Christmas time

What does Christmas on Catalina mean? I think the word that best describes it is 'mud'.

Yes, we're into the rainy season, and with every couple inches of rain, a new mud texture is discovered. First, as the dust of summer is first moistened, it turns into an unbelievably sticky clay-like mud that cakes on to shoes until they are the size of dinner platters and weigh a (figurative) ton. Tires pick up the top inch of the road surface and fling it all about, tearing up the roads. Then as more rain falls, everything seems to liquify. Any slightly dirty surface (ie all surfaces) become covered with a slime-like mud that is very slippery. The roads (in unpredictable places) turn into 4-6 inches of muck making driving quite treacherous (since we're driving on the edge of a cliff). The kids who go to school in Avalon get the day off because the interior roads become impassable. You can see the muddy streams flowing down every crevice of every hill. They don't have gutters on the houses. Rain streams down windows and drenches you as soon as you open the door. Finally the rain stops, and the parched ground has a chance to drink in all remaining moisture. After about a day, there are no puddles to be found. The dirt is gelatinous with its retained water making walking treacherous. Soon it returns to the sticky clay consistency, and then a sunny day will bake it back into the hard soil from which next year's dust will be made. Ah, the circle of life...

"But what of the decorations?", I hear you ask. (I have good ears.) The Island Company (which runs the town of Two Harbors) organized a shipment of very nice trees to the island, however, most of our decorations (and all our tree ornaments) remain in storage on the mainland. We scrounged some decorations from friends and managed to make a pretty festive tree. The Things were so excited that they had to take some ornaments ('elements' as Thing 2 calls them) and re-decorate the tree. Not much in the way of exterior lights for us. Some houses have quite a few, but what with it being the rainy season and all, I'm worried about that whole mixing water and electricity thing. Sweetie made sugar cookies the other day, and we decorated them. Again, the Things had a blast. Some cookies you can just barely see beneath the avalanche of sprinkles atop them.

So it's looking like it will be a Merry Christmas. We will be on the island for the Big Day, then travel to the east coast for New Year's (and to complete the sale of our house) (knock wood).

So Merry Christmas to all of you out there (unless you're a Happy Hannukkah or Sensational Solstice type of person) and Happy New Year, too.

Travels

We had a very nice visit with extended family over Thanksgiving down in Escandido. Let me tell you how NOT to get there the day before Thanksgiving. Do NOT take the 91 to 15. This is a big mistake. At one point I saw a sign saying 'Cororna 15mi' and I thought to myself "Gee, at this speed we'll be to Corona in two hours!". I optimistically/naively think that the 5 will be a much better choice next year.

We eventually got where we were going. We stayed in a hotel that had a heated outdoor pool. The Things had to go swimming, naturally. The air temperature was less than 60, but we went swimming, darnit. Brrrrr! Good thing there was a hot tub to warm up in before we went back to the room. The next morning, we had to go swimming again. This served two purposes: it got the Things to stop asking when we were going swimming, and it tired them out so they wouldn't be too bouncy with the excitement of the day. Thing 2 actually had to take a nap in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner. We were dining with friends of my Uncle and Aunt. They were very nice and served an excellent dinner. There neighborhood was close to where the fires were in October, so they had some interesting and hair-raising stories to tell.

Friday we had planned to do something fun like the Wild Animal Park or Legoland, but everyone was tired and the weather wasn't that nice, so we decided to drive back to LA and go to the Natural History Museum. That was really cool. They have great diorama's displaying their large mammals and the Treasures from the Vault exhibit was great. Saturday was errands and a movie, and then it was back to the island.

A week later, Sweetie and I were back to the mainland. We had to take a ferry from Avalon, so the first part of the trip was a drive across the island. The ferry ride over was smooth as glass, which should have alerted up to bad things ahead. The next day it rained (in LA!), which made our drive downtown that much more interesting (it's sort of like when it snows in North Carolina). We were supposed to go back to the island Friday night, but decided to wait until Saturday. This turned out to be a mistake. As the ferry left the dock, the captain said something about "it's kind of bumpy out there today". And it was. I would say the swells were around 6-8 feet. The boat would hit them and the spray would go 20-30 feet in the air. At one point I think the boat went airborne. Many passengers were getting seasick. I just closed my eyes and thought about work. We finally got to Avalon. I got off there; Sweetie was going to take the ferry over to Two Harbors. So I get to the truck to discover that Sweetie still had the keys! Fortunately, some friends of ours needed groceries, so there were willing to drive the keys across the island to me, otherwise I'm not sure what I would've done. Finally, I got home. It was an exhausting couple of days. The Things were very happy to see us.

Next post: The Christmas Season