A Story of My Life Part 12: Christmas

I had a wonderful time over the Christmas holidays. I had relatives from New York City, Ohio and New Mexico come to visit and it was so great to see everyone, and wonderful of my people to make the trip in the dead of winter, to the frozen North. My two nieces (my deceased brother Jerry's children) Leslie and Jenia and my nephew Michael (also my eldest brother Jerry's child) came.

We had a terrific grand dinner at a very good Italian restaurant called Mario's. It was terrific. The cousins got to see each other who never meet under ordinary circumstances. The table was set with ivory and red, and it was so pretty that Jenia got a picture of it with her IPhone. I hope she remembers to email me the pics from the party. I'll post them if she remembers to send them, later on.

We spent some time together and got to play games and eat pistachios and talk up a storm! Mom's little apartment was packed with people for a couple of days.

Jenia and her man Jim come from New Mexico. They have a pistachio plantation nearby, over 200 acres of pistachio trees. So they had sent Mom a gift basket of pistachios earlier, for a Christmas gift, and everyone had fun digging into the pistachios; cracking them and eating the nut. Pistachio shells EVERYWHERE! I think it gave everyone something to do with our hands as we all chattered away, catching up with everyone.

Leslie and her two children, Libby and Hannah, came from Ohio. They set up a game which was kind of like Monopoly only a green version. You could buy a rain forest, and a waterfall for hydroelectric power, and got "carbon credits" and things like that. It was fun. I can't remember the name of the game and they took it with them, or I'd tell you! Like Monopoly, it seemed to go on forever, but hey--it kept the kids entertained. I just looked it up on the Net--it's called "NEW Earth-Opoly MONOPOLY Earth Go Eco Green Board Game". Earth-opoly. Soy ink, made from recycled cardboard, and all the game pieces are natural objects. Cool.

Michael and his wife, Yuki, had recently moved from Seattle to New York City, where Yuki is now a professor at NYC of Japanese literature. Michael, a classical guitarist who won a world contest in Greece, and has recorded some of the most excellent music I've ever heard, is looking around for work in New York. I'm sure there's lots of oppotunitites there--they are still settling in.

It was unsettling to hear that Michael's former music studio in Seattle was recently firebombed by an insane homeless person. The insane person had a grudge against Starbucks, and so firebombed the whole street of little businesses, among them Michael's former studio. It almost seems they will be safer in New York. Michael and Yuki both say New York City is cleaned up now and it's safe to walk. They live right in Manhattan (Washington Square) and have no problem with walking here and there, both day and night.

I ended up sick in bed for a week after the holidays. I'm not sure why. I think it might have been because I gave away my coat to someone who needed it more than I, and ended up scraping off my car to get some of my people to the train station with just a warm sweater and jeans to protect me from the ice and cold and snow.

I ended up with a bad cold. The cold and winter snow has set in for real, here in upstate New York. We've had temperatures in the teens for a couple of weeks now, and heaps of snow.

That's partly a reason and partly an excuse why I haven't kept up with my weekly hubs over the holidays. I've still enjoyed very much reading other people's work, and it gave me such a good occupation and amusement, in between blowing my nose! Thank you, my fellow hubbers, for making my sick time much more "bear"-able!

One of my New Year's resolutions was to resume the series of the stories of my life. This is a start. It reads a little flat, and I can tell I'm out of practice with writing, but it's a start.