singing along to Mary Lambert. I had to think about that line for a minute and decide if I did agree with it. Which meant I had to dig further into thinking about what my secrets might be and what would bother me about them being in the open? Then I realized pretty quickly that while thankfully I am not walking around talking about every single thought and emotion I have, I don’t really keep much buried anymore. Sometimes, I have to work a little harder to discover what it is and that can take a while. I wouldn’t classify that as secrets rather as unknown.

Last night I went to the Girl Geek meetup and in addition to all the tech geek topics, we went deep into neural science, conditioning and definitions of feminism. I enjoyed it, 12 or so women, all geeky and all passionate about various topics. I thought that I would only stay for an hour or so but I ended up staying three.

So, if you are of the American variety of the species, Happy Thanksgiving 🙂 I hope that your time with family and friends is filled with laughter, kindness and a healthy sense of renewal. Of course, if the Black Friday madness is your thing, then I wish you lots of success with that 😉

My mom always used to buy roasted turkey from PCC on Thanksgiving for the pets. She would slice it up very finely and they would get on their plates. I remember that my dragon cat, Mikha, would go nuts for the turkey whereas Lientje thinks turkey is gross. She still does, if the wet food the cats get is turkey, Lientje walks away. It was the one time a year you could safely approach Mikha if you weren’t one of the very few people she tolerated.

As for us, Mom and I would do everything but the turkey. I miss her stuffing. I can’t get the exact flavors no matter how hard I try. I think that also has something to do with getting sidetracked while I am making it – I suddenly start thinking of more things to add. Whereas Mom had strict rules about not adding too many things. We would go to the movies around 4pm, precisely when the rest of the world was sitting down to dinner. Then we would eat afterwards while the rest of the world was at the movies, in a food coma, or later heading to the malls.

I get a lot of my contrary tendencies from my mom. It doesn’t help that my dad is not exactly Mr. Conformity either. In my DNA, I have a doublescoop of Do It Your Own Way 😉 Well, actually we all do in varying degrees of intensity.

The weather has gotten pretty cold and on the bike, you need mittens. You might remember that I had a collection of my mom’s Bartell’s mittens. Well, I still have them. With the move, they just happen to be buried in a box somewhere. Yesterday, I needed to take the train to the Hague for a customer meeting and I could not find a pair that matched either my coat or each other, so I followed in my mom’s footsteps and wore two mismatching ones. The important thing was to keep my hands warm. I did remove them before walking into the building 😉

Okay, back to work. Later today off to homework help where I plan to learn some more Dutch and dig up my rusty knowledge of area and circumference formulas 🙂