Thanksgiving Fun

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving filled with fun, family and games. Wednesday I went to my parents house to help clean up and get ready for guests. Peter came over after work and then Abbie, Rafe and their dog Ruby showed up around 6:30. They drove down from the bay area. Ruby is 13 and Gracie (my family's golden retriever) 6 played a bunch. It was funny to watch Ruby bump Gracie with her nose and then spring backward and want to play. Of course Gracie would play, but she had more energy than Ruby, so Ruby would end up leaving the game first. We had a fun evening. Thursday was Turkey Day! Peter volunteered to be in charge of the bird. He brined it(soaked it in water and herbs and stuff) and that made it nice and juicy when it cooked. It was great!

After dinner which was rather early, we all took a nap. Several of us were out for a long time, which made it easy for us to stay up until midnight playing games. Peter and I introduced my family to Apples to Apples, Scum, Pit and we introduced Nerts (which is hard to play with a lot of people) to Peter. We also played Disney Scene It #2. Peter was at the end first, but he missed the winning question and I caught up and beat him :) My mom and sister clearly lost.

Friday morning we made apple pancakes for my family. They are like German pancakes (you cook them in the oven and they fluff up) with apples in them. They are oh so good! Peter's great at making them, and I love them, so we eat them often. Then Abbie, Rafe, Peter and I headed out to La Jolla. We went to the Mangelsen Gallery where we bought a poster of a bear holding a fish. Thomas Mangelsen's most famous photo is called "Catch of the Day" it is of a brown bear standing over a waterfall and a fish jumps out of the water and is headed towards the bear's mouth. My dad has that poster in his office. After that we headed down to the children's pool and watched some cute critters.
At one point there were two divers in the water and they spooked the seals. I took a video clip, but it's not working on this site I keep getting error notes...arg. Basically it was the seals moving rather quickly across the beach. Peter referred to them as giant caterpillars.

It was also low tide, so we went down to the tide pools. Here we have a ton of mussels and a beautiful wave. Next is a dead crab. We think someone purposely put it there because the water was really shallow and it was missing a few parts...We made Rafe touch it to see if it was dead and then for the rest of the day we told him he had dead crab hands. There were also sea anemones everywhere!


Saturday morning we finally decorated our Christmas tree! Then did a little shopping and headed over to raid the fridge for the last remaining pieces of turkey. We had sandwiches and watched a movie.

My break from work was wonderful...I had a whole week off! I got a lot accomplished that I wanted to. I even got to play in my garden. I planted sweet pea seeds and started moving some plants around. My mom informed me that she wanted to turn one of my garden spaces into a cemented area and put a storage container to hide all of the grandkids' toys. This meant me moving some plants around. I started with the strawberries and boysenberries and moved them to the back of the yard where I have other boysenberry plants along the fence. I put the strawberries in front of some roses also in the back area. I still have a bunch of gerberas, carnations, and geraniums to move as well as a few others. However she doesn't plan on cementing the area until after Christmas, so I think I will leave some plants in there so we don't get a muddy area for Gracie to play in. Plus it looks nice with some plants there. I need to get some snap pea seeds into the ground soon, then I'll be all set.

On Tuesday my nephew Joshua-6, came to see what I was doing as I was pulling weeds in the front yard. He asked if he could help and then proceeded to grab giant hedge clippers. I told him he could help trim one plant back by cutting the brown parts. Well thanks to him and my own accidental chop the root in half, we ended up pulling that bush out. He turns to me and says, "Does grandma know you're doing this?" Me-"Well sort of." Joshua-"I think she's going to be mad that you took out her plant." Me-"Well you helped me." Joshua then gets the look of I'm in trouble on his face and then says, "I think I'll go inside now." I reassured him he wouldn't get in trouble and he stayed and helped me awhile longer. I later told my mom and she said she didn't notice the plant missing. There are several out there just like it and they have roots that run. So somewhere it will probably start up again if it hasn't already.

Did we win?

Our Christmas tree is up already...did we beat you?

Yesterday Peter and I went out to lunch at In N Out (don't know what that is...you're missing out) and then went shopping for a tree. We stopped at Mervyns which is going out of business to check out their artificial trees and well they were pretty tacky. Then we headed to Costco and picked out a 7.5 footer with white lights. Peter tried to convince me we needed the one with the LED lights that cost about $30 more. He only wanted it because of the lights. I told him we could buy some LED lights to put on ours...so we got the cheaper one.

Last year we decided to buy an artificial tree because neither one of us wanted to carry a real one up a flight of stairs to get it in the house. Nor did we want to have to constantly clean up the needles, and well artificial ones don't get dried up and pose as a fire danger. This one said it was flame resistant on the package. Anyway last year came and went and we tried to get one after the holidays for real cheap, but we didn't like any and they really weren't cheap. So yes yesterday we bought our first Christmas tree, and in a couple years or less depending on the prices of real trees it will have paid for itself.

So there you have it, we have a tree and it's up with lights on it. Perhaps we'll decorate tonight as we start making stuff for Thanksgiving.

More Babies

A couple days ago Peter informed me that he thought one of our platies and one of our guppies might be pregnant. We decided the guppy looked the biggest so we placed her in the breeding tank. The next morning Peter said the platy had her babies and found one...which later died. I haven't seen any alive in the big tank yet. Well that morning we let the guppy go as she was quite active. This morning Peter caught the guppy and put her back in the breeding tank as she wasn't eating...sure sign that she's going to give birth or has already started. So here is the best pictures I was able to take. So far we have 23 baby guppies and still a really fat mama. In the video I also show you the other breeding tank where we have our survivors from another pregnancy...there's one guppy and one platy left.

Conference, Fires and Disneyland Oh My!

This weekend was quite an adventure. It started out with my co-worker (Vicki) and I driving up to LA for a work conference Thursday night. We stayed the night at my friends house. Friday morning in the wee hours Vicki had an allergy attack which kept her and I up most of the night. Friday morning we knew we had to find another place to stay. On our drive to the conference hotel we called another co-worker (Karin). She did not answer her phone. We called Vicki's husband to have him find us a hotel to stay at (mind you this is within a mile of Disneyland so there are hotels everywhere). A few minutes later Karin calls Vicki back and we beg to stay with her in her hotel and we'll split the cost three ways. Karin retells the story to us: She was checking in when we called her and she did not hear her phone ring. The man checking her in told her there was a mix up and instead of giving her a room with one king sized bed, she was getting a room with two queen sized beds for the same price. The man then asked if she would like an extra room key. She originally said no and then changed her mind and said sure, she might have a friend that wants to freshen up or something. When Karin called us back she said "Things happen for a reason. There was a reason why I got two beds instead of one and there was a reason that I changed my mind and got an extra room key." Vicki and I were of course very grateful.

Friday, Saturday and Sunday morning were conferences. I only had one seminar that was completely pointless for me to go to, so I walked out. But that was only after about 20 other people had walked out too. Friday and Saturday night our last seminar was over at 5. So Friday we took the hotel shuttle to Downtown Disney and walked around the stores and ate at the Rainforest Cafe. It was fun! There were some fires burning Friday, the sky was a bit murky looking. Saturday it was pretty bad. The sky was quite orange and dirty looking for most of the day. We only went out for lunch and dinner and then stayed in the hotel to watch a movie(which somehow didn't end up on our final bill, though we did say that we watched a movie.) I wasn't feeling terribly well so I fell asleep during the movie. Sunday morning we went to one of the seminars and then headed out to Disneyland. Kim-my friend had to do a scavenger hunt thingy, so she got her friend to meet us in front of the last A in California and he got us into the park for FREE! Mind you it was a park hopper ticket so we got to go to both Disneyland and California Adventure for FREE!
We went to California Adventure first. Did all the major rides including the newest Toy Story which was a 3D interactive thing, it was so fun. While waiting in line there was a Mr. Potato Head that was talking to the guests. He said something to a little girl wearing a gray shirt and she was like "He's not talking to me, he can't be talking to me, he's a toy." It was funny. Then we went Grizzly River Rafting and we all got soaked!!!!! Luckily it was really dry and hot out so we dried quickly. We soared over California, did Maliboomer, California Screamin and the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror to name a few. Then we headed over to Disneyland got a Dole Whip (funny story behind the picture. It was supposed to be a picture, but Vicki somehow got it to do a video clip, so anyway enjoy the short clip of us totally unaware that it's a video.) . We enjoyed the Haunted House, Pirates of the Carribbean and a couple others. We were only at Disneyland for about an hour and then we had to run back and try to catch the 3:50 shuttle back to the hotel. We were there at 3:51 to watch the shuttle drive away. As we sat to wait for half an hour for the next shuttle, one pulled up. The driver said someone didn't show up to pick up some people from a hotel so he had to do an extra drop off and he was headed back to the hotel. So we hopped on. We left the hotel and were back home at 6. I was in bed by 7:30.

That leads me to today. I stayed home from work today and slept all day. I think conferences are cursed. I went to a conference in New York a couple years ago and came home sick. I went to this conference and came home sick as well. Go figure! I hope to be back at work tomorrow, with a box of tissues.

Where's Waldo?

Last night Peter and I participated in a live action Where's Waldo game down at Fashion Valley Mall. We showed up 30 minutes before the rest of the people and were told to go shopping and groups would come and find us, take our picture and then get our signature. There was a Waldo who had the striped shirt and hat. You got more points the faster you found Waldo. There was a cowboy, business people (Greg and Ellen), a rastafarian (Guy that looked like he was from Jamaica), a Chief's Fan, a girl in a zebra striped shirt, and we wore nearly matching hawaiian shirts and khaki pants, we were tourists. It was quite a fun game. I think nearly every group if not every group found us. One group found us inside of a toy store, two groups found us inside SEES candy, two groups found us at the food court, one group found us as we were going down an escalator, one group were sitting on benches and we walked right in front of them and a couple others spotted us as we were walking the mall. It was hilarious, people would yell tourists and then come running to get a picture with us. We got several funny looks from other people shopping at the mall. The groups after they found us they would see us again later on and shout and wave. It was quite a fun night! This was a regional singles ward activity that we were asked to participate in and boy we had so much fun we would totally do it again.

Afterwards we met up with Chris and Mary and headed over to the Cheesecake Factory. I got lemon raspberry cream cheese cake and it was delicious! I was the only one to eat all of mine. Peter got a super rich chocolate mousse, Mary got a peanut butter kind and Chris got dulce de leche. We sampled each others, I liked mine best but Chris' was a close second. Peter's and Mary's were really rich, a wee bit too rich for me.