Holiday Round-Up

Moms and pops are gone and the homestead is filled yet again with the yelling of only two people, rather than four (well, actually only three as mom doesn’t participate in plebian behavior). All in all, I’d have to crown this year a rousing success! December started off with a trip to the land of wind and a visit with the Kleins of the northern ‘burbs. Their young girl children are so smart I become discouraged about the prospect of my own offspring as they surely could never be so bright and cute. Here’s a picture of the youngest (Dina) in dance class.

Mom arrived on the 16th and declared the weather in San Francisco to be “freezing”. Luckily, it was nothing a little In-N-Out burger couldn’t fix! She performed an insane amount of gift wrapping the first day she was here. It’s hard to resist slipping one’s own presents in her sights when she’s on a roll. I can openly admit that I did not resist and had my mother wrap most of my gifts. For shame! We also spent a day visiting the EPA police department for a certificate of clearance and drove to cosmopolitan Fremont in order to deal with Costa Rican residence card issues. Dad arrived a week later and we all crammed into the Impala for a trip to Lake Tahoe. The hotel I booked was a little on the budget side, with a space heater next to our bed and a rather small TV, but fun nonetheless. The best part was wrapping mom and dad in winter clothes. For some reason they remind me of dogs in sweaters—such an unnatural look for those particular animals.

We visited the casinos, which was sort of boring.

We couldn’t find any good walking places on Lake Tahoe as there seemed to be cruise boats taking up the lakefront. We bought a map that gently reminded us that the Lake Tahoe region had many other lakes besides the big one, so Natan and I went on a wintery walk to fallen leaf lake.

I also got these people out there! (they refused to walk down to the lake as that would then necessitate a walk up from the lake)

Rachel arrived on the 25th for a visit and stayed with Matt and Jazmin. We went to Santa Cruz where I had the most delicious vegetarian hamburger with fake bacon, onion rings, cheese and BBQ sauce. Overall, we did a lot of eating, and game playing.

We also communed with these guys:

When Rachel left, I had two glorious days left with the old folks. Our time was mostly filled with shopping, movies and trying to decide between Jack in the Box and McDonald’s for dinner (so familiar). They left on New Year’s Eve and Natan and I experienced Pruett withdrawal symptoms. We were in bed by 10 (me reading The Female Brain and him reading The Odyssey), and asleep by 11. I did, however, get snookered from two and a half glasses of wine at dinner time (around 6:30) on the first day of the new year. After expressing a deep, sincere love for my cat and laying on my face under the Christmas tree for the “experience”, Natan indicated that he was slightly weirded out, at which point I went to bed. Another successful beginning to yet another new year!