Happy New Year

Today is January 2, 2011 and it is my mom's 92nd birthday. Today, more than any other day, I wanted to be with mom. The brothers (mostly their wives Anita and Monica I think) threw a party for her and many of the family members showed up to celebrate the day. Monica forwarded this picture to me; Anita made the cake. Isn't mom a beautiful lady! Happy Birthday Mom!

New Year's Eve day, we were suppose to be at the airport at noon to pick Suz up... Well, she lives in Moorhead, Minnesota and they had a two day blizzard and she never even made it to the airport. You may have seen TV coverage of the 100 car pileup on highway 94 just outside of Fargo; thank heavens Suz was safe at home... but we were very bummed that our reunion in Palm Springs wasn't going to happen.

Indian Canyon is one of the places we were going to visit with Suz so the four of us went anyway. New Year's Eve day was a beautiful day to hike in Andreas Canyon. The hiking trail runs along a creek, rapidly flowing due to the recent rains.

And it has mountains on the other side (duh, it is a canyon).

One thing I have found to be true about shooting pictures in the Palm Springs area. It is almost impossible to take a picture in which a "jet stream" is not evident.

This canyon area has some of the most amazing rocks - check out this one with an X of quartz right through it.

And then of course there are the creatures...

It was just the kind of place where you wanted to stop and look around...

It was good exercise and good scenery.

Then the sun started to go down on 2010 and it was time to move the festivities indoor. But first, we needed to make a stop to pick up some fruit. When you are in Indio, the place to go is the parking lot of the government center... no, there isn't a farmer's market there, there are trees there and the public is welcome to pick the fruit. We harvested what we could from the ground and then brought in the truck...

to pick those big ones that were up a ways.

After selecting a dozen or so lemons, it was time to head back to the park. (Today I squeezed all the lemons and froze the juice to use for bars and pie later - mom would be proud.)

For our evening entertainment we decided to do snacks, martinis (virgin for 3 and orange vodka for me) and a gaming marathon. There are four games that we often play; Sequence, Greed, Rumikube and Mexican Train. So for the marathon we decided to play each game four times and determine who was the overall winner for all the games all evening.

There was even a prize (that I had carefully hidden in my pocket before the games began) for that superior games person. All three, but me, had a point and we were heading into my least favorite game - Greed. Somehow I just do not have the knack to shake the dice and reach 10,000 but the lucky ones were popping for me and I won. So each of us had one point and then David won at Mexican Train, will wonders never cease. So, yes, he was declared the overall greatest game player for 2010. I prepared to present the prize, but given the martinis and the zippers on my pocket, I had a bit of a problem. (So did the photographer judging from the blurry picture)

Eventually, IT was retrieved and David seemed apprehensive about accepting the award from me.
After a complete giggle fest on my part,


David finally accepted his "Gold Award"

and beamed with pride at his accomplishment.

New Year's Eve was great fun. Hope your new year is off to the good start. Tomorrow we move to Yuma, Arizona for a couple of weeks. News from there next week.