And all of a sudden life gets really busy with good things.
In less than a week is Thanksgiving and I’m headed to Marin for a day off with my nephew and a few other friends, pies in hand. If time and transportation allows, I may stop by a family friend’s house out in Oakland because my Uncle Jack will be there, a man who while is not blood related, for all intents, purposes and amount of love, is family. I may even scoot on over to another friend’s house in the TL on the way back, as I figure they’ll be going late.
Black Friday another old friend from high school finishes his seasonal job and comes to the city with his girlfriend, and while they may or may not be staying at my place, they’ll be in town for the weekend.
And now a friend who’s been threatening to visit for some time now is coming out from NYC two weeks after Thanksgiving for a long weekend. She found a ticket for two-fifty round-trip from JFK to SFO on Virgin, which basically means she couldn’t not come visit. So it looks like I’ll be taking a day or two off and snagging a car to bomb up to Pt. Reyes, Bolinas and Muir Woods, checking out the Presidio, and finding my way to The Slanted Door for some killer Vietnamese.
Maybe we’ll even get to Oakland.
After she leaves, it’ll be less than a week before I come back to the East Coast for Christmas with my parents and my sister for the first time in years. It looks like two of my best friend are coming down from NYC, one for a mini-vacation with her girlfriend and another to come back to our shared hometown to visit his new niece. It’ll be a week filled with friends and family, food and coffee, tattoos, museums and hopefully, a little snow.
It’s that time of the year where it’s easy for me to feel grateful. As cheesy as it sounds, I’m surrounded by love, and this next month is going to fly by. All I have to do is keep working, set aside a little extra bread for all of the fun stuff and remember that when you work for yourself, you can take time off whenever you want, as long as you prepare for it.
Thankfully, I’ve been pulling extra shifts all month knowing that the extra money would come in handy.
Guests mean cleaning my apartment, which is long overdue for a good mopping and dusting anyways. Guests mean making dinner reservations as well as getting to explore a couple of places outside of my normal haunts. It may even mean a ridealong in my taxi for my NYC friend if she’s game to go pick up strangers and fly around a city she’s never been to in the front seat of a cab.
Most of all guests mean quality time with quality friends and getting to show off this city of mine that I love so much.
Speaking of friends and working, I have to go meet an old roommate for dim sum on my way into work.
Another day, another post, another shitload of reasons to be grateful.
