a fine monday

Started out the morning showing houses, beautiful sunny morning.  By the time I was driving home, taking the familiar old route I used to drive home from college twenty years ago, was getting warm.  The city is different now with all the trees bare, but the buildings were shiny in the sun.

I took this picture of little water ski Santa before I went inside.

Kari went with me to Costco, and then I went to the bank, and then more shopping, and the shopping is far from over, but it is a solid start.

Kari and Julia are decorating the upstairs hallway for Christmas, and Mondays don't come any finer.

Love, Val

getting ready for christmas

Big Santa is back.

And Little Santa.  There's also water skiing Santa, but he's hard to see in the dark.

Here's the cardboard Santa Jay's mom gave us back in the early 80s.

 Candle lights are all set.

I thought some little girls might like to help with the tree, and they did for about three minutes. They were way more interested in Mario Baseball and playing Barbie with Aunt Julia.

I ordered a Christmas shower curtain, strange enough, but also fun.  The bathroom is so small and the shower curtain is so huge it was hard to get a picture.

And we made a big pot of  Winter Night Turkey soup, and there was so much I sent a container over to the neighbors too.   They said they liked it.

It's from a cookbook my parents gave me for Christmas back in 1987.  When I make it for us I use 8 cups of water, 8 bouillon cubes, more than 8 cups of milk, and increase the other ingredients, though I don't measure those.

Anyway, onward to Christmas!

Love, Val

thanksgiving, 2021

Preparations take time, but we've done this before so we have a system.

 Alicia's pictures:

Kirsten's pictures:

The end of the evening:

Beautiful day--Happy Thanksgiving, 

Love, Val

youth basketball

On Monday we went to a game, and it was so much fun.

Same as always, kid sports.

They played a great game.

And the siblings were more interested in running around with their friends and the concession stand than anything else.

Nice how not much changes.

Love you all, Grandma and Grandpa

the fire

This is what happened during the night.  Maria's boyfriend Dalton's house burned up.

She sold her house a few months ago and they bought another house together and have moved there, so this house was empty, being prepared to go on the market and sold this winter.

Except this now:

The neighbor was in a bit of a panic, calling them at 3 am thinking they might be in there. When he heard they'd moved to another house and were getting this one ready to sell--nobody is in the house, he was so relieved.

When they got there at about 4 am, Maria said she didn't realize how HOT a house fire is.  It was melting vinyl on the garage, 30 feet away.

So this an interesting and complicating turn of things, but it'll get sorted out.  Nobody was hurt, not a scratch.

Life.

Love you all, MOM aka Val

sunset last night

These November days, early darkness, windy, overcast, just like always.

The clouds are glorious.

Love, Val
 

past the middle of november

Took some pictures, trying to get used to this old camera since the one I usually use got lost at the cabin a few weeks ago.

This camera takes perfectly fine pictures, but the computer saves them in an odd way, which I have to figure out and get used to.

Last weekend, Jay stuffed and cooked a turkey for Thanksgiving.  We'll cook another one Thanksgiving morning too, but the oven is too small to do everything in one day.

And it snowed.   Not too much, but there you go.

And these pictures I accidentally selected from the file while I was working on this, but I'm leaving them because of the cute people involved.

Love you guys, MOM, aka  Grandma

volleyball banquet

It was good to have a volleyball season this year, and fun to celebrate at the end.

So much love, Mom