Well, sort of early anyways.

The plans are to visit both sets of parents and enjoy all the requisite Thanksgiving food all while trying not to explode from overeating. 

What am I thankful for this year? 

Graduation - New Job
Finall finishing my bachelor's at UNLV in Electrical Engineering.  Will also be starting as an associate engineer at Nevada Power this December.  Life is sweet!

Rediscovering Video Game Music
...or more specifically, finally getting into Hitoshi Sakimoto (even though Vagrant Story still eludes me), Yuzo Koshiro (Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune 3 and Sekaiju no MeiQ) and some old-school goodness (Junko Tamiya and Naoki Kodaka).  Also, staying up-to-date on what's what in the VGM world.  Thanks to everyone here!

The Wii
Mostly for giving me and the wife something to play together.  Ever since I got her addicted to Wii Sports, she's been playing nonstop and wants the Wii Fit board badly.  The console really is a good conversation starter and a wonderful gateway into gaming.

Again, Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Word, son. A very Happy Thanksgiving to you and to everyone else here.

My plans are relatively quiet tomorrow. I'll be going to a small family gathering at my aunt's house, which is in the next town over. Instead of traveling and getting stuck on the highway somewhere between here and there, we (me and the parents) are going to have a nice long 8 minute car ride. I usually go to my cousin's house, which is about 45 minutes by car normally, but that takes about 2-3 hours on Thanksgiving because of the traffic.

On to the happy things. Here are some things I'm thankful for:

Family and friends
So trite, but so true. I'm really blessed to have such a warm and supportive family, and to have the relationship with my parents that I have with them. They are my best friends. I have some great friends, too - my inner circle is always there to lean on, have fun with, and most importantly, sing karaoke with.

My new job
After struggling with a crappy job at a crappy company for a while, I quit back in June of this year with no further plans to get out and "re-center" myself. After four months full of tons of gaming (I think I beat Tomb Raider Legend about seventeen times every week) and one really awful temp job that was worse than the job I quit, I nabbed a sweet job with a higher job title and salary than I was used to. The company is great, the location is great (10 minutes by car as opposed to an hour each way on public transportation), the job itself is great... everything is freakin' great. I really, really lucked out and am very grateful to have a fun and rewarding job.

Taco Bell Taco Sauce
Seriously, this stuff is ambrosia. I use it on just about anything and everything - pizza, veggie burgers, nachos, sandwiches... just about anything but cereal. And the best part? It's FREE.

Piece of Mind
Over the past few months, things have been really settling down for me mentally. I'm finally content with most of my VGM collection and look at it as a bunch of music that I love to listen to as opposed to a pile of stuff I need to figure out if I want to sell or not. I've finally weeded out stuff and made a distinction between things I actually like to listen to and things that I am/was holding to for novelty or rarity - completely deleting my entire MP3 collection and forcing myself to sit down and focus on the music really helped. The same goes for my game collection - I'm really happy with what I have and I don't feel the need to search for stuff to fill the gaps. I've also been more prone to chill out and be less snappy toward things I don't agree with, both here on the boards and in my life. It's nice to feel at ease as opposed to being an easily irritated person/poster.

Karaoke
My favorite thing to do outside of the house, period. If anyone is ever in the Boston area, it'll be my pleasure to take you to the local karaoke digs to rock the mic.

My thumbs and hand-eye coordination
Man, I love me some good quality gaming.

What am I thankful for?

Family
Parents, siblings, wife, son. It's all good.

Sex
This is a subset of being thankful for my wife. It would also explain why we have a second baby on the way. Sorry if TMI, but everyone should be HAPPY about makin sweet love.

Music
VGM and the crap I dig up on YouTube. Gotta love it.

Sugary yummy desserts
Pumpkin pie, pumpkin roll, those Stauffers chocolate stars (milk chocolate only prz), etc. Good way to lose your teeth and gain 30 pounds.

Teh Internetz
No seriously.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!
I'm thankful for:

Health, Family & Friends, and being paid to be a graduate student

Granted, I'm not paid much, but still being paid to do research, take classes, and pursue your PhD... well, it's really quite a sweet deal in all!

cheers,

-avatar!

eh, i have two histology finals and a physiology quiz, and then an nbme exam on saturday.
bah, humbug.

Happy Thanksgiving, you all! Um, but Canuckistan celebrates f---ing Thanksgiving in October. So, like, you're entire country is late by, like, a month by Canadian standards.

Why do Canadians ALWAYS feel the need to point this out? Is it some "you stupid Amercians" thing?

-Joshua

Thankful, thankful...Very fun word to look at. All peaks and valleys. I'm thankful for:

-Family (natch)
-Friends (natch)
-Job (awaiting the official word to be even more thankful about this one, but even the current one rocks...New one, I can't listen to music 10 hours a day. Well, we'll see.)
-Car (still ticking...door works only half the time, but the rest is in fine shape)
-All the great new music I discovered this year, past and present. Chewing into 200+ bands/artists in 7 months makes me mad at myself for not doing it earlier, but I also have many more resources now too which have been completely invaluable. Best part is, broadening my horizon only ended up making my favorite VGM sound better (or at least more clearly recognize what it is I like about it) and really helped weed out the garden of practically everything I felt I "should have been liking" or stuff I was never "in the mood for". Now it's just pure hedonism
-Kix (the band). I was surprised to see Maryland had contributed something worthwhile to the hair metal scene, so I feel a bit of hometown pride listening to these guys and knowing we produced a band that survived the grunge scare reasonably intact and actually getting better at what they did.
-Silvertone Stratocaster clones. I've been perfectly happy with mine thus far, despite the horror stories I hear about cheap guitars. Stays in tune, looks good, the strings stay in place and it sounds good from a crappy practice amp...Can't ask for much more from a sub-$100 guitar.
-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5G8MLutk7ZY
-I don't have to take my last few classes for 3 more months and I never have to look at statistics again. I'm also thankful for having a good teacher who cut the bullshit out of statistics and taught us what we need to know (read: how to put stuff into the calculator and Excel), while grading on a massive curve. Good fortune smiled upon me this past summer in that regard.

Not to kill the mood, but I'm in mourning... 

I'm standing in solidarity with the indigenous folks in remembrance for what this day really meant for them...

Not at all. Just in case you didn't know. You don't have to get all up in my grill, yo.

I won't itemize the things I am thankful for, too many, and I hate to rate that type of stuff...But I will give a shout out to all-ya'll.  Hope you had / are having a great Thanksgiving.

best

Ai, t'was a joyous Thanksgiving indeed!

One of my cousins showed me Super Mario Galaxy, Twilight Princess, and since my aunt and two female cousins DEMANDED it, WiiSports.

I actually broke a sweat playing boxing, but the controls seemed a little bit unresponsive...or like you couldn't do certain things with them. I wanted to deliver a curving left hook, but it seems it wouldn't let me do that. It be cooler if it was more motion sensitive.

Otherwise, Wii is definitely Nintendo's most innovative product ever, and I'm interested to see how they utilize and develop the hardware in the future.

I think it's safe to say I want a Wii now!

No way, dude. Two words: Virtual Boy.

... just kidding.

Our get together was similar...I have 5 cousins...3 are nuts about Guitar Hero, one is just getting into it (he's 13 or so and trying to score it for Christmas) and another (his brother) actually plays guitar and thinks the whole thing is silly, so he just sat there and played along to the stuff in the games while we passed the controllers around (minus the amp). And the youngest one did goddman "Through the Fire and Flames" on expert and got 4 stars on it. Very fun evening, although a fight almost broke out because of the complete gayness of Battle Mode and how it handles tiebreakers. Can't wait to see what the next get together is like with Rock Band.

Food was excellent too.

My thanksgiving was actually fairly normal. The majority of my family (the dramatic ones) were on vacation so it was just a small gathering with the usual food. And the Wii! We did a lot of bowling and I got a little further with SMG.

I also learned that it looks like I'll be going to Rome in a year! Exciting! I'd better brush up on my Italian...

Get.  Out.  I watched at youtube video of that and almost collapsed.  It's funny how you mention the serious guitar player thinking Guitar Hero is "silly".  I think Rock Band is "silly" just by the drums alone.  If I remember correctly, only on hard to you implement the bass pedal.  That being said, my wife's little brother brought over Guitar Hero 3 for the PS2 the other day and I might want it for the PS3.

I'll snap a photo of it next time he comes over and if he can do it again. I had been calling bullshit on it for awhile, when my uncle said he got, "some game where you play guitar and apparently, he's really good at it.". He died once at the opening (which I can't do for the life of me), but once he got past that, it was all over for Dragonforce. He's 12 or 13.

The fight I mentioned happened when we started up battle mode and the same guy COULDN'T WIN! At all! I even beat him twice because of the stupid death-drain tie (I think it defaults to player one winning if it's a tie) and then I got a lefty-flip (which is as good as insta-win on hard or above). Then his brother got, like, five wins in a row before he started hitting his controller and it went back and forth every game for awhile until dinner. No wonder the whammy bar on their controller is completely shot.

Fun times.

Not bad... for fans of Napolean Dynamite...

www.youtube.com/?v=7vtAyVqfYQc