So we’ve just finished getting all the holiday stuff up in the house: the tree, ornaments, stuff on the walls, pretty much everything except the outdoor lights. Right now we’re watching TV and waiting for the pizza guy to show up with dinner. Later we’ll probably get a fire going in the fireplace.

This was my first Thanksgiving in Modesto. The big family Thanksgiving is a pretty new experience for me; my family in Florida was only four people, and in recent years it’s been a real effort to get everyone in the same place at once for dinner. We’d eat, enjoy each other’s company, maybe watch a DVD, and then all go break in our separate directions.

Thanksgiving among the Taylor/Jepson (and now West Coast Warren) clan is a very different experience. This is the big California family gathering of the year, over thirty people packed into the Jepsons’ house eating food and watching football and playing Scrabble or dominos for most of the day. It was a lot of fun – many of the relatives from the wedding made it, including Andy Taylor, the pastor who married us. We all drank the patented Jepson fruit punch and ate super-rich coconut/chocolate/graham cracker cookies and got loud over a cutthroat match of the Mexican Train Dominos Game That Would Not End.

Last Thanksgiving, I was still in Florida. We were newly engaged and planning my early December move to California; my first Taylor/Jepson holiday was Christmas ’07. This year I kind of feel like (along with Shelley Taylor) in the sophomore class rather than rolling in again as a green freshman. It’s still a bit intimidating, navigating through such a large group, but it was a lot of fun.

We both hope you all had a good Thanksgiving and are spending the rest of the weekend relaxing and just generally enjoying being wherever you are. We’ll have some photos up soon of the living room, done up with all the decorations – we’ve gotten it all pretty festive now.

In case I haven’t said so lately, thanks to everyone in the Jepson/Taylor clan who have done so much in the last year to adopt me into their family. It’s a good place to be and I’m enjoying it a lot.

(By the way, sorry I haven’t written for a while. Our copywriting business has been having a record November, and so I’ve been spending almost every spare minute doing client work. It’s been left up to Kristi to keep R&K going by herself, lately. Busy is good, but busy does make a guy tired.)