Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

Quiet and non-dramatic Thanksgiving here.  That’s what happens when there’s only 3 of us left.  Son Andrew came over Tuesday from his home in Twisp (Eastern Washington, Methow Valley) to take his girlfriend to SeaTac and a flight to visit her family, and he’s been hanging here and visiting city friends.

We’ve done several urban hikes, and yesterday checked into our gym for a family workout.

Today was just vegging until dinner.  We (well, let’s be honest, Mrs. Perils) didn’t do a whole turkey, instead got a nice breast and thigh from PCC and surrounded it with roasted Brussel’s sprouts, an herbaceous non-cavity stuffing, roasted potatoes and cranberry sauce.

We used to do large, raucous orphan’s Thanksgivings when we first moved here and had no family within 2500 miles, very festive for 20-somethings in the same boat.  We would relish the seeming emancipation from fraught family Thanksgivings and it was lots of fun.

That 20-something crowd eventually had their own kids and made other friends and married other people, and our insouciant, celebratory gatherings dissipated.  I miss that scene, but I love the casual intimacy of our recent 3- or 4-person repasts, and the lack of expectation and drama.  We genuinely like each other and have a wonderful time.

The weekend stretches before us.  Tomorrow morning, way too early, Mrs. Perils and I will don our Rainbow City marching band uniforms for the first time since early August and head downtown to march and play in the Macy Seattle Thanksgiving day parade.

Old news for some, but I began playing in the Rainbow City Band, an LGBTA organization, in the fall of 2009, under some interesting circumstances.  Mrs. Perils and I met in high school band, and she still had her student clarinet, stowed in the closet for 40 years.  She unearthed it and joined the band the next year.

We’re a wind symphony/concert band fall, winter and spring, and become a marching band in the summer, performing in all the major parades in our region.  We love playing together, and the band has become the main hub of our social life. The band also has a mission of reaching out to the community at large, to show that we’re not that much different from other communities in our urban soup, and that’s led us to arise at 6 tomorrow morning for the privilege of shivering in the November Seattle cold and rain.

I kid, I think it will be a whole lot of fun.  We work pretty hard at both our concert and our marching band personae, and like to say that we’re a concert band that marches, meaning that the quality of the music is our first emphasis.

Here are a couple of examples:

Thriller, with dance routine:

Jump:

And one we’ll be playing tomorrow, Shut Up And Dance:

Happy Thanksgiving, y’all!