Virtual Quill

I came home from Beige U. Wednesday night to find that Aby Eyeshine had volunteered her residence for the extended family's Thanksgiving dinner the following day. Everyone prepared their own meals and brought them over, so all Aby had to do was be a good hostess; a role she fulfilled admirably.
A good time was had by all, including the two grandmothers. I suspect that this played a role in Aby's offer, since they now are running her garage, and it's in Aby's interest to keep them cooperative. The offer of her home for one meal defused a potential flash point, all the while doing a good turn for her friends. (I continually find more and more reasons to admire her.)
Of course this Thanksgiving "dinner" was actually breakfast for me. After sundown I went over to Fenton's where I joined his family for their meal. Already full, I just ate a few insect wings.

I spent last weekend acquainting Rachel with the vegetation she had previously seen only as pulp after trampling. She was initially bored and unconcerned with the differences between various plants, as all her life she'd simply seen them as fuel. After a few days, however, she became amazed by all of the variety she'd been missing, and she got into the process. It was an exercise in nostalgia for me, as I was a straight-A Forager up until I discovered my true insectivore identity.
I picked up signals of discomfort from Fenton, which I initially thought was due to my spending time with Rachel. However, I soon realized that it was from my spending time with botany. I had to reassure him that I wasn't returning to a plant-based diet, and after all, he shouldn't worry about it affecting us since our relationship first blossomed when I was eating plants.
He did wince when I said "blossomed."
Speaking of food, there's a dust-up going on back home over where to hold the Thanksgiving dinner. The grandmothers have chosen that decision as their latest battlefield, so who knows what I'm going to walk in on when I return on Wednesday.

Rachel got her first "F" on a paper, and to her chagrin it was in a herbivore class on botanical categorization. Her explanation (that her diet consists of plants she's trampled into an unidentifiable pulp) rang true, but it still meant that she now has a lot to learn.
I can help, due to being raised as a herbivore. For those of you who need a refresher course, Dad and Angelique adopted me from a British orphanage before realizing that hedgehogs are insectivores. Angelique couldn't bear to feed me bugs, so she convinced Dad to raise me as a plant-eating American porcupine. Dad went along, and he's since confessed that he regretted it. He didn't reveal my true species until I was in high school, and that was only to save my relationship with Fenton.
So, I grew up studying a plant-based foraging diet in the rabbit warren with bunnies. Obviously I was an outcast, but I did learn a lot about plants. Rachel and I walked around campus yesterday and I pointed out the specific leaf shapes as they fell off the trees. A couple of times she instinctively charged at the tree trunks, causing even more leaves to fall.
We collected dozens to study, and after Rachel had drawn pictures of them in her notebook she ate the batch for lunch. She said she enjoyed the crunchy texture, as it was her first non-trampled meal.
It's a good thing it was already in her stomach or she would have charged at that.

It was Halloween at the dorm, and Fenton and I were so busy with our regular studies and with doing remote work on the Hare-Link servers that we didn't have the energy to create new costumes. We just wore the Angel/Devil outfits we had from a couple years ago.
Speaking of the servers, they're now fully functional after the move, and we kept the customers online at all times. Tree seems happy with the arrangement; although her systems are completely separate from Hare-Link's, she senses the presence of the Internet activity and doesn't feel as lonely.
Dad wrote a check to Fenton for the use of Tree, which enabled Fenton to make his mortgage payment. I asked Dad where he got the money for that, and he said that the wi-fi deal we had with the city was starting up again (but in a much smaller form). Details on that later.