North Carolina, Day 2

Sleep. Lots of sleep. It's awesome. Happy Thanksgiving!

Yesterday mostly involved more leaf-raking. It got dark before we could finish the front yard on Day 1, so completion was the name of the game. The yard looks good now, but three things are depressing:

1) it won't last

2) the backyard still has to be done

3) turns out I was wrong -- the leaves have been raked twice before, which makes this quantity all the more impressive!

Our big leaf pile

The clean (for now) yard

K did some work on her paper today, "pushing all the bubbles to the bottom," as she said. Unfortunately, it's not finished yet, so Thanksgiving might be less than fun. Or she'll just take a page from my book and procrastinate.

Oh, and I read some more of my book today! I'm almost finished and am totally loving it. More on that in 50 pages or so.

While my mom was getting dinner ready, the sun was setting behind the trees in her back yard. It was so orange and bright -- it looked like they were on fire!

The sunset

We had some dinner -- apple/carrot/pecan salad and tomato basil soup -- then headed off to Raleigh to see the Carolina Ballet perform to music from Handel's Messiah. The music was wonderful, and the choreography was awesome. For some of the dances, they had probably 20 people on stage, all doing different things, and somehow making it work. There was lots of spandex, which led to some interesting speculation which I will refrain from posting here. Use your imagination.