Thanksgiving With the In-Laws

We consider ourselves so fortunate not only to have acquired a son-in-law, but to have acquired his family as well. His parents also live in Washington state—on the peninsula—and I’ve been to visit them a number of times. They welcomed DD#2 for Christmas a few years ago when she was still working as a sales associate in a Nordstrom store and couldn’t come to Montana for the holiday. They even kept the snow tires for her Jetta in their storage container and made arrangements for her to get her car serviced in their town. So no one thought it was weird that they invited DD#2 and me over for Thanksgiving dinner even though their son and DD#1 were celebrating in Alaska.

DD#2 and I got up bright and early on Thursday to catch a ferry across Puget Sound to the peninsula. The trip took about 25 minutes. We simply drove the car onto the boat on one side and off the boat on the other side. We arrived around 10 am. The house smelled amazing. DSIL’s mother is an accomplished cook and loves to bake. I really wish the husband had been with me to do justice to that meal. We had a turkey dinner with all the trimmings, the turkey expertly carved by DSIL’s dad. (His father had been a butcher, so he learned young how to carve a turkey properly.) There was not one, but three pies for dessert, including the most awesome pecan pie. That’s one pie I don’t ever make, so I indulged myself. I even had a piece for breakfast the next morning. Yum.

DD#2 and me before dinner:

After dinner, we sat around and watched TV and visited and I worked a bit on some hexies. I’ve got quite a stack of them done.

DD#2 and I headed back to Seattle on Friday morning. Our plan for that day was simple and included only a trip to Ikea and possibly the Container Store in search of a trash can to go underneath DD#2’s kitchen sink. You would not think that finding a suitable trash can would be so difficult, but it was.

Ikea is not really a Black Friday destination and wasn’t crowded. Unfortunately, I could not find the items on my list—lint roller refills, some little pouches for hanging off my rolling cart next to the Q20, and the stacking plastic bins that I use to hold quilt projects. I ended up ordering them off the website when I got home. We did not find a trash can, either, so we headed over to the Container Store at the nearby Southcenter Mall.

Oh, my. That was where all the Black Friday shoppers were. The traffic and the crowds were awful. I went into Joann Fabrics but came out empty-handed. We ducked into the Container Store, found a trash can, ordered food for take-out at a restaurant in the mall, and got ourselves out of there.

As a Nordstrom employee, DD#2 gets a substantial discount for a short period around the holidays. She had made a shopping appointment for Saturday morning with a friend of hers who is a sales associate at the Bellevue store. The Bellevue store is in the high-rent district. The only store that is bigger is the flagship store in downtown Seattle. The plan was for me to leave DD#2 at that Nordstrom to do her shopping while I went to the nearby Joann Fabrics. When we got there, however, I discovered that I had left my phone in her apartment.

It is a malady of modern civilization that being without one’s cell phone inspires such a high level of anxiety. I was in an unfamiliar location with no way to navigate or to contact DD#2. Fortunately, the Joann Fabrics was just a few miles from Nordstrom on the same road. I got myself over there, did some shopping, and got myself back without incident.

I’m going to digress here for a bit. Washington state has a mask mandate. That is enforced at various levels depending upon where one is—the stores in Spokane are much more lax about it than the ones in Seattle. At the end of October, King County also instituted a vaccine passport system. People have to be fully vaccinated, with proof, or have to have had a negative covid test within the past 72 hours in order to eat in restaurants or go to movie theatres.

DD#2 and I wanted to have lunch at Nordstrom, but both of us had forgotten about the passport requirement. I am not considered fully vaccinated, having only had the first shot. And I hadn’t thought about getting a covid test so I would have proof of a negative result. Thus, we could not eat at the restaurant inside the Nordstrom store. DD#2 thought for a moment, then said, “Let’s go get lunch at the E-Bar and eat in the mall.” So we did. We walked just outside the store entrance to Nordstrom’s E-Bar, ordered lunch, then sat at a table and ate it.

INSERT EYE ROLL HERE.

We had plans to see the House of Gucci movie, too, on Saturday night, but we had anticipated the passport issue. After we finished our shopping in Bellevue, we headed back to DD#2’s apartment, unloaded her purchases, then went to a different mall in a different county—one that doesn’t have a vaccine passport—where we were able to see the movie with no restrictions.

We both enjoyed it. I especially enjoyed spotting a couple of Necchi industrial sewing machines, seen in this clip:

And part of the movie was filmed at the Villa Necchi-Campiglio, built in 1935 by the Necchi family.

I headed back to Spokane on Sunday. Traffic was fairly heavy, but I had left early enough to avoid the “multiple collisions” in the Snoqualmie Pass area. I spent the night in Spokane and raced back here Monday morning.