Giving Thanks For...

We had the first of three Thanksgivings this year -- a friend from the lab's parents are in town to do "their" Thanksgiving, so he and his wife (also in my lab) decided to invite over a lot of friends from the labs to do a proper Thanksgiving dinner.

There are few things as joyous as a big table of people eating delicious food that they've all shared a hand in preparing. Compliments are thrown out between bites and sips of wine. We burn off all the calories with laughter. During the more than four hours we were there, places at the table were continually swapped, and three or four conversations were going on at once. At one point, the father who was visiting asked us to introduce ourselves and explain how we know each other. This was one of the most fun exercises I've ever had to do, actually -- tracking how everyone got to this point, where we all know and are comfortable with each other, was surprising.

My favorite part, though, was all the absurdity. The only fight of the night was not over politics, but over which Star Wars movie is the best. We told long drawn out stories that ended up in hysterics. And one of our friends said, in utter seriousness, "Well...I think if Anne Hathaway and I ever met, she'd be really into me."