your standard 24-hour diner, for the most part, although the crowd reminded me of late nights at VI back in Anchorage. We sat, talked, and played rummy until about 3 am. By the time we made it back to my place we were both pretty tired and she didn’t feel like driving back out to Issaquah, so she ended up just crashing out here.
After waking up Friday morning Candice headed back out to Issaquah, since she had to work a few hours that day, and I just dinked around the house and killed time for a while. Candice and I had made plans to go out that evening, however, so about six she showed back up, and we walked a couple blocks away to St. James Cathedral for their Friday evening Taize service.
This has been one of the really neat things about meeting Candice. She’s going to school at Trinity Lutheran College, and has is a member of the the Lutheran church. The Lutheran denomination is not very far removed from the Episcopal faith that I’ve grown up in (in fact, there was recently a Concordat of Agreement between the two churches, joining them in a fashion that my dad would be far more qualified to explain than I can). While I grew up in the Episcopal faith and have always counted myself as a Christian, that has been an area of my life that I’ve not paid that much attention to over the past few years, for a variety of reasons. A lot of the conversations that Candice and I have had over the past week have involved (among many other things, of course) our relationships with our respective faiths, where our interests lie, and such. Part of what this has got running through my head is that I’ve actually missed that part of my life. Before various aspects of my life got in the way of attending church regularly I’d been fairly involved, including being part of a youth delegation present for the selection of the Bishop of the Diocese of Alaska a few years ago. While I wouldn’t say that I’ve left the faith by any means, it’s been a while since I’ve done much more than hit Christmas Eve Mass with my family and the occasional service here and there when I found time. Being able to sit and talk with Candice and some of her friends has been reminding me that the church is a definite part of who I am and what I believe. While anyone who knows me well at all will know that I’m certainly not ever been, and will never be, the sterotypical “bible-thumper”, I’m certainly giving more thought to getting back involved in that part of my life. It’s a nice feeling, actually — I hadn’t really realized I had missed that until now.
After the Taize service we went out to the Broadway Grill for dinner, then back to my place. Eventually we started getting tired, and as we needed to get driving by about 9am for our trip to Portland, it was easiest for Candice to crash over here again.
Saturday the alarm went off way too early, but we were up and on the road by 9am as planned. The drive to Portland is about three hours, and as traffic was pretty decent, we rolled into the restaurant we were meeting Candice’s friends at right on time at about noon. Her coming down was planned as a surprise for her friend Dave, and it worked out perfectly. She’d arranged for her friend Jenna to get Dave to the restaurant at noon, and they pulled in just about five minutes after we got there. He managed not to realize what was going on until he saw Candice (even though he parked next to her car, and he noticed the Alaska license plate, the “Alaska Girls Kick Ass” bumper sticker, and the purple monkey hagning from the rear-view mirror that he remarked to Jenna, “was something that Candice would have.”), and his reaction was priceless. We spent the day running around Portland with the two of them, and had a blast. Dave is almost absurdly proud of the city he lives in, and makes a great tour guide — I don’t think I know as much about Anchorage after 24 years there as he does about Portland after living there for 8 years! It’s a very nice city, though — if I get tired of Seattle, it might be worth giving Portland a try in a few years.
After a full day of running around, finished off with a wonderful dinner with Dave’s parents, two friends of theirs, Dave, Jenna, Candice, and myself, Candice and I decided it was time to head back to Seattle while we were still awake enough to make the drive in without any problems. We left Dave’s house about nine or so, and made it back into Seattle right about midnight. We were both pretty wiped out at that point, so we just ordered some pizza, popped in Bring It On — and promptly passed out about 20 minutes in.
Today was very much a lazy day. We slept in until about noon, then spent most of the day just lazing around the apartment, with our sole excursion out being to walk down the hill to the Meridian 16 theaters to catch Monsters, Inc., as according to Candice, everyone in the universe except her had seen it. After the movie we came back here, kicked back for a bit, and then she headed back to campus. I’ve been hoping to get laundry done tonight, but as it’s now just after 11pm and the machines have yet to free up, I think that’s just going to have to wait until tomorrow. Bedtime will be coming along soon, and then tomorrow is the start of another week. Fun fun fun!
Oh, and just to confirm any suspicions that may have arisen — yes, it does appear that I’m no longer single. Candice and I talked about it Friday night, and after roughly three years of being (technically) single, I’ve re-entered the dating scene.
Pretty cool, I think. :)