planes, trains, and automobiles

Happy Thanksgiving!!

Thanksgiving has always been a favorite holiday of mine. Spending a day with family and good food is my kinda holiday. And like my friend Christie said, spending a day in gratitude for the blessings we have is the perfect segue to the Christmas season.

I have always had so much to be thankful for. My life has been so filled with joy and comfort and I am truly grateful for my blessings. Just to name a few: my husband and my kids, my parents and siblings and Jason's parents and siblings, our beautiful first house and our wonderful community, the health of my family, and my husband's job in this tough economy. And while I am grateful for those things, I know that they are not necessarily all lasting blessings, and so my gratitude for my Savior and the Gospel is even greater.

And now, my most memorable Thanksgiving story.

Thanksgiving 2005: Jason and I had been married for almost 8 months and living in Laramie since August. We were excited for Thanksgiving break so we could go back to Utah to visit friends and family, eat at all of our favorite restaurants, and go shopping (those are all things that Laramie lacked for us at that point). We enjoyed a great Thanksgiving weekend and grudgingly left on Sunday morning to get back to Laramie. I had work in the morning and Jason had a paper due (one that he hadn't actually finished yet). The drive was going fine until we got to Rawlins, which is only about 90 miles west of Laramie. That's when we noticed this:

(except the one we saw said "Return to Rawlins" and the lights were flashing)

Ok, this was our first experiences with I-80 closing, and to be honest, we didn't really believe it would be closed, so we kept driving until we got to the gate that blocked freeway access. Then we finally turned around, ate lunch at Subway, and waited in vain for the freeway to reopen. We finally accepted the fact that it wasn't reopening any time soon, so we started to look for a hotel room. Which was really fun, because I was wearing pajama pants and flip flops and getting out to slosh through slushy parking lots to hotel offices, only to find out that they hadn't turned on their No Vacancy lights even though there weren't any rooms left. We had tried about six hotels with no luck when a car pulled across the parking lot exit, blocking us in. The driver got out and ran over to our car, and when Jason rolled down the window, the guy told us that he and his girlfriend managed to get a room at this particular fleabag motel, but they had charged them the rack rate and they were looking for someone to share it with them and split the cost. We didn't see any other options, so we told them we would.

They took us up to the room: one bed. They showed us the receipt: $140. This was a fleabag dump, folks. So we handed them a check for $70 and Jason got started on his paper while I watched Dude, Where's My Car? with our roommates.

It was awkward.

They decided to go out for dinner, and while they were gone, we discovered the roads had reopened, so we wrote them a note and left. Luckily Jason had been able to finish his paper, so we considered the $70 money well spent. It took us about three hours to go the 90 miles from Rawlins to Laramie, and it was white-knuckle all the way.

This was not our last experience getting stranded while living in Laramie, but it was by far our most memorable.

Goodness gracious, I am glad that we don't have to worry about driving conditions this weekend!!

Mickey Mouse's little buddies...

.... were here waiting for us when we got back from Disneyland.

Yep. We have mice. Or, at least, mouse droppings under the sink.

Finding out you have mice is never a good feeling, but I infinitely prefer finding out this way than finding out the way we did when we lived in Laramie.

First, let me set the scene. Laramie is an island of brown and gold in a sea of rolling plains. And the roads in Laramie go for a while, and then dead end in the rolling plains. And we lived at the very end of one such road, right next to the rolling plains (that's our townhouse on the right. Also, our road was like that from November-March or so.)

When the weather turned cold, all the little critters in the rolling plains ran under the fence and into our neighborhood.

One night I woke up in the middle of the night to find Jason pulling on a sweatshirt in the dark.

"What are you doing?"

Pause.

"I have to go to Wal-Mart."

"For what? It's the middle of the night!"

Pause.

"For mousetraps."

And then he just left me there! I couldn't fall back asleep, so I just sat in the middle of the bed with the light on, and after a few minutes I could hear skittering and scratching downstairs. I went into Tempe's room to feed her, and while I was sitting on the couch with her, a mouse came up the stairs, stood in the doorway, and stared at me.

When Jason got home with the traps, the whole story came out.

"So... could you hear them running around? Did it wake you up?" I asked him.

Jason wouldn't meet my eyes. Finally, he told me what really happened.

"I was asleep in bed and all of a sudden, I woke up and I could feel something on my chest. It ran down my neck and behind the bed and I could hear it scratching around. At first, I thought it was just a spider, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized it must have been a really big spider for me to have felt it on my chest. So I went downstairs and I could hear it running around. And then I turned on the light and there were two mice running around in the middle of the floor."

So the spider on his chest (already pretty bad) was really a mouse on his chest. In our bed. With us.

Nice.