New Years Eve

Monday, January 28, 2025

On New Years Eve, Kira and her family and Brandon and his family decided to get some family pictures done. Kira’s bunch headed out in the morning and Brandon and his bunch headed out in the early afternoon. They both went to Balboa Park. I’ll try and remember to share those pictures once I have them. While in picture mode, Lisa and I decided to get a picture of us with all the grandkids who happened to be there.

Coincidentally, we were just at Kira’s house, and saw a picture of Lisa and I with all our grandkids back in 2014 (or somewhere around that time). At that time Kira and Brandon were the only ones who had grandkids. It is interesting to see the difference between a picture of mom and I with Kira and Brandons kids then and ten years later.

In the evening we played games and partied. We also danced as you can see in the picture above. Well, some of us danced.

Some of our activities were dancing, a ring toss, tossing rings onto the reindeer antlers,

catching donuts on a string

and then we cheered in the New Year.

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there are more possible moves in a game of chess than their are atoms in the universe

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Beach Day

Thursday, January 23, 2025

Sunday, Dec 29, was just a normal church day. Well, I guess it wasn’t normal for mom, she gave a talk. It was my month to conduct so I am the one who asked her to talk. She wasn’t exactly thrilled and as we got into the very busy time with the kids who were home, she was even less happy, but, she gave an amazing talk and had so many compliments on it that in the end I think she was glad she did it.

It was even more special since two of her kids and several grandkids were there to hear her.

Monday was beach day. We went to the Del Maar beach because they have those beach chairs with big balloon tires for Evan.

Most of us had a ton of fun. The weather was beautiful and winds were calm but the water was VERY cold.

The kids loved playing in the sand.

The adults loved the sun.

A few of the brave (or foolish) headed into the water.

Once we were numb, though, the temperature of the water could be ignored.

The waves were perfect for body boarding. A bunch of us braved the cold water and had a ton of fun in the waves.

Peter and Many joined up with us.

Poor Alley has had stomach pains since she arrived in San Diego. At the beach the pains got so bad that she couldn’t ignore them anymore. She headed off to the VA hospital for some help.

As it turned out, all they wanted to do was give her some pain killers. Ally forced them to do more testing, and finally, the doctor diagnosed her with some random unrelated problem. I don’t remember what.

In the end she had the test results sent to her VA office in Texas and then she joined us at home. The Texas office ended up giving her a call and told her that she had gall stones and she should never been released from the hospital. From here it gets very complicated because in the end the VA hospital in Texas hasn’t done anything either so I don’t really know what is going on.

On our way home we stopped at an ice cream place so we could be even colder than we already were. 

Once we got the kids settled in, the adults headed out for dinner at a very swanky restaurant.

Other than missing Alley at the beach, it was a great day.

--------------------trivia--------------------

Piranha are actually timid fish. The chance of a human being killed by piranha's are infintisimally small.

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