Thanksgiving Weekend

This thanksgiving Jessi and I flew down to Los Gatos, California to visit my family. It was an awesome weekend with the whole family. My parents really liked having everyone visit especially since this is their first year without anyone in the house. The weekend was marked by three main events: lots of eating, visiting my sister's college and cutting down a Christmas tree.
	My sister, Lisa, goes to San Fransisco State University. Matthew, Jessi and I went up to SF to check it out. The campus is very nice. There's some large trees in the middle of campus that helps hide the fact that the school is in the middle of a huge city. We also went to Twin Peaks which are a set of hills looking over the city. It was a little foggy, but there were still a ton of tourists checking out the view. We then went down the winding part of Lombard Street and drove around the Warf. Going over the Gold Gate Bride is up to $5, so we decided to simply view it from a distant.

Then we went out for our annual Christmas Tree hunting trip. This is the first year we've gone without Scoter. I won't lie, it was tough not having him around to "help". I threw a big stick in memory of him - then I told Jessi to fetch the stick... let's just say I miss Scoter. One of the fun part about my family is that we have no problem doing weird things and accepting it as normal. For example, we found three potentially worthy trees. In previous years we would simply pick one, but this year we decided to put it to a vote. At first we were going to do a secret thumb vote, but some family members had trouble with the concept. So Matthew, being the president of his fraternity, decided to implement Roberts Rules of Order to the process. The winning tree had to have 50% + 1 votes to win (or 2/3 majority, or 4 votes). We started down the path of making it a secret ballet vote, but quickly realized we didn't have paper or pens. Then someone called "Roll Call Vote" which means we had to go around the circle and publicly state our vote. It took a few rounds, promises were made, deals were brokered and we finally picked a tree.
We also watched Los Gatos High School win their football game, saw friends from church and generally relaxed. For Christmas Jessi and I decided to go to Colorado and hang out with her family. I'm hopping for a white Christmas.