Thanksgiving Weekend with the Browns

Look! Cute Brandy haircut (just in case you missed it last time)!

“I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land.” - Jon Stewart Hey! So, here at the Brown House L.A. we are just finishing up our splendid Thanksgiving Weekend. It has been wonderful time spent together, eating, relaxing, shopping, drinking a tad, and then eating some more. What's more, the house is clean and everyone (including the cat) is in a pleasant, ready for the holidays, mood. Since this is our first major holiday out here alone in L.A. (not including Halloween... which is my favorite holiday but not as family oriented as the rest of the holidays), I figure I'll give you a glance into how we celebrate when left unsupervised.
  Things I forgot to talk about last week: Okay, so last week's post was really short because I was having a rough time and I forgot to mention something pretty freaking awesome. Last Friday was totally awesome. I went on my first field trip as a teacher ever to the California Science Center. It was really neat because Daniel got to come to be a chaperone too! Every teacher and chaperone had a group of about 8 kids to be with.... they went nuts but it was super fun. Here's some pics of some of my kid having a blast:

After the Science Center all of the teachers (plus Daniel) went out for Happy Hour at a really nice bar that Daniel and I both quite enjoy (and will be going back to because their Happy Hour is really really cheap). So, if any of you visit and want to go out, we know where to go ;). 

Wednesday Night  School got out at 12:15 on Wednesday. This means that Mrs. Brown happily left "to work the rest of the work day wherever I am most comfortable" CCMS at about 12:30. Unfortunately I had a few errands I had to run before I got to go home. Daniel had accidentally cooked up the sage sausage that we needed for the stuffing a couple of nights before. He had mistaken it for hamburger meat for our Hamburger Helper. We also needed a pie, some apple bourbon (I made a yummy apple bellini...experimenting a little for the holidays), and I picked up some sparkling cider as well. The Wal-Mart, which is normally tame because it's just a food Wal-Mart, was a mess the day before Thanksgiving and BevMo was even worse, so this shopping excursion took me an egregiously long time. I didn't even get home until 2:30. Boo!  After shopping I cleaned the house. It took me until 10:30 to clean to perfection our small, three rooms. Seriously, the house looked amazing. Part of me was like, the kitchen is just going to be completely messed up tomorrow, why are you making the effort? But, it made our house much more enjoyable as we celebrated our Thanksgiving together. Even the ferrets got a bath. Which is honestly why it took so long. We try to clean their cage once a month but with two old ferrets who are not following litter box rules.... it gets pretty nasty. 

Thursday Both Browns slept in late on Thursday. While this was a nice thing to do, it also put us in a bit of a hurry to make sure our turkey lurkey was cooked at a reasonable time. We both skipped breakfast (bad idea) and began our separate meal preparations. Daniel was in charge of the mashed potatoes (we cooked them in a crock pot - they turned out pretty good) and I was in charge of the turkey and the stuffing. We took turns cooking whatever was left to cook as it came out.  We had realized the night before that I forgot apples for our meal and decided to run to Wal-Mart to get them in the middle of it all. Out of curiosity we drove by the Target that's about .2 miles away from our house. Target was closed but there were already people lining up at 11:30 for Black Friday (Thursday night) deals when the Target opened at 6 pm. You have to understand, this Target is tucked away in the back of an industrial park. It's just a weird location for people to be lining up at.... it's a small Target too. We were both very surprised by their willingness to be out so early. Luckily, it was pretty warm on Thursday. Black Friday waits are definitely easier in 80° weather.  When we got back home we waited rather impatiently for the Mr. Turkey to finish cooking. We shouldn't have skipped all the other meals. It took him a while but he finally finished and we had a delightful meal with our small family. We even gave the pets wet cat and dog food and put their food dishes next to ours so they could enjoy the feast with us. I took lots of pictures to document our first Thanksgiving alone together.  After our tummies were full we decided to take Miya for a walk before eating pie. We went for a really long walk (at least 3 miles) around the neighborhood and stopped by to see the Target line. It still wasn't 6 pm but the line was growing a bit. We decided that we should stop by and see the deals after pie. We didn't really care if we got any good deals and we can walk from the Target to our house in under five minutes, so the stakes were not high. Neither of us had ever taken part in any Black Friday events before, so we thought it would be fun to see some of the mass chaos ensue.... especially if we each and another shot of apple bourbon to escort us through.  Well, we went back and were disappointed about how organized and agreeable everyone was. We did find some deals that we were interested in though. Sadly enough we actually got through the checkout line faster then when we usually go to that Target. It's a secluded area so they usually only have like one or two checkout stands open, so a normal shopping crowd takes about ten minutes to get through. Well, the checkout line snaked through the aisles on Thursday but since they had all the registers open, we got through really quickly. We got new bed sheets (ours were disgusting and torn up... and I don't know why they were so bad because I washed them regularly... they just were gross) $35 (normally $85), How to Train your Dragon 2 $10 (normally $24), an iPhone 5s Charging case $50 (normally $90), Ben's X-mas present (not sharing), and a cat toy.... because Tolkien kills his toys too quickly. It was a very pleasant Black Friday (Thursday) experience! I can see why it is so addictive! 
I took some crappy pictures of our first Thanksgiving Dinner together for your enjoyment:

Friday Friday was a little tamer than Thursday. We woke up late again and went to get Peppermint Mocha Lattes at Starbucks. We hung out and planned what we were going to get everyone for Christmas and even managed to get most of our X-Mas shopping done from Starbucks or when I got home. Nothing says, "Let the holiday season commence" like peppermint mocha, christmas music blaring through the speakers, and looking at cyber deals.  After the Starbucks we came home and I set up some of the X-Mas decorations that we've gathered. We forgot our tiny fake tree back in Utah (super sad face) and since we're coming home for the holidays neither of us wanted to purchase a live tree this year. We both want a bigger fake tree but there's still some discussion whether we want pre-lit or not. I most definitely do... Daniel just doesn't like the price tag on those one. So, decorating detail was minor. We have a moose nativity set and some snowman pillowcases... but that's about all. Kind of sad if you ask me.   We finished up the day by enjoying our turkey leftovers and getting a little more than tipsy on the rest of the apple bourbon. We then decided to go on a bacon run to Target. We bought some wonderfully expensive bacon, settled down and watched our new movie, How to Train your Dragon 2 together. 

Saturday Saturday was a much more mellow day. I basically spent the whole day re-cleaning the house and putting off any actual work that I have to get done this weekend. I don't know why I do this... but I do it and it only makes my anxiety worse. Still, the house is really really really clean! 

Sunday Sunday is a beautiful day. There are some weather warnings out for this week. It has been raining since we woke up this morning and apparently we're going to have a complete downpour later in the week. While this makes me a very happy Brandy (rain rain rain rain... I love the rain), it does make the commute here fairly dangerous. People here don't know how to drive in the rain. They follow too close and then get surprised when they're rear-ending others...not good for rainy weather. 
Still, I love it. I've opened up all the windows... I can smell the rain and our neighbors' chimney smoke. I'm not really sure why they have a fireplace in their house.... it makes no sense at all. It's pouring outside and it's still 61° outside (though that is the coldest it has been since we moved out here). 
I'm really nervous about this week. There are no breaks until winter break three weeks away now. It's going to have to be a push. We've got benchmarks and performance tasks coming up which make me anxious. Next week we also have student led conferences with parents.... that part makes me a little anxious too. 

And to the Future Obviously there are some exciting things happening this December. In just three short(ish) weeks we will be flying out to see most of you! I'm pretty dang excited. Anyway, I just wanted to talk about a couple of things:
1) X-Mas - Now I'm not trying to assume that I will get Christmas presents from anyone... really this is just very awkward. Like last year when Dan and I were asking for IKEA gift cards for our bed (we got a really nice one - thank you). We are now asking for Best Buy gift cards. Now that we finally have our own place we are hoping to get a decent television. We don't want an excessively large one but I believe we want one bigger than my computer monitor... since that's what we've been watching on these past 6 months. We need something a tad smarter too. We need to be able to connect Netflix and possibly mirror (might need to get an Apple TV too) to it, since neither of us wants cable - just to be able to watch the shows we do like. So, please... as much as I don't like giving gift cards, Best Buy gift cards if you absolutely don't know what to give us. Though - if you already have something in mind, don't worry too much about it. Though gift cards are easy to bring back with us on an airplane. 
2) We need to party, yeah? - Okay, three weeks. It's a long time to be out there and I expect to be busy EVERY SINGLE DAY. Okay, just kidding, but I do want to see as many people as possible because I don't know when I'll be able to make it out next. School doesn't get out until the 19th of June and then we've got to save save save since I don't make any money during months off. While I think Daniel and I will probably make a trek to Utah during the summer, I don't know for how long and I don't know when... so, PLEASE MAKE SURE WE TAKE SOME TIME TO SEE EACH OTHER! Seriously though, I'm going to start calendaring dates with people and I know I'm going to take every effort to make sure it fills up fast because I am so excited to see all of you.  Well, peace all! I hope you guys had an awesome Thanksgiving Weekend as well. Now it is time to get back to work and PUSH for the next three weeks. Then we can all start to have a ton of fun together. I will be seeing you soon! Loves!
<3/ Brandy