Happy Thanksgiving, Eh?

I guess I'm behind on posting, but I might as well get one in before skipping town.

This Monday was Canadian Thanksgiving: I was invited over to the Dans' place for dinner--it was very nice to be adopted for the holidays here. Also, their friend persephoneplace joined us. It was a lovely dinner--Dan roasted up a free-range chicken (yeah, you can definitely tell the difference in flavor), cornbread stuffing, green beans, cranberries. Also, I brought oven-roasted potatoes and parsnips, and brussel sprouts with bacon and onion:

I'm embarassed to admit that I only bothered looking up why Canadian Thanksgiving is so much earlier this year: cold climate -> earlier harvest -> earlier Thanksgiving (oversimplification, but basically true). I have to say it works better as a holiday date--US Thanksgiving is a bit too close to Christmas to work well for travelling, being just a month before.

So I took home plenty of leftovers to lunch on for the next few days. In other random updates:

• Thesis work is going, um, not as disastrously as possible, but still incredibly slowly. I am likening it to siege-of-Stalingrad levels of progress: "... well, with a full day of work, I managed to output a page and a half." Grr. Well, at least I'm getting close to the end of this stupid background section ("Can you say quagmire, boys and girls? I knew you could."). I can't hope that I will actually achieve blitzkrieg speeds in future sections, but it will probably be better.
  
  
• I showed off my apartment to one of the new members of the grad group--she has expressed interest in taking it over when I leave town. The prospect makes me happy--that my efforts to make the place a bit nicer would be appreciated by somebody I know.
  
  
• I'm flying to Boston tomorrow! (Thursday). I'll be at meetings at my old company on Friday through Sunday, I think; I'll keep everyone posted when I get freed up. I fly out on Tuesday. Hope I'll see you!