I drove my feet though a desert whose mirage fluttered like a host.

HI MS. WALTERS!
HI ANYONE ELSE SECRETLY READING THIS THAT I DON'T KNOW ABOUT!
HI REGULARS! (I haven't forgotten about you lot yet.)

Now that that's out of the way, I suppose I'll get to talking about my week. I'm not going to talk about Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday 'cause I saw y'all on those days. So let's start with Thursday, a.k.a. Thanksgiving. We (meaning Mark, Anne, Cole, and yours truly) got up at some point in the morning and drove our motorhome to our grandparents' (dad's parents) house, where we ate thanksgiving with the whole crew, including aunts (Karen and Kelly), uncles (Ken and Brian), cousins (Megan, Connor, Shane, Bryce), and, of course, the old folks (Marion and Geraldine). Now, what you've got to realize about the Satterfields is that we like to eat. A lot. Now, I realize that most everyone probably thinks they eat more than everyone else on Thanksgiving, but I've really got to say that we take the cake, and it's so obvious that I mean that in not only a figurative sense that I'm not going to elaborate on that particular point any further. When you think of Satterfields, you probably imagine rather skinny young men who are either extremely attractive or the exact opposite but never anything in between, and I cannot fault you for this empirical deduction, but I have to correct you, if this is indeed the case. Cole and I get our body type from our mom's side of the family. Satterfields, as a rule, are short and fat. Put it this way: our mom is the shortest and fattest member of her family, and our dad is the tallest and skinniest member of his family. If you've ever seen the two of them together, you should realize what this implies about the rest of them. Naturally, when you put a bunch of Satterfields together at a table, well, you better have a some serious calories ready for consumption, or else they'll eat the table, just as Celaeno the Harpy foretold the Teucrians would have to do ere they found Rome. To say we eat like kings is an overestimation of monarchical dietary habits. To say we eat like starving African children is perhaps a more accurate representation of reality, but nevertheless politically incorrect. To say we eat like pigs is, frankly, a little bit insulting, so please don't. Let's just say we eat like Satterfields and leave it at that.

So after we stuff ourselves, some of the other relatives leave, but we (meaning the aforementioned immediate family) spend the night at the grandparents' place, and the next morning we drive out to Ocotillo Wells to go ride us some dirt bikes. At this point Rachael and anybody else with motorcycling experience who has heretofore concealed it from me can imagine me having a damn good time in the middle of a barren desert, and everybody else can try to imagine just such a thing, and if you are in any way successful, then consider yourself saluted. Here's a little piece of Ocotillo to get you started:

This is from Google, because A) I don't bring technology on rides, and, more importantly, B) I don't associate with quads.

So we do that on Friday and Saturday and then we drive back home on Saturday and we eat dinner and go to bed and then Cole and I fly out the next morning and he gets to spend most of the day at Berkeley and I get to spend most of the day traveling and I get back to my dorm around midnight and find out that the Ducks lost again but at this point I've basically given up on their season. Hopefully they draft well this year. This morning I get up, spread peanut butter on my pancakes, go to my first class, listen to a lecture on Catholicism in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries (emphasis on the word "boring"), and then I head back to my room, where I write this thing. Now I'm realizing that I don't think I've ever posted before my 11:15 class, and I guess I could, but I want to find out if Winkler does anything worth discussing before I sign off, so I'm gonna go to that class now and when I come back I'll finish this. Of course, nothing could be more pointless than me explaining all of this to you when I could simply add it on when I get back from class without delineating the chronological progress of my typing, but I shall nevertheless continue to write about this particular thought process until I get bored of it, which, coincidentally enough, is right now.

Okay, Winkler's class wasn't that exciting, although I did get my last exam back and I did really well. Hooray for me. But I feel that I ought to sign off with something clever. Hmmm. Nothing coming. Goodbye.