Belated Thanksgiving Post

Hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving full of family, friends and FOOD!  Mine was good.  There was a wee bit of a snow and ice storm on Monday of last week, which kept us homebound for 48 hours.  For Thanksgiving my mom and stepdad came over.  I made some awesome cinnamon rolls while hubby made the turkey, and there were various side dishes.  On Friday, I woke up at 3am to start Black Friday.  I got home at 9am.  Lots of deals were to be had; I tried not to go too crazy and look mainly for gifts I will be giving to people or get stuff that we actually need or really, really want.  I scored a rather inexpensive game for the Wii, which hubby and I have been obsessed with over the weekend.  Then on Friday night I went out for some MORE Black Friday shopping.  Saturday and Sunday are a blur: chores, grocery shopping, movie watching, decorating for Christmas.

I did make a huge batch of turkey soup on Thursday night.  It's SO good and filling despite being really light.  It kinda balanced out the heaviness of the Thanksgiving meal.

Here's my belated Thanksgiving post:

I am thankful for those connections I have made with other people over the years.  The girls I knew often didn't share similar interests with me, and the guys were considerably easier to understand and easier to share interests with.  In fourth grade I made my first connection.  As time went on, I met more people who I made connections with.  I assert that it is relatively easy to make a friendship connection with a guy.  Growing up they are taught to not express feelings with most people, so once you have established yourself as someone who will listen to them without judgment, they do tend to open up.

As I've said before here, when I met my husband, he had been dating someone else for a few years.  I was kind of dating someone else initially as well.  We met in July of 1996 (see, I remember these things) while he was working security.  He had a girlfriend, and I was sort of dating someone.  There were only two jobs on campus that you could have even though you didn't qualify for work study, and the police station was one of them.  Perhaps in the back of my mind, I did want to spend more time with that intriguing guy I met.  Who knows.  Since he fed me all the interview questions beforehand, I was relatively set for the police station interview.  I got the job, and we ended up working the same "week" (there were two sets of weeks, and you rotated working one week one and one week off).  Since he had more seniority, he had the better shift of 8pm-11pm.  I had the 11pm-2am shift, so we saw each other on the shift overlap from roughly 10:45pm - 11:00pm.

We generated a connection pretty quickly.  Meaning that we had our little inside jokes and talked quite a bit.  One of my co-workers on my shift was a complete drama queen.  The kind of girl I love to hate, but she's so ridiculous that most of the time you can only laugh at her.  So he and I would chat about the so many dramatic incidents she would start, usually involving her flinging things around the police station or the multiple dramatic sighs she would do to make you ask, "What's the matter?"

As time went on, he would sometimes stay after his shift ended and walk with me on my dorm route.  He would say that he had a few minutes before he went to his industrial engineering lab or he was on his way to his car.  I was usually pleased to have company, and I didn't think much of it.  I enjoyed chatting with him, he was smart and funny.

Occasionally we would see each other on campus.  There are those people you see around campus who you wave to.  Then there are the people who you stop to say hi to.  And then there are the people who you end up walking with.  We were usually in the second or third category.  It was rarely a wave, more like we'd have a conversation.  He was kinda popular too.  Everyone seemed to know him, or at least it felt that way when I was talking to him on campus.

It was easy to forget that he had a girlfriend.  I mean, I intellectually knew that.  But when I saw him at work, he was alone.  After I started my shift and he would occasionally accompany me, he was alone.  When I saw him on campus, he usually wasn't with her.  So the few times I actually did see him with her were really jarring.  That's when the cold hard reality would set in.  But it was easier to take because I was seeing someone too.  Still, I considered him a good friend despite us being with other people.

The next summer (1997) was really defining.  We had developed a connection over the past year.  Then you add the layer of us both working on campus when almost no one is there.  Shifts over the summer were longer; so instead of 3 hours, they were usually 6 hours.  He would drive the car around or was training to do dispatch.  I stuck with the dorms because A) I didn't like to drive and B) it was easier.  There were 1/4 the people in the dorms as there were during the school year, and most of the people in the dorms were Japanese exchange students who weren't known for being party-ers.  So my job was basically ambling about the dorms and making sure doors weren't propped, there weren't massive parties, that sort of thing.  That summer when he was in the car, he'd often meet me, and we'd drive around in the car together or he'd hang out in the dorms with me.  A lot.  Just hanging out and talking, but building even deeper connections than in the past year.

In short, while I am thankful for all of the connections I've made with people over the years, I am most thankful for my wonderful husband and the foundation we built because, after all, a relationship is like a house (insert hand gestures that mimic a house); you have to have a strong foundation*.  :)

* That's an inside joke about a co-worker from the security department who practiced his break up speech to his girlfriend with me.  I really appreciated the hand gestures that illustrated the house and the whole strong foundation thing.  He really got into it.