Louise and James' wedding was a wonderful celebration. A happy time.
The wedding was Friday. On Saturday, we (Anne, Ack, Erin and Alana) visited the entertaining
giant statue place in Southampton and then hiked -- well, walked -- along the boardwalk at Smith Point Park on Fire Island. We then spent Saturday evening and Sunday with Eileen and Danny's family before we all returned home. Erin flew back to Indiana - Alana took the train to DC.
Anne and I spent a long day flying back to Wisconsin before getting home at 2 am Monday. We survived a three-hour delay at LaGuardia pretty happily last night by watching a DVD we'd brought -- "The Lives of Others," a really interesting German film about the invasive surveillance East Germany did on its citizens before Glasnost. The bleakness of their lives made our waiting at the airport look pretty good!
Anne here - the swans are gone but about a dozen mergansers are here on their migration through. All three types are swimming and diving together out there on the edge of the ice: common, hooded and red-breasted.
Merry Christmas! Erin and Alana came out the day after winter solstice and are here for a week. Here we are decorating the tree. Margaret, Meg, Reed and Grace are coming over for Christmas dinner. We are off to another snowy season, currently we have over 40 inches of snowfall. Anne and Alana went skiing this morning and Alana went back out for more. Ack stayed home and cleared snow off the roof in anticipation of near 40F weather on Dec 26 - high today is about 12F!
We spent Saturday -- the four of us along with Mark and Sisi's family (Max, Nila, Eli) -- in the museum of the California Academy of Sciences in beautiful Golden Gate Park. Nice exhibits on fish, Galapagos Islands and a white alligator. Mark then took us for a 'car tour' around the city which included some very colorful stairways. We had a very nice dinner at Plouf. Mike and Ev head back home on Sunday morning.
We are having fun in San Fran! We met up with Mike and Ev on Thursday night. Our first day touring, we had breakfast at the Ferry Building down by the piers, visited Alcatraz and toured there for a few hours, climbed up Telegraph Hill (see Ev and Anne panting) and saw the flock of wild parrots there during our climb, visited Coit Tower with their WPA murals, ate Italian in the North Beach neighborhood, read "Go Dog Go!" back in our hotel lobby, drank wine and met up with Mike's friends (Mark and SiSi) who now live here.
On Saturday, we drove over to Chicago to see Tommy Sourlis and Sue Eleuterio at the One of a Kind art show/sale at Merchandise Mart. Tom makes wonderful lamp shades and paintings out of glass. That's him in the foreground and some of the lamps shades hanging on the wall. Sue is a folklore buddy of Anne's.
Louise and James' wedding was a wonderful celebration. A happy time.