life, movies, buyu. etc.

I was unexpectedly invited over a friend's house for thanksgiving, so I made some pumpkin eggnog pie and stored my own personal thanksgiving ingredients for another day (ie Friday). It was a lot of fun and I tried green bean casserole for the first time (which I'm sure sounds like heresy to some of my readers, but it's not all that common on the east coast and although my father is from the midwest he loathes green beans, so it's rare for me to eat them at all. (and he's perfectly correct in that non-fresh green beans served plain are disgusting, but these green beans were fresh and covered in cheese, tomatoes and bacon so they were sure to please)). I was interrogated on my research and we shared embarrassing family stories before watching some james bond. I left a little early, partially because I nostalgically watched them set up a roaring fire before realizing that I could no longer survive in the same room as a roaring fire due to asthma, and partially because I had promised my little brother to spend the rest of the day playing Civ 4 with him. We played until about 2:30am *L*

I have a paper and presentations on that paper and another presentation due soon so I have been doing work over this break, but it's very hard to focus since I'm just sick of this semester as a whole. Because of my trip in August, I've been on the go for the past 4 months and I need more than one day off for mental health. But I have three more weeks until I can really have more than one day off. *sigh*

I made my own thanksgiving meal for myself on Friday (which is what I always do, and it's a very relaxing way to spend the holiday to be honest... I am, of course, not the most social of people in the world). This way, I get to make a smaller amount of turkey (two turkey breasts, already deboned), and ignore making a lot of the foods I'm not as fond of (I appear to have gone off sweet potato casserole at some point. I adored it as a kid, but it seems too sweet to me these days). I have since been lackadaisically reading academic articles, interspersed with tumblr, watching half episodes of Adventure Time, and reading fic.

I have only seen two movies since August and they were Thor 2, and Catching Fire. Thor 2 surprised me by being a lot of fun, if only because Darcy and Loki stole the show. Catching Fire stayed very close to the book, and it's been fascinating talking to people who haven't read the books and getting their opinions on it. I suppose my anthropologist is showing...

Made it back to bujinkan training twice in the whole semester, most recently on Weds when I sort of half taught the class everything I could remember learning in Japan. They train at such a high level in Japan though that it makes it hard to explain because a lot of it was just me going. "Uh, the uke throws two punches, you evade the first then capture the second with the sai, then do whatever you like to take them down without getting hit yourself". It was kind of interesting to teach it to two very different people (body types, personalities, etc.) I also found out I do a lot more things like cross stepping completely automatically than I used to, so it surprised me when one of them commented that I was cross stepping to the other one, when I had no memory of doing it.