thanksyness

Vegan thanksgiving at our house!!

For real Thanksgiving, we were in Sacramento with our families, but now that we're back in Portland, we hosted a super rad post-thanksgiving thanksgiving at our house. It gave us an excuse not only to make a whole bunch of vegan holidayish food, something we've been fantasizing about, but also to hang out with a whole bunch of our favorite people (something else we've been fantasizing about:)

Best idea ever! We cooked up a veritable feast of pot pie, stuffing, cranberry sauce, roasted veggies, mashed potatoes (both purple and white potatoes, swirled together in James' artistic potato yin-yang creation), fudge, and pumpkin pie bites--all vegan and made from scratch, mind you, though we didn't make our own bread for the stuffing, and I guess we cheated by using canned pumpkin instead of real. But it was all pretty fricken delicious, and with the addition of gravy that my boss made from mushrooms she picked herself, to pie and brussels sprouts and various beverages from other lovely guests, we had a pretty classy feast.

The best part, though, was all the people. I sometimes feel like I've collected friends from so many different parts of life that I don't really have a real group of them anymore. Or rather, even though I know a lot of really awesome people, since most of them don't know each other I lack that sort of group-friend-collective that you have when your friends are also friends with each other. I'm not really sure how to explain it, but there's something about knowing that your friends' lives are all intertwined, that you can talk to one friend and know it'll get around to your other friends as well since they're part of this meshed-up web around you.

My web is much more like a lot of exclusive relationships: I may have a lot of lines radiating outward from me, but they don't intersect with each other. (Man, if I could just draw this out instead of type it, it would be a lot easier.) But this weekend was awesome because it threw a whole bunch of people from different parts of my life together and mixed them up in a way that made me feel much more coherent. Looking around the room, I could see James, of course, and some old co-workers from my teaching days (heh), and some co-workers from the Community Cycling Center, my boss from the zoo, a woman I know from my naturalist volunteering, some running buddies, some dear friends from college, and old roommate... all sorts of random people, but most of my favorite random people. And putting them all together in a room (with some delicious vegan food) just reinforced to me how amazing all these people are, and how crazy lucky I am to have them all in my life.

My world is full of lovely people, and this weekend, we had about twenty of them in our house. With food. Getting along with each other and chatting like they were old friends. How much better than that can you get? :)