Thomas home for Xmas

On the 13th Thomas decided he would deign to come home for Xmas break and I duly went up to fetch him.  Here's the law quad at Ann Arbor onto which he now looks out from his smaller-but-higher-up room (than last year).  He seemed a bit flustered and lightly-equipped, but as he's allowed to leave his stuff in his room over the break (disappointing his parents, who thought he'd live at home for the next semester, thereby saving us a big chunk o' change), I didn't question him.  And, of course, when we got home he realized he didn't have any underpants, socks or indeed most clothes.  But I wasn't driving another two hours, so we let him borrow the car.  Apparently this whetted his appetite for driving, because since then most of his waking hours (which, unusually, have often overlapped with daylight hours) have been spent doing "DoorDash" - a con whereby saps (or people with saps for parents) wear out their cars and consume their own gasoline driving round delivering food to people who are too scared or too lazy to go get it themselves.  Basically you're a pizza man, only mostly for McDonalds, as far as I can tell (and as far as Jami reports about the smell of her car now).  But Thomas seems to think that this is how he'll get rich, and is rather disappointed that the spanking new bike he got for Xmas (to replace the spanking OLD bike that got stolen, because one of the side-effects of his new room being smaller and upstairs was that he kept his bike outside instead of in his room) isn't a car.

Both Jami and Thomas have reached the halfway point of their Law School careers, and Jami has all this surplus creative energy from writing giant law papers (that get nauseatingly gushing responses from her professors) and has decided to turn it to cooking a different meal every night.  Now, perhaps this doesn't sound too amazing, as we used to do something similar, but remember that we all have different, largely incompatible (Thomas is vegetarian but virulently PRO-gluten and dairy) diets, so merely coming up with a recipe requires higher math.  And we actually sit down and eat them together, which, again, has been facilitated by Thomas's DoorDash addiction, because he needs to eat in the early evening before hitting the big bucks of the evening meal rush.  Plus, we have the Amazing Lettucizer (or whatever its official name is) which was up on Thomas's balcony all summer, but has now been kitted out with super lights and sits in our dining room, both providing us with actual sustenance and winter-blues-fighting light.

Yummy!

This brings us up to Xmas, which was a bit light for Thomas (according to him) as he had already got his bike, but the pile of presents still looked obscene to me.

Of course, the main reason Thomas returns, is Martha, but he is taking all appropriate Covid precautions, what with her being an OAP and all: