Christmas

Today I am finally feeling almost normal. I have been very sick for over two weeks and they were the most fantastic two weeks I've had in a long time. What a lousy time to be getting sick. I can't imagine how I could possibly talk about the last two weeks in a single post so I will just dive in and get started. This could take a while to complete.

Jackie planned the A Q Leavitt family reunion this time and it was held in her home state of Idaho. I wasn't exactly thrilled about leaving San Diego and going to Idaho in the middle of the winter but she enticed us with the promise of snow mobiles, sledding and hot tubs. While I'm not a fan of snow, it is really cool to sit in a hot tube with snow falling on your head.

Since Lisa can't possibly relax when there is a big event (like Christmas) coming up she was very stressed worrying about everything leading up to Christmas and sure enough, when the big day arrived she was very sick. It was our families off year meaning that the kids all went to their in-laws for Christmas so with Alex the only unmarried child left in our family Christmas this year was just Lisa, myself and Alex.

With Lisa falling ill Alex and I decided that we'd better step up and with the exception of the Turkey we pretty much took care of Christmas dinner. Christmas was  very quiet. We all slept in, had our presents all open within an hour and were playing with our presents right after that. Let's see if I can remember everything I got. The coolest present was a Star Trek Catan game. How cool is that? One of my favorite games in a Star Trek version. I got a Jack Reacher novel, a new Star Ship tree ornament. a first aid kit, some Star Wars mugs and some genealogy books. A good Christmas.

We did have one dilemma going away for Christmas. Sheba had quit eating and was starting to hide under beds. Our Sheba is eighteen years old and I'm told that in human years she would be in her 90's. When any living creature quits eating that is a pretty sure sign that they are about to die. I told our friend Desire who was feeding our pets that if Sheba died while we were gone to just through her in the garage until we got home. I didn't want her to go into the garbage because she deserves a proper burial but I didn't want the house to stink either. That kind of freaked Desire out. Lisa took a more practical approach and went and bought several cans of soft cat food. We've always fed Sheba dry cat food but Lisa figured maybe that was getting too hard for Sheba to eat and she thought the soft cat food would be easier for her. She was right. Sheba started eating like an animal. I guess she is an animal isn't she? To make a long story short, Sheba is in no immediate danger of dying. She is gaining weight and devours her cat food within a minute.

On Boxing Day I went into work for a few hours in the morning then came home, loaded up the car and headed north. Lisa was still ill so the plan was for Alex and I to drive straight through to his apartment in Salt Lake City. I did fine until St George but by then I was starting to get sick. I turned the wheel over to Alex and he was a trooper and drove the rest of the way. The problem is that I had great weather the whole way but no sooner were we out of St George when it started to snow. The further north we got the worse the weather was. I, of course, was dead to the world just minutes after I closed my door. Alex is a very good driver but he has no experience driving in a blizzard so he was a little bit freaked out. It didn't help either when the tire tracks he was following suddenly formed very chaotic lines all over the road finally ending up at a jack knifed truck with a double trailer in the ditch.

He wanted to stop but the road was so slippery that he was well past the truck by the time he could have stopped and he wasn't up to backing up on the freeway in a blizzard so Lisa called 911 to let them know about the poor trucker. It looked like he had barely wrecked.

Somewhere around the point of the the mountain Alex couldn't take it anymore and turned the wheel over to Lisa and she drove the last 45 minutes to Alex's apartment. We all slept late on the Thursday morning and then Alex and I went and got our hair cut. Lisa then went to the genealogy library, I took Alex's car in to get new tires on it and Alex went on a date. Some how I think I got the short end of that stick.

One of Lisa's life time goals has been to see the Christmas Lights on Temple Square so that evening we saw them. They really were quite spectacular. To make them even more "Christmasy" It started snowing quite heavily while we were there. It was bitterly cold but very beautiful. Lisa loves nativities and even collects them so she was quite excited to learn that they had a nativity section in the church museum. They were pretty nice. I think our favorite was a nativity made in Chile by carving the end of a match stick. It was very impressive.

We then went back to Alex's place and went to bed.

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Pigs injure more humans than any other animal.

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