Very thankful

We are tripping back toward Blacksburg on the day after Thanksgiving. It’s called Black Friday. An otherwise benign day transforms soccer moms to hockey players and CEOs into campers. In their rush to get the latest TV or $3 off a spool of yarn, ordinary people become Twilightish vampires, willing to stake out Best Buy or Hobby Lobby three days ahead of time. (And it’s not really the time you can get the best deals… Source).

We had a great Thanksgiving with my family this year. It was just the right blend of laziness, technology, food, entertainment, cheating and football.

Laziness: We left after our evening worship service last Sunday night and finally drove into Little Rock on Monday. We enjoyed sleeping late and laying on the couch watching mom and dad’s new big screen 3D TV.

Technology: I sold mom my old Macbook Pro (she’s had an iBook G4 for years),and I upgraded to last year’s model (mine was a 2009). I came out even on the sale and used purchase off of Ebay. Helping mom get up to speed with all of her Mac gadgets was fun, and Carolyn even helped “reload” her digital picture frames with newer pictures. Dad is still happy with his Motorola Razr, but Mom is geeking out with an iPad, and iPhone 4 and now a Macbook Pro.

Food: Nuff said. My sister voted her contributions of sweet potato casserole and dressing as best in show on Thanksgiving. We really couldn’t disagree with her. But she was rather smug about it.

Entertainment: Football and more football. Sam, Dad and I saw In Time on Tuesday. Great scifi flick. The premise of time being used as currency is sobering. I loved how they portrayed most people in the movie as having less than a day of time left. When you time out, you die. It was a disconcerting reminder of the danger of living from paycheck to paycheck.

Cheating. We like to play chickenfoot with dominos. I’ve observed that it’s ridiculously easy to cheat at that game – not that I would do so with my aging parents, silly kids, or distracted wife. That would be terrible. However, we did overhear someone around the table say, “I was doing a lot better when I was cheating.”

Football. The only thing that made the end of the week melancholy was the Razorback’s blowout loss to LSU in the Battle for the Golden Boot. It was more significant this year since they were undefeated and ranked #1, and the Hogs were ranked #3. We left Little Rock early Friday and drove hard to make it about halfway to Blacksburg by game time.

We checked into our favorite chain – Country Inn & Suites – just in time to watch the game. Since we did no shopping that morning, the Hog loss became known as our own Black Friday.

We moped around for a while tonight and fielded a few tacky Twitter comments, such as the one from @rebman10 who said:

“@journeyguy are you still riding shotgun or are you off the wagon?”

It was a reference to his wife’s tweet earlier this week that asked me:

“Where were u in the lean years? #bandwagon”

My response to her had been a simple hashtag: “#icalledshotgunonthewagon”

Ok, so maybe I had tweeted excessively and exuberantly about the Razorbacks this season. To my defense, I have always loved the Hogs but not been a big fan of Nutty coaches. Ole Miss fans now know how right I was.

What about you? What characterized your Thanksgiving?

You can see more Noble family Thanksgiving photos here.