There's no place like home

Geoff didn't realize how apparently cheeky he was in requesting both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day off as the new guy in the practice. Even so, they gave it to him...exactly.

In order to get back in time for him to work on the 26th, we had to fly back on the red eye at 9:45 PM on Christmas Day, a voyage wrought with near-missed planes, the deicing of a frozen toilet, a seat that didn't recline, the torture of the movie The Santa Clause III: The Escape Clause, and sickly and ginormous neighbors spilling their germs and their bodies into our seats. Just as we had laid eyes on the North Carolina landscape and known it without any sense of surprise to be home, we slipped back to Pentuckett Avenue in the dead of the night murmuring "there's no place like home."

We really enjoyed spending time with our parents, meeting our newest niece Wesli, playing with her big sister Rylee, and hanging out with our friends. Only, it flew by too fast. We packed to change locations six separate times. There were people we didn't get to see. We only got one full day with our adorable nieces. But at least we got to go home for Christmas.

Next year, Geoff isn't likely to be so cheeky...or so lucky.

Season's Greetings!!

We want to wish all of you the very warmest holiday season!
If 2007 was a great year for you, we hope that your luck will continue into the new year. If things didn't go your way last year or times were tough, we hope that you will find all of the love and happiness that you deserve. And, since life is rarely ever so clear cut, in the meantime, we hope that we can be the kind of friends to you that you have been to us all of this time.

We love you!

Quiet for so long

Nearly a month has passed since I last updated this blog. During the interim, I made some (invisible) attempts: there's a draft kind of dangling, not quite ready for its debut. There's Part II of the Pink Martini story waiting to be told. Of course, there are so many new things to tell - my VIP weekend at Montesoro, our California Thanksgiving dinner outside, the December Nights festival in Balboa Park, the next phase in our renovation.... What can I say? We've been swept up in daily life.

Since I last wrote, we've discovered some more misconceptions about San Diego living:

1) It is not 70 degrees here all year round.

Let's stop there.

So, as the temperatures have dipped into the upper 40's at night, we've been tempted to turn on the furnace, but we were trying hard to hold out (never mind the fact that we don't know how to light the pilot anyway). To our delight, there's cause to burn fires in the fireplace. We wear sweaters indoors. Geoff started calling me the Ninja Sleeper because I've been going to bed in a snug black long-sleeved shirt and black leggings. Mishka is summoned as a bed partner for her heat-generating capabilities. Every morning we all awake to find ourselves huddled together in one tiny fraction of our Cal King bed, making a triple spoon with Mishka as the smallest spoon inside. In this place where the usual sun and mild temperatures make it hard to accept the changing seasons and the shortening of the days, it is somehow comforting to us East Coasters that winter has set in (sort of). At least we see the signs....

A few weekends ago, I took Mishka hiking in Lake Laguna with Anni and Gustav and Ifat (another friend from the lab), and, miraculously, the whole place was covered in a thin layer of snow!! Mishka hadn't seen snow in years, since global warming or bad luck had denied Winston-Salem any snowfall. She ate chunks of it greedily and ran around like a drunken banshee. Best of all, we made a tiny snowman, and Mishka sat patiently for their portrait together. I think they both look wistful, don't you?