I'm Back!

Santa lay in a flaccid lump this morning.

He was posted on the roof of the community center of my mother's mobile home park and would inflate and deflate seemingly at whim. It was pretty pathetic.

But I was happy anyway. I had received a text message from Walt that there was SUCCESS with the repair on our internet connection. Apparently there was a short in the telephone line outside the house (all the clean-up and locking up of the dogs turned out to be unnecessary). My first clue should have been the horrendous static we've been having on the line. But AT&T doesn't send repair people to repair something so simple as never being able to hear anybody on the other end of the line. What they do is give you a long list of things you have to do to fix it yourself.

Well, it was unfixable. So we've been putting up with the horrendous static...and it turns out that it was AT&T's fault. There still needs to be some digging up of the sidewalk to completely fix it, but that was the job of a different department, so I don't know when that will happen, but the man thing is that the internet is back. Yippee.

Cousins Day was the usual bunch of fun. To start with was Peach's new hair do

There was a little girl who had a little curl right in the middle of her forehead.

Only there were actually three curls in the middle of her forehead. She looks very cute, but it takes some getting used to.

(There were also comments made about the similarity to Mrs. Claus!)

We arrived at my mother's around 11 in the morning. She kept telling us that we were going to have to "work for your lunch." She didn't tell us what we were going to have to do, but when the time came for lunch, it was obvious:

Yummy Dungeness crab for our salad. The others cleaned a lot of crab legs and mixed the meat with lettuce, tomatoes, and avocado. I ate my crab separate from the salad I made. Either way it was delicious.

Then started the card games. Lessee. My mother won twice, Peach won twice and I won once. While Kathy took a nap, Peach, my mother and I played canasta, which my mother won (2 games). Actually, usually she slaughters us at canasta and the games were fairly even in score so nobody really had to feel overwhelmed. It was fun.

We get worse and worse in "65," though, never remembering whose turn it is to deal, what card is wild, who has the Boob, etc. But we laugh a lot and that is the best part, even though I outdid myself in doing klutzy things--I spilled water on Peach twice, for starters

We played two games this morning before heading home and have made plans for a 3-day Cousins day next month, so we can visit the land where my mother's family was living when she was born. Many years ago we went and visited the old house, but it has been torn down now and Peach wants to remember where it used to stand.

So now I'm going to post this and then get caught up on all the e-mail that accumulated during the Great Internet Blackout!