New Year and Warm Days

A freezing 82 today. Brrr! No, really, it was wonderful. The last few days have been just beautiful - blue skies, clear, warm. Did I mention it was warm? I've been sitting in the sun for a couple of hours at a time each day, quietly gloating about being here. Danielle said I'm like a lizard.

Speaking of temperatures (when do I not?) - I was thinking about Thanksgiving today. We were blessed with good weather (well, not snowing, at least), so we drove out to Michigan to spend Thanksgiving with my grandfather, aunts, uncles, and cousins. We had the traditional feast, we ALL somehow managed to fit around the table, and we gave our thanks to God. Because it was a nice day (60s), my Uncle Scott, the pastor, said we should open up the windows. We did. Everyone took a nice deep breath of fresh air. As we enjoyed our meal, Uncle Scott says, (to no one in particular), "Boy, how many Thanksgivings can you think of that have been nice enough to open the windows?" Like I could let that slide by... :) "Um, about 31," was my reply. He kept his response short and to-the-point: "Shut up."

I drove out to visit my sister-in-love, nieces, and grand nephews (yes, grand-nephews - I have 5 of them and one grand-niece). Just three boys there today, but boy, my niece has her hands full! Did I mention that my sister lives in Huntington Beach? She does. I do not. It's a fairly long drive (an hour), on interstate freeways. BUSY freeways. With stupid people on them. I do not miss those. (Freeways or stupid people.) I've become very spoiled by my "rush hour" traffic in Madison. Two-minute stops and slows in traffic are tolerable. Stop-and-start for an hour is not. I still hate driving when there's ice around, but I found that buying a house on a fairly well-traveled road has its advantages. It gets plowed and salted - often. That means that pretty much anywhere I need to go is all on salty busy streets. Yay.

In my travels today, among other sights, I saw a couple of sign twirlers. For those of you unfamiliar with those, they are people who stand on busy intersections with big signs pointing toward some random place they want you to visit. Usually, there is bouncing, dancing and twirling involved. Today there were two on this one corner - one was for a new home development, the other was for a Mexican restaurant, featuring 3-foot long burritos for $19.99. One of the men was Caucasian, one was Hispanic. The Hispanic man was NOT the one twirling the Mexican restaurant sign. No, the holder of THAT sign was your stereotypical "white-guys-can't-dance" kind of guy - complete with a whole entire fiesta dumped all over him - sombrero and all. Welcome to southern California.