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Catherine is showing off her nice iPhone X photos

The holidays are here, and as usual I’m stressing out to get all of my end-of-year blog content written before we leave on our Christmas trip and generate yet more content to blog about. I also managed to secure the contract to run this year’s family Christmas Quiz, which I don’t think I’ve been allowed to do since I was about five years old and asked questions like “name the the first book on the shelf in my bedroom”. So the pressure is on not to blow it this time.

Latkes!

These Christmassy and/or Hanukkahy photos (the ones with the nice focus) come from Catherine and AJ’s holiday celebratory gathering, during which Randi cooked latkes, we all made gingerbread cookies of varying degrees of crispness and whatever college football [sic] game was on in the background became infinitely more interesting when the pitch (do they call it a pitch?) started to fall apart. Play then stopped so that a harried operations dude could ‘fix it’ (by scattering coal dust?) and the TV commentators, lacking anything else to talk about, began to commentate earnestly on this repair job instead. “This guy’s doing amazingly. Look at that concentration under pressure. Oh… oh… we have his name!”

And once that was all over we watched The Room (worst film ever made) in preparation for seeing The Disaster Artist (retelling of how the worst film ever made was made) this week, which was amazing and very funny. It’s probably still funny without seeing The Room first, I guess, but I’m not sure why anyone would let that opportunity go by.

The incredibly meat-like Impossible Burger

In the last few weeks Randi and I also saw Voyeur (a documentary about journalist Gay Talese and a motel owner who spied on his guests for decades: it’s honestly a bit of a toss-up about which one has bigger problems) at a Dinner & Docs event. I also made a quick two-day trip to Palo Alto during which I was excited to try the Impossible Burger. It is a really impressive attempt to re-create a meat burger from genetically engineered plants, and it was totally delicious.

I do fear it moves us a step closer to the nightmare future where the next generation, able to enjoy all of the pleasures of eating meat without any of the downsides, smugly update their morality and then charge their parents and grandparents with meat-related crimes over bitter family dinners. I can see it all now. You hear that, next generation? I preempted your outrage.

At the 2017 Groupon Holiday Party

Last weekend we also partied at the Groupon holiday party at which T-Pain did not appear (I was indifferent about that, but the party was nice), played satisfying games of Dixit with Jason and Carrie (i.e. games I happened to do well in) and watched The Third Man in preparation for our trip to Vienna. This film taught me that everything in Vienna happens at a jaunty angle, and that if you want to go home again the British army is happy to buy you a plane ticket and drive you to the airport (#travelhacking). Finally, tonight we saw Star Wars: The Last Jedi with Toggolyn before we leave tomorrow. It seemed a bit long to me, but maybe that’s because my mind is already drifting to our travels, which start tomorrow. Tomorrow!

Merry Chrismukkah!

Willow

Last week we dogsat for Willow at Robert’s house, and by ‘we’ I mean ‘Randi’, although I was also there to play Carcassonne and buy ice-cream and watch Would I Like To You? and generally perform non Willow-related functions. (She is cute, though!)

We also got to see Todd and Carolyn’s astonishingly beautiful new flat (so many books!) which, as a wonderful added bonus, also contained Katie and Brandon on a Thanksgiving visit back to Chicago. Was great to catch up with them again.

One more pre-Thanksgiving snippet: the night that Randi, Amanda and I decided to watch a film together and settled on The Princess Bride, which I had heard lots of good things about but never actually seen. And indeed, not only did it prove to be a fun and offbeat adventure comedy, but I should be clued into many more memes in presentations at work now. (That’s assuming I can remember them after Amanda and I decided that we should start drinking the leftover brandy from the mulled wine afterwards, on the basis that brandy rhymes with Randi. Actual Randi went to bed instead.)

And now: Thanksgiving in California!

Meanwhile, in the Southern Hemisphere…

A crowded Thanksgiving table

It’s a turkey usurping the White House and making himself King. It’s satire turkey.

Everyone and their less satirical turkeys

Not ready to go back to Chicago

Everyone made a big deal of insisting that the 35°C weather was ‘unseasonably warm’ for late November, but I believe that they are all lying and just trying to discourage more emigration to the coast. Regardless, we had a packed Thanksgiving 2017 in the sun which included an enormous quantity of cheese, a game of Smash Up, a packed schedule alternating between the pool and the hot tub, an unfairly-judged gingerbread turkey decorating competition, a sunset walk around the hills of Yorba Linda, brunch with the Leikens and mulled wine around the fire pit at night. Also, props to Andrew at Thanksgiving dinner proper for being the first person to ever explain the Hanukkah story to me without using any circular logic.

GUESS WHICH FESTIVAL COMES NEXT?!

Remember, remember!
The fifth of November
The Gunpowder Treason and plot
I know of no reason
Why the Gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!

Our very own bonfire

..but I do know an excellent reason to stop reciting the poem after the first verse, after which it gets considerably less fun. Still, to celebrate Bonfire Night in an uplifting and non-sectarian manner, we took Cat’s advice and constructed a magnificent bonfire of beans, sausages and mash, accompanied by amazing mulled wine and a Bake Off finale. Sadly it was missing a little Trump effigy sitting on top, but it was delicious and filling all the same.

Meanwhile the outside world is getting colder, rainier and generally more miserable. The other day it went as far as snowing, which tricked me into playing music from the Spotify Christmas playlists already. Too soon? But… snow!

A Whole New (German) World

One person who is escaping the Chicago winter is James, who (as I previously grumbled about) is joining the Citizens of Nowhere brigade by moving to Berlin. We saw him off with sushi and karaoke, although I didn’t stay long enough to find out if anyone sung 99 Luftballoons. I hope so. Last weekend I also had brunch with Jason and Carrie, who better be staying put.

This weekend we caught up with Lauri, who is excitingly throwing off the shackles of suburbia, and ate an ungodly amount of chilli at the 2017 edition of Ellen’s Master of Peppers competition. Randi was pushing me to work out what the nearest British equivalent would be – they have cake-making contests at some village fêtes, don’t they? – but I have to say there’s something admirably American and civic at the grassroots democracy to select a winner. It’s the sort of thing you imagine that seventeenth-century Puritans in small Massachusetts towns would endorse wholeheartedly.

Ellen tallies the votes

Other notes:

• Blue Planet II is increasing my respect for fish. Especially fish who can smash open clams on the side of rocks.
• I bought a new Kindle! I didn’t need a new Kindle in the slightest: my four-year old Kindle Voyage was still working perfectly, but I traded it in anyway (plus many additional bags of silver and gold) for a new Kindle Oasis out of sheer lust. In my defence, I am doing great on this year’s reading target. Bring on all the miserable weather you want, Chicago… I’ll be inside.

We’re putting the band back together!

We were extremely excited to host Cat in Chicago this weekend after a three-year absence. She was mostly here to reminisce with the staff of Windy City Café and snag an on-trend Macy’s handbag, but we also made time to leave the city for a quintessentially autumnal American afternoon of apple picking. (To be honest, I’m not actually sure if apple picking really is quintessentially American or not, but this was the hook that Catherine and AJ used to persuade me to come.) Setting aside my lack of interest in the apples themselves, at least until they could be converted into cider form, the orchard looked beautiful and there were a surprising array of apple picking extras including warming bonfires, wayward goats and a maze of corn. Think of it as the Hampton Court of Wisconsin.

Quintessential autumnal American experience

I choreographed this photo (instead of picking any apples)

On the apple picking wagon

Pumpkins!

I waited for everyone else to (eventually) join my escape from the Crazy Corn Maze

Immediately afterwards, we made our way to the Night of 1000 Jack-o’-Lanterns at the Chicago Botanic Garden for a Halloween-themed walk in the dark. The giant carved pumpkins were spectacular, and the garden’s already-adorable model railway section was made even better with spooky little trains. I am warmer towards Halloween than I used to be, though I still think it’s something we should just leave to Americans to do best.

More pumpkins!

The best pumpkin

Cat, Randi, warm cider

Trying to wring out as much time with James as I can before he ups and leaves for Berlin, we saw Blade Runner 2049 together on Wednesday night. As someone with good but not great memories of the original plot, I thought it did a decent job of working as a standalone film, although [mild spoiler warning] there was a fair bit of contortion necessary to avoid ever quite confirming that Deckard is himself a replicant although of course he is. Also, the obligatory evil CEO is given the most ridiculously impractical office yet, in which everything is not only kept at very low lighting but also surrounded by a deep pool of water. Just remember, prospective super-villains: not only does someone have to design this in the first place, but a whole team will be necessary just to feed the fish, rescue any dropped electronics and clean the filtration system.

At some point I feel I should mention that Joe and Julie have faithfully come over every Sunday for the past nine weeks to watch the new series of Bake Off with us and shout at Prue Leith. So no spoilers until next weekend, please. I need to savour the exquisitely compressed emotional range of all the contestants, forever bouncing between feeling ‘a little disappointed’ and ‘pretty chuffed’, for it makes me feel that all is right with the world. We should leave Halloween to the Americans, and they should leave stoicism to us.

Usually this blog has a lot more narrative focus and/or available photos after I’ve been travelling, but going to Palo Alto never quite works. I was there last week for work, back in the trusty and still murder-free Comfort Inn, but at heart Palo Alto is a deeply suburban place and so any photos would just be of people’s back gardens and flower pots.

I did enjoy having dinner with my new team, as well as an evening with Nolan after a quick hop to San Francisco by train, and in the Lyft on the way back to the airport I craned my head around when I realised we had stopped to pick someone up at Facebook’s HQ to see if there was anything worth seeing. But there wasn’t, besides people holding their thumbs up outside a large Thumbs Up sign. Just a large campus in the middle of nowhere and shuttle busses to move employees in and out. The best way to describe this part of the world is that it’s as if Lloyds, Barclays and HSBC all decided to plonk their global headquarters in Amersham.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Apropos nothing, here’s what happens when Randi has to wait for brunch

Death by dysentery

Back in Chicago, we were delighted to meet baby Bernard Edward at Robert and Julie’s. The name immediately triggered memories of being read Not Now, Bernard in primary school, and it was only after I’d ordered the book as a gift (newborns can read, right?) that I realised how dark (and British?) the story is. Parents: don’t ignore your kids until they are eaten by monsters. One thing that Bernard Edward will almost certainly never experience is The Oregon Trail, a video game classic now parodied in boardgame form, which we played with Amanda, Alec and John the other night. The nostalgia factor was absent for me, since I never actually played the game – why exactly would I want take my wagon to Oregon anyway? – and by all of the ‘rules’ of boardgames it’s pretty terrible. Players can just die, from pure bad luck, and are immediately exiled from the rest of the game. But we enjoyed it with the right spirit, and some of us even made it to Oregon, too.

MisterWives

Randi and I also saw one of her favourite bands, MisterWives, as well as 1980 (Or Why I’m Voting for John Anderson), a political comedy about clashing personalities within the Boston branch of John Anderson’s independent 1980 presidential election campaign. Two Facebook HQ-sized thumbs up! (Side-note: in real life, you should never actually work for an independent presidential election campaign.)