Run, turkey! Roll, pumpkin!

Dave, the math guru of our incoming bunch of math grad students (here in the pink shirt- one of his 17 math/science shirts that he rotates through), had his heart set on a math movie night so Joo volunteered to cook the food and we had it over at our place after the last final. We began the festivities with Donald Duck and MathMagicland (in which Joo said she learned quite a bit) and then proceeded on to 21 (a true story about how MIT students used their math skills to become rich by beating the casinos- you can imagine how inspiring that would be to math geeks like us!).

The next morning, we packed up our bags and said goodbye to our house for awhile (it was the first time we had been gone from our house for more than a week and it certainly wasn't the easiest thing to leave. The downside of backpacking is that you never know when you'll find your next clean place to stay; the upside is that you don't have to mess with water boilers, plugs, gas furnaces, locks, trash, securing important documents, etc.) Our next stop was Mom and Dad's, where Mom was ready with her new wire-bending hobby to give us all a lesson...

With her schedule beginning to free up in the initial stages of retirement, she has been investing her time in lots of creative endeavors, all of which Joo found quite interesting and so they worked together while Dad and I discussed the field of education.

We then joyfully carried out our annual Thanksgiving family tradition of rolling the old decorations (pumpkins) down the hill and into the creek.

It took Joo awhile to get the hang of it as she seemed more apt to take aim at Dad...

We followed this up with a nice walk to savor the final breaths of autumn...

And then of course the delicious Thanksgiving turkey (or chicken, whatever... in any case a full and scrumdiddlyumptious meal.)

I think this was my first Thanksgiving at home in 7 years... definitely one advantage of this recent move back to Ohio. In general, it has been a year of huge transitions and decisions for each member of our family, some of which had some pretty rocky lows, but as the year winds to a close, I think we all are quite assured that we are where we are supposed to be, making it a particularly easy Thanksgiving to be grateful.