Happy Belated Thanksgiving

Considering I was planning on posting a lot in November, I'll confess that only managing one measly post was pretty pathetic. Here's to turning that around this month.

To that end, I'd like to wish everyone a belated Happy Thanksgiving. I hope you all had a wonderful time wherever you spent it. After an aborted attempt at hosting the holiday for Meaghan's family this year, we opted to go back to my parents' in Michigan where we always have a good time.

This year was no exception, as we got not one but two turkey dinners (neither of which my mom had to cook - although she helped with one). On Thanksgiving day we went to Mount Pleasant for dinner with my dad's side of the family. It was a crowded affair, as there are an awful lot of my generation's children running around these days, but it was a good time. We got to watch the Lions lose (as is tradition), and I got to catch up with cousins, aunts, and uncles. We didn't make it back to Michigan at all this summer, so I hadn't seen any of them since last holiday season. A lot of them didn't even know I'd moved to Minneapolis (they're apparently not reading this blog). I'll need to try to fix that.

On Friday, we went to the "Grand Eye-Opening" of the new Detroit Institute of Arts. The DIA has been undergoing extensive remodeling over the past six years, creating unique new spaces and ways to view and become engaged by art. They celebrated completion of the project by hosting a giant 32-hour party and giving free admission to anyone who wanted it. As a fan of art museums, I thought this one was pretty cool.

They don't really have any extra-special exhibits on display just yet, so the star really was the museum itself. Absolutely none of the exhibit halls was your standard rectangular room, as walls arced and jutted all over the place. Couches and benches were the norm to ease your feet while still being able to enjoy the exhibits, and they came complete with companion art books so you could learn more about the types of art you were seeing. Some rooms were even themed (a bit like being at Disney World, but not in a bad way): the religious art exhibit halls were like walking through the inside of miniature Gothic cathedrals, there were multiple plazas for resting and eating that looked like European courtyards surrounded by many-windowed buildings. All in all, a very neat place to go and spend a day from time to time. I hope it works out for them.

Saturday was our second Thanksgiving dinner. This one was up in Midland with my mom's side of the family. There weren't so many people at this one, as only one of mom's siblings has kids and they all live out on the East coast. So after helping lug a vintage 1986 TV to the basement (to replace the 1985 TV that had burned out a few months back) I spent some time down in the "Man Cave" with my Uncle Bill watching football and chatting about life. Good times.

We actually watched a lot of football over the weekend, much to my sister-in-law's chagrin. There was the Lions game on Thursday, state high school championship games on Friday and Saturday (as is tradition), and some college games on Saturday, too. It was a pretty rotten weekend for teams I was backing: the Lions lost, Kansas lost, Tennessee won (the luckiest sons of a gun in all of college football), the Midland Chemics (Uncle Bill's alma mater) lost in the Class 2 state final. Of teams I cared about, only Hawaii (I love to see those small conference teams get into the BCS) came away with a victory.

I would be remiss if I ended this without mentioning a couple more things:

1) Ken Burns' new documentary "The War" is as good as they say. I only watched the first episode of my mom's newly purchased DVD set so far (I'll watch more at Christmas), but I felt that I learned more about WWII in those two hours than I'd known previously. It's one thing to know of a lot of things (Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal, German aggression in Europe, etc.), but it takes something like this to really fit it all together in a way that makes sense. It's similar to a radio documentary I just heard the other day about Eugene McCarthy's (who I'd never heard of) bid for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination. It really put the events of that tumultuous year (MLK Jr. assassination, RFK assassination, Chicago protests, etc.) together for me in a way nothing had before.

2) I already knew this, but hadn't written about it here before. I'm going to be transformed into an uncle in March! My brother Steve and his wife Mandy are slated to have a son, Søren (like the Danish Existentialist) in March. I don't know if they're actually going to use the cool 'ø' with the stroke in it, but I think that would be pretty neat. A hearty congratulations goes out to them. I'm looking forward to meeting the new addition early next summer. Maybe he'll even change my opinion of kids younger than the age of 5. We'll see.