Cultivation

Never has the topic of farm subsidies for cultivation produced such gales of laughter, I'm certain! But that's how things were the past couple of days--just silly.

This was my get together with some of the women from the old Women's Health days--one doctor, two nurse practitioners, a midwife, the office manager who hired me, and me. I've seen some of them within the past couple of years, but we haven't been together like this in a very long time. We were missing the 3 nurses, who weren't able to join us, but the group of us who got together on Saturday at Walt's mother's condo at Lake Tahoe made up for the ones who were missing.

First of all, 20 minutes after we arrived, I looked in the heretofore empty refrigerator and found it so full I don't know how we managed to fit even more food in it when Lynne arrived several hours later! I lost count of how many bottles of wine there were for the seven of us (two left after dinner and the rest of us stayed overnight). And countless things to eat from pistachios from Ikeda's, lots of fresh fruit, crackers, cheese, and other things.

But first there were the squeals and hugs of seeing each other again and getting caught up on who is doing what and more importantly how our children had all grown since we last compared notes.

While Lynn made enough tacos to serve a small army for dinner...

...the rest of us were comparing apps for our iPhones and iTouch.

Lynn, who thought my zippo lighter for my iTouch was about the coolest thing ever, ended up downloading the app for herself.

When Lynne arrived from Reno, we had to take group photos.

After dinner, Lynn and Lisa left to return home and the rest of us settled in for the night. There was talk of going to the hot tub or playing a game of some sort, but we were all too stuffed from Lynn's great dinner to seriously consider moving off the couches.

In the morning we had breakfast and three walked down to the lake while RoseMarie and I settled the problems of the world.. Then we put out some of the leftovers to pick at for lunch. (It was a big eating couple of days!)

(I particularly liked the garlic mint flavored cheese!)

Then four of us started loading the car...

...while Mariana finished doing the vacuuming.

It was slow going down the mountain because everybody and his brother was driving back from the lake, but we laughed a lot and tried to figure out how to use the stop and go traffic and the highway construction barricades to allow some of us to relieve our bladders without causing a worse backup.

Now Walt, Lynn and I have had another round of Lynn's tacos and she has gone off to bed. Her visit is ending much too soon, as she is flying to So. California in the morning to visit her family before returning to Houston.

This two day trip was entirely too much fun and we will have to do it again, sooner than 5 years!