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Poppy's big exictment for the month was finding a special stick on our walk through conservation land. Took a while for Dave to realize the stick had a hoof.
the annual cleaning of the roof before the winter snows that didn't come
The real fun was post-Thanksgiving, when Will, Carley and Brie visited ... with their dogs. And, thrown in for good measure, just before Thanksgiving we ripped out the old, dog-urine-saturated carpets and replaced them with this spiffy new high end simulated wood laminate that actually looked much better than we expected.
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 rooster dog |
 new floors |
In November, Alison did a long girls' weekend in Phoenix/Scottsdale with her close friends Gaelle and Elizabeth. They saw Elizabeth's daughter Taylor and had a wonderful time touring the Wrigley Mansion and the Phoenix Art Museum. They hiked, shopped, and checked out the Arizona Biltmore (an iconic resort that opened in 1928) and the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, plus went to an evening festival along the canal in Scottsdale. All in all, it was a fun and relaxing getaway.
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We attended Eli and Liz's wedding along with Noah (Eli and Noah have known each other since 2nd year of preschool). It was held in the Edward M. Kennedy Institute, which features a full scale replica of the United States Senate Chamber (where the wedding was held). Special guest included an Irish Wolfhound that was bigger than Eli.
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 Masks were required Loved the bow tie -> |
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We celebrated Paul's birthday at the house. Two great horned owls stole the show, however, with a mating ritual that was hard to ignore. The female would hoot. The male would make some kind of noise like a cat being drowned while a coyote was latched onto it's tail. Hoot. Screech. Hoot. Screech. After a few minutes, suddenly the female's hoot became softer and she turned around and waved her tail feathers in the male's direction. The male cooed a few times and they flew off together. All in all, a much better alternative to tinder.
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Then it was time to pull out the holiday decorations and set up the Christmas tree. We were heading to Cali for the holidays, but it's still fun to make the house festive, and Dave's happy place has always been lighting up the Dicken's Christmas village every night.
We left for Cali December 17th. We'd rented a four and a half bedroom Ski condo in Mammoth Lakes (the loft counted as a half bedroom) and all the kids and significant others (Brie's husband Aidan and Will's girlfriend Carley) joined us for four days at Mammoth Lakes. We flew into LA, renting a Ford Expedition, and did the five hour drive to Mammoth. Brie and Aidan drove up with Noah in his car.
We had incredibly good luck with the weather. Mammoth had almost no snow until a few days before we got there, when a winter storm dropped five feet of snow on the mountain. And then leaving we were literally watching a new storm sweep over the mountains, chasing us out of the Sierra Nevada's, a storm that dropped something like 10 feet of snow over four days and shut down most of the mountain (and the town).
 Flying business class has it's perks |
 Ford Expedition ... packed to the gills |
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The skiing was fabulous, with temperatures right around 32, cold enough to keep things from getting slushy, warm enough that you didn't need anything other than a winter coat. The views were stunning, the lines reasonably short, and life was good.
Day two, Noah and Dave decided to recreate something Noah's dad Jeff and Dave did every time they skied at Mammoth three decades earlier, go off the top of the mountain on "Dave's Run." Every run off the top of Mammoth general involves a cornice (a vertical drop of four to ten feet), followed by something resembling a snow cliff, only steeper and with moguls.
That was a good choice, as it turned out, because it taught Dave a valuable life lesson about acting half your age. He made it over the cornice but lost his balance going around the first mogul. Falling at the top of something that steep doesn't end with the fall, it ends with sliding down a thousand vertical feet of bumpy snow. Dave's skies were set for "advanced," meaning they are supposed to come off just before your leg does, which more or less worked as Dave only lost one ski during the tumble, pulling a muscle badly enough that it swelled to the size of an avocado in the process.
Dave managed to ski down the rest of the mountain, albeit with a certain amount of agonizing pain, but that was it for him for the rest of the trip.
Regardless, everyone had a great time, with enough overlap in skill levels (from beginner to advanced, or in Dave's case, delusions of advanced) that everyone could have a good time in smaller groups.
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The evenings were fun as well, sometimes eating out, sometimes dining in the condo. We exchanged presents, did jigsaw puzzles, played board games, chatted, drank, and made merry.
The journey home went smoothly, with the spectacular scenery enhanced by the mega-storm blowing in over the mountains.
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We dropped Will and Carley off at the Bishop Airport on the way back; Will had holiday support duties over Christmas and Carley was going to her sister's in Portland, so they were skipping the LA Christmas part of the trip. "Airport" might be a stretch, as we drove past it twice looking for the "terminal," finally parking on a dirt lot and wandering around until we realized it was the building with the "Thai Thai gourmet Thai restaurant" sign on it. Turned out that Bishop Airport had become an official airport FOUR DAYS EARLIER.
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We spent the next few days in LA, staying with Maddy (who is living with housemate Brenna in Alison's house in Pasadena), meeting up with Brie and Aidan (who were staying with Noah, as Maddy has two cats and Aidan is allergic to them). LA still reins supreme for having the best variety of individually owned, inexpensive boutique restaurants, and we went to one of Noah's favorite Thai places near his house, where we had a few "Thai hot" dishes that made Dave cry.
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Christmas day, we met up with Anne, Nick and Lisa at Lisa's house. We all went out to dinner at the W hotel restaurant ... only to find out that it was closed because they didn't have enough staff to wait tables because of Covid. But we could get bar food and we took over a corner of the lobby and had a great time anyway.
