840 seeds

Thanksgiving was great. I decided to suck it up and leave Ozzie alone for a day so that I wouldn't flake out on my sister. She'd planned a Thanksgiving trip to Cherry Lake, where she'd lived one summer as a ranger, just east of the border of Yosemite. It's near a pretty out of the way part of the park, by the Hetch-Hetchy reservoir (how I miss your sweet, pure water), so we were actually pretty well away from other people and the rest of civilization. We saw a couple of redneck hunters with some unusual facial hair and lots of hounds in a makeshift kennel in the back of a truck, but I'm not really sure if that qualifies as civilization...

It was an evening characterized by lots of running, destined to become inside jokes, as any evening focusing on eating and drinking in a small (7 of us), boisterous group is. For one, half of the party showed up an entire day late, since they got lost in the foothills just 25 minutes from their goal destination. This of course jinxed me to get lost. But not as badly as them. It just took me an extra 20 miles and 15 minutes to get beyond Sacramento... But I hold this isn't my fault. I looked on a map. Just the wrong scale of map. Sacramento, like any city (and yes, Sac is a city...), is basically a scribble of highways when viewed at the state scale (especially a state as large as California). It looked like all those highways met up with each other! Unfortunately, the road I chose did not intersect with the one I wanted to get to, despite the fact that one was East-West trending, and the other North-South. But I figured it out by the time I started to see the Sierra foothills in the distance, which isn't so far out of the way. I didn't get all the way to Tahoe before I realized my error...

Once my apple pie and I got there (which only took about 4 hours), we played horseshoes while the turkey cooked. Then there was the last minute scramble to cook everything else, and then we feasted! It was the standard Thanksgiving fare. We had dinner in the house of one of Jenny's friends who still works there. The table was set up in his living room, from which you could see the lake through the windows. It was very pretty. Definitely my most scenic Thanksgiving.

That night was plagued by the corn-hole snorer, and a demonic refrigerator, but we all eventually got sleep.

The next day I had to take off. Didn't want to leave poor little Ozzie alone for more than 24 hours. Didn't get lost in this direction =). I stopped at a fruitstand! There are lots of fruitstands between Davis (or the Bay Area) and Yosemite. Believe me, I know. We once had to stop at all of them on a vacation with our mom who was on a futile quest for almond butter. You have no idea how much we hated fruitstands, almond butter, and her... But they all tempted me on the way out with signs for yummy, exotic fruits, so I succumbed. I got lots of kiwis, persimmons, and pomegranates! If you like any of these, and are near me, come by! We can have a fruit party =D. Did you know that every single pomegranate has 840 seeds? That's a little tidbit I learned at the fruitstand. I find it really interesting. No plasticity there! I even decided to be nice and got a couple jars of almond butter for my mom. What do you know, the stuff really does exist. I guess it had been the wrong season when she forced us to come along on her obsessive quest. She had better eat it now!

Then home home home. Ozzie was very happy to see me. He ran all the way to greet me at the door! Usually he doesn't do this. He's usually much more relaxed about my homecomings, and only ambles out from under my bed when I get to my room. So Ozzie and I have spent the past two days playing and cuddling. He's been a great help with my statistics project (yeah right). Well, he has sat on my lap for much of it, at least.

And that's pretty much been my holiday! Right now I'm remembering everything else I need to get done this week. Yikes! How is it the last week of the quarter? I'd say already, since most quarters go by very quickly, but this one didn't. This has been a very long quarter... Now it's almost over!!