Thanksgiving
Seeing as we were planning a lot of travel during Christmas, we opted to stay home in San Francisco for Thanksgiving rather than fly out to Ohio or New York. Fortunately Tatyana's aunt Zhanna was able to come out to visit Alina during this period so we had some family around other than just ourselves.
Neither Tatyana nor I had really made a Thanksgiving dinner before, so there were a lot of phone calls to each of our mothers to get advice and recipes. Tatyana was in charge of the Turkey and her mother's special rice dressing. I came up with some favorites from the Connor household, sweet potato soufflé, another stuffing, pumpkin pie, green bean casserole.
I think both of us were surprised at how well it all turned out. We had a great meal, plenty of leftovers for the rest of the week.
During her stay it was funny to listen to Tatyana and Zhanna talk about life in the Soviet Union. Tatyana kept bringing up stories that she had heard while doing her thesis work, and Zhanna kept contradicting those stories with her own, firsthand, experience. One of my favorites (paraphrased):
TATYANA: "But Zhanna a well known professor from Columbia wrote a whole book about this."
ZHANNA: "I was there!"
