I'm the last person in the world who would subject an unwitting audience to my holiday "news."  In general, I dread receiving these tomes, wherein some "relative" who you really wouldn't know from Adam's duck regales you with every thought he or she has had in the past year.

So, I promise, this won't be that.

Two days before Thanksgiving, I was laid off from my "day job" forcing me to dive  face first into what I should have been doing alll along....being gainfully self-employed.  For a year or so, I had been "piddlineg around" with my little company "AlasKit Educational and Scientific Resources." which I really knew was my true calling. (It involves primarily WRITING!)  My day job was actually a pretty good excuse for AlasKit to "fail to launch."  Now I have an additional 8 hours a day, not including  commuting time, to dedicate to teh success of AlasKit.  I have no more excuses.

That's not the interesting part, though.   When I had arrived home, Tuesday, before I had a chance  to deliver the good news to my family, I wss handed a message with a phone number to call.  It turned out to be a BIG software writing contract (Yes...computer code is literature)...one which will undoubtedly put AlasKit on the map, at least in this sort of niche.

Okay, here's the boring holiday news. (Ths old bait and switch....so sue me). For the first time in recent history, we celebrated Thanksgiving at someone else's place.  Normally, everyone congregates HERE, because I'm the official patriarch of the Alaskan Nichols clan.  This is not figurative, until our first grandson was born, our son David was the sole surviving Nichols.  Anyway, this year wa went to our middle daughter Jessica's place in downtown Fairbanks, with all the Filipino inlaws and outlaws that result from said daughter having married a Filipion feller....(an extremely handsome lad indeed).  In addition to turkey we had Filipino noodles and squid and these wonderful beef and pork egg-roll/enchilada sort of things...a traditional Filipino thanksgiving favorite.  (Unlike the English, Filipinos consider Thanksgiving a real holiday).

Afterwards we had the requisite Karaoke session that accompanies every festive occasion in fhe Philippines (and just about everywhere else in Asia), followed by a riotus game of Mustache Uno, invented by our granddaughter Aliofe, wherin the loser of every round gets a moustache painted on his/her face with eyebrow pencil.  We discovered we were short of whipped crera, so all us mustachioed celebrants decided to go en-mass to the local convenience store and pick up said whipped cream.  It was at this juncture that we discovered that not EVERYONE plays mustache UNO in Fairbanks. 

We now  return you to our regularly scheduled progam.  As you were.