We had a really fun Thanksgiving last week complete with all of the usual festivities despite the fact that it was just Peter, Ali and me here. Ali and I watched the Thanksgiving Day Parade, during which we recognized next to zero "celebrities", followed by the dog show, while Peter watched football. I'm sort of loving that we have two TVs now.

It was a beautiful 75-degree day, so Ali and I drove down to the river right across from Downtown and went on a short walk. There were tons and tons of people out walking their dogs and/or jogging. I decided people who jog on Thanksgiving are the worst kind of people. I felt overachieving even going on a walk and then they come and put me to shame. I did take this picture of a fun little map on the top of a hill in the park where we were walking. It shows the distance to notable Texas destinations from that exact spot.
Part of the reason I didn't really take any photos was because my phone freaked out and starting freezing every five seconds and then randomly deleted all 5,346 pictures on my phone. So that was fun. I actually recovered them via iPhoto so all is not lost, but it was highly annoying and I almost bit the bullet and bought a new phone on Black Friday. See, I still have the iPhone 5, which I'm aware is archaic, but it came free with my phone plan in Australia and I don't want to sign on to another contract until I absolutely have to. That is, until I need a new phone and don't want to buy it outright for 8 bajillion dollars. So, until then, I'll stick with my iPhone 5 and my Straight Talk Wireless plan.

Yes, there are actual people who use Straight Talk Wireless in their actual lives and not just for burner phones and I am one of them.

Anyway, we had an amazing Thanksgiving dinner complete with tons of turkey, potatoes, stuffing, corn, green beans, gravy, and an apple pie. We were extremely full after dinner, but that didn't stop us from venturing out to witness the madness that is Black Friday. Around 6 pm we headed over to the mall and wandered around Macy's. I'm sad to report we didn't see any fist fights. One year, Ali and I witnessed an actual fight between two grown women over bedding at Walmart that was discounted like 20%. No joke. Macy's was slightly classier but still pretty hectic. We checked out a few other stores, bought a total of two things, and then headed home. Worth it.

On actual Black Friday Ali had to work, so Peter and I had the totally original idea to drive down to the ridiculously massive outlet mall in San Marcos to do a bit more shopping. Turns out, several others decided to hit up the outlet mall as well, and it took us approximately an hour to make it into the parking lot and find a spot. We ended up doing one of those things where you spot someone walking to their car and relentlessly stalk them. Again, we left with approximately four items, mostly purchased at the Old Navy outlet, which in itself is a somewhat unbelievable concept. How do you discount a $4.00 shirt? Let me just say, you haven't lived until you've been to the San Marcos outlet mall. It is insane.

On Saturday, we still had a bunch of Thanksgiving leftovers so we invited some friends over for a retroactive Friendsgiving. One of my college roommates has an old coworker who is in Austin for a few months with her husband working as a traveling nurse, so we have gotten together a few times with them, given that they don't know anyone here either! We had a really fun little dinner and got to finish off the last of our Thanksgiving feast.

Sunday was the 50th anniversary of the Zilker Christmas Tree Lighting, which is supposed to symbolically kick off the start of the Christmas season in Austin. Later in December, there is a Trail of Lights spanning Zilker Park that's rumored to be really cool, so we will definitely go to that when it opens. I took a few photos of the tree and it really did feel pretty Christmas-y with all of the festivities going on in the park, minus the 70-degree weather of course.

I apologize for the super-grainy low-quality iPhone pictures, but here's the tree before it was lit:
 And after:

And a video: