Emily finished her first semester (trimester?) of school. She finished earlier than Caitlyn and Christian, packed up and headed down to Syracuse with her roommate. We were a little worried about her driving back down on her own as the snow storms picked up right as she was getting ready to leave. We sent her some snow chains as an early Christmas present in case she needed it. She spent a couple of nights in Syracuse and then headed down to the St. George area of Utah where her cousin currently lives with his new wife.
Meanwhile, Caitlyn finished school Thursday afternoon and we packed a truck load of junk to donate/unload at Deseret Industries. She's been living with boxes piled up of all the extra stuff, out-grown clothes, books and toys that are no longer used since Emily left.
Christian finished school on Friday. It has been super stressful for him since over half of his students were failing. He managed to badger/cajole some of them into doing some work and got many of them to get passing grades; only a third of his students ended up still failing. It still sounds like a lot but considering how many more students in other classes actually failed, he did pretty good.
Early Saturday, Christian and I headed to St. George to meet Emily. We ended up asking Caitlyn to stay back to bring in packages that were en-route. We got into St. George pretty early. Emily said that her cousin went in to do some work that morning as he wasn't expecting us until noon.
We decided to take a detour to Hurricane, UT to Matt's Off-Road Recovery and see if we can meet Matt and pick up some gear. His shop was actually closed but his truck was out front. We took some pictures like a couple of kids. Some other fans of his from California dropped by just after we did. As we were about to head out, Matt came up front to see what his dogs were barking about and we were able get him to sell us some gear and chat a while. Christian got an old Windor Towing hat and we picked up a t-shirt for Caitlyn as a consolation prize for leaving her behind.
We were pretty excited as he is so genuinely nice. Caitlyn made us give her all the details when we got home.
Afterwards, we made it to Austin's house but found out all the kids took off for a bit of sight seeing. We were going to meet up with the kids but we ended up chatting with Natalie's mom for quite a while. They ended up coming back to meet us at the house. We had met Natalie's parents at the wedding but never really spoke to them. They seem like really good people. We chatted together for a while longer and went to take Austin and Natalie out to lunch with us.
We did get some good news and Natalie and Austin are actually expecting a baby! We are so excited for them. They also purchased some land near by and are working to build themselves their own home. They are actually currently living with Natalie's family while Natalie is going to school.
We stayed quite a bit longer than we had intended but it was a good visit. After we dropped them back off, we headed back to Riverside. Caitlyn heated up dinner for us and we had a late dinner back at home with the whole family!
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We had a day to relax a bit and Emily started to unpack a bit but by Monday morning, we were off again. We decided to visit with my sister at her new home in Pacifica. She had visited about a week and a half and convinced my mom to go back up with her so we decided to go visit for the holidays. I have not seen them since the beginning of the year...probably for Chinese New Year. My mom is going nuts shut up all by herself for so many months. My brother is super paranoid about the whole Covid thing so he has been dropping off groceries to her and stopping by to fix something here and there but that's about it. He actually even just dropped off Thanksgiving dinner to her and she ate by herself in her big house.
I have not tried to visit her since she seemed just about as paranoid as my brother but my sister said that she isn't really that bad. She occasionally freaks out when she watches too much news but my sister is usually able to calm her down. I think after so many months by herself, she got sick of it and took the chance to socialize. She seemed much happier with family around again and is even able to get better rest.
When we got to my sister's house, she was running errands and taking care of some things so we went for a walk on the beach.
It was really nice to be next to the ocean again. It wasn't very cold and the air was moist. I could have sat there listening to the ocean for hours but the tide was coming in and we were expected back for dinner. Christian started some bread for the next day. Tommy prepared the prime rib he got for dinner for the next day. They ran out of rosemary, so we made a run for some more. Other than that, we just chat for a while before calling it a night.
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We had too many plans for the next day and we could not quite decide what we would do. We ended up driving into San Francisco with just my sister. Our first stop was to the Ferry Building to visit the Acme Bread Bakery. Tommy requested some focaccia bread for the evening so Christian used his starter from the night before and we were talking about bread and Emily had heard us talking about Acme bread in Berkley for so long and wanted to taste what all the hubbub was about. Wendy told us that they had a little place in San Francisco as well, which is why we ended up going into San Francisco.
Since the girls have never been to San Francisco, Wendy decided to take them through a quick tour. After picking up some bread and some of their starter, we headed over to Fisherman's Wharf and Pier 39 to see the sea lions.
Caitlyn wanted to stay longer but as the meter was running and we wanted to see some more things, we were off to see the Wave Organ.
The Wave Organ only works during high tide, so we did not get to hear anything. Afterwards, we headed into Chinatown to get some dim sum for lunch.
There was not much parking in Chinatown and there was a long line at the dim sum shop. It was pretty late by the time we hit all the shops we wanted to. We got a bit turned around and could not quite find the shop that had the lop cheong (Chinese sausage) we wanted to try. By the time we got back into the car, we were all starving and ended up eating most of it in the car. We managed to save a few things to bring back to the house!
Back at their house, we finished our late lunch. Christian finished his focaccia bread while the roast was in the oven. Dinner was really good. For dessert, Wendy decided to do a bit of an ice cream tasting with some of the weird stuff she had and some weird ideas the boys through together. It was interesting. One was unexpectedly good and the others were....not so much. We ended up with just some regular ice cream with a berry sauce I through together!
Afterwards, they pulled out the MaJong set and taught Emily and Caitlyn how to play. Christian helped Wendy sharpen her fancy Japanese knives and taught Wendy and the boys how to sharpen a knife using sharpening stones.
We went to bed pretty late. Christian stayed up even later to finish up the knives.
In the morning, we planned to head out again to get back in time to visit with Christian's dad. Tommy took Christian out to pick up some baked buns for breakfast. He bought enough to send us back with a bunch as well, so we did not need to stop by to pick up any food along the way.
It was a short visit, but it was really good to see my family again. We, of course, did not see my brother's family. We were all too afraid to tell him we were up there visiting.
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The morning after we returned, we prepared for another feast, this time for Terry and his wife, Jackie. We had a rib roast aging in our curing chamber for about a week before we took off to S.F. It was Christmas Eve and Marian decided not to join us this year. Apparently she'd been sick with the flu or something and a bunch of people at her work had been testing positive for Covid so she did not come.
This whole year has been increasingly out of whack, so all the changes did not phase me that much. We did not get together for Thanksgiving and we did not take a family Christmas picture or send out cards. We got a bunch of new decorations that Christian's mom sent down from Oregon so I didn't even bother with the Christmas tree this year.
After Terry and Jackie left, we started opening presents that evening.
We kept back a few presents for the next morning, along with the stockings and some presents that Marian had left here over the summer. The only glitch was that Marian could not remember who most of the presents belonged to so we played musical presents as it was opened. Marian joined us via Zoom for most of that!
With all the Christmas festivities done, we prepared for our big winter trip to New Mexico. We were all packed up and ready to go but decided the evening before to double check the weather forecasts and maps for all the places we wanted to visit.
We found out that we would be pretty much running from a storm most of the way. On top of that, we found out that a lot of the places we picked out to visit were actually on Indian Reservation land again. We knew from our experience from the previous month that all of those places would be closed to visitors and didn't want to deal with that fiasco again. In the end, we decided that it just would not be worth the time and gas to drive two days to see only a few things that would be open to us.
And unfortunately because of the weather, we would not be able to change our destination very easily to anywhere else. We thought that we could salvage our time a little by just doing some small semi-local day trips but that turned out to be a disaster as well.
We tried twice to go up to the mountains to drive up in the snow but found that it was just too crowded. We didn't want to get stuck on the mountain roads with all these people who really had no right to be there. They did not know how to drive in the snow. They all picked up snow chains but did not know how to put them on, much less when to put them on. It was a nightmare. We tried to go during that first rain and then earlier in the morning the next day but ended up turning back both times.
On the third day, we decided to investigate a trail that went into the southern end of Death Valley. We figured that there would at least be less people out on the lesser known roads. There was still quite a few cars heading onto the main road into Death Valley. The road skimmed the edge of a military base so we were not sure that we could get through.
We did manage to get through but it ended at some communication tower. We did pass a few questionable people parked along side the road here and there and the only other people out in the area were some geologists.
As the sun went down, we did go out onto a more traveled road to get out as we wanted a faster way home. We stopped to heat up some dinner and headed home.
We gave up after that. Christian spent the rest of his time working in his shop and Emily spent her time looking for a job. I just bounced around between them and worked on trying to get Caitlyn to work on some of her projects.
