Month: December 2015

We got everyone out of the house today and into nature!  We went to Lake Needwood, which is now infested with toxic blue-green algae, so no one touched the water.  Vince was grumpy to start off with, but warmed up and was happy by the end of the hike.  He perked up mainly because he was excited that we get Philly cheesesteaks for lunch.  Keyla had visited Philly last weekend, but failed to try a cheesesteak there, so we needed to hunt one down for her.

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We tried this place in Bethesda that advertised a “Mis-steak” – a gargantuan Philly cheesesteak, big enough for four.  Edda enjoyed her Fanta.

We were a bit underwhelmed by the “Mis-steak”, we probably should have ordered 4 individual cheese steaks.  But, we ate it all.

Vickey is turning 29 (again) and she wanted to go to saucy Rockville Chinese restaurant.  We went to Michael’s Noodles (near the now defunct Blockbuster where I spent a lot of time as a 16 year old).  I hope it was saucy enough.  We did spend more time talking than looking at our phones even though the photo above captured only our screen time.

Saucy!!

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Jeremy has been spending some time replacing hard-to-reach light bulbs.  The newly installed LEDs have been flickering in the ceiling fans and just not working at all in our garage door openers.   Jeremy’s not satisfied. We argued last night about light bulbs. Light bulbs!  How can we think (at the same time) that we are both trying to do what the other person wants and (at the same time) think that neither of us told the other one what to do?

We are decluttering like fiends.  Took the door off the hinges to get this out of the master bedroom.

Someone gave me Belgium chocolates for Christmas – like actually bought in Belgium and carried over on an airplane.  I brought them to Sunday night dinner where there were enough people to demolish the whole box.

Edda got a beautiful cupcake hat.  I’m hoping that I can borrow it sometime.  This photo doesn’t do it justice.

Guests were in from London.  Gene is recovering well from back surgery (and being non-compliant with his walker).

Jeremy loves his electronics and the wiring that goes with it.  He likes to keep a lot of it “just in case”.  But maybe we don’t need the chargers from 2007?  He spent the morning sorting through his beloved wire box and giving me old cell phones to take to e-recycling.

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Our fabulous friend Ruth from LA came to visit us.  She’s going to take me to see the LA athletic club the next time I’m in the vicinity.  She goes swimming there everyday and flirts with the men there.

Christmas Eve Day,  I went out with Vickey, Karuna and Bert to celebrate Karuna’s birthday.  Chinese food!  And Sweet Frog yogurt (where the Frog stands for Fully Rely On God), but we just rely on sugar.

Karuna is studying acupuncture.  We talked about qi and how it should always be in balance.  I was hoping for some tips, but she said that it was part of next semester’s curriculum.  I’ll just have to wait.

Then we played a very competitive game of hungry hippos.  If you look carefully, you’ll see that Karuna and I both were wearing wear toe socks.

Christmas eve, all the stocking were hung by the chimney with care.

Elf: The four food groups: candy, candy canes, candy corn, syrup.

Christmas morning:  A smile!

Things for feet:

Orange things:

Family for dinner:

Merry Christmas!  From us to you.  I hope all your Christmas wishes come true.

I logged into work this morning and I couldn’t get any of the applications to load.  Called the help desk, there was a recorded message saying that there was a power outage at main campus and they were working on it.  I went to run some errands thinking that it’d be up in a couple of hours.  I came back to my desk and found out the following:

A major power outage at USPTO headquarters occurred last night resulting in damaged equipment that required the subsequent shutdown of many of our online and IT systems. This includes our filing, searching, and payment systems, as well as the systems our examiners across the country use. We are working diligently to assess the operational impact on all our systems and to determine how soon they can be safely brought back into service. Status updates will be issued on our systems alert page (www.uspto.gov/blog/ebiz/) as they become available, as well as on our Facebook (www.facebook.com/uspto.gov) and Twitter (www.twitter.com/uspto) accounts.

 They don’t expect any of the systems to be back up until after Christmas, the patent office has basically ground to a halt. I think a lot of people at the patent office are working furiously to get everything back on line, but those people don’t include me.  I’m officially off until after Christmas.  There isn’t even a possibility of working, which is a good thing.  No work, no school, no travel, no one extra staying in the house for the holidays.  A real break.

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We saw How the Grinch Stole Christmas (the old one).  There was no room for me on the couch!