This is the first year that Vince believes in Santa. He asked technical questions – Santa’s flight times, geometry of landing on roofs and getting into houses without chimneys. We explained that Santa is helped along the way by a little bit of magic.
This Christmas was magical. All four of Vince and Edda’s grandparents were here together. I’m lucky that our families can spend time together in this way.
Hooray!
Yesterday, we went to Seth and Christine’s house for a pre-Christmas party.
From us to you!
Well, Bob, Katherine, and Emy came by today, so now the house is full as both sets of grandparents are here, an uncle, an aunt. Cool beans. Today we went off to the library for like 10 minutes. Doris went out to eat with a high school friend. Any suggestions on where she can meet a guy in a non sports arena? I suggested dancing.
Also, to my horror, I found out on the way home, that my elementary school has bee razed. Sniff Sniff. College Gardens is no more… 🙁
Here’s some pics of our trip to the library!
Last evening, all the Lees (Noel, Rena, Doris, Donald & Jeremy, Vincent & Edda) were togther for dinner. It has been a long, long time that such occasion happened. Rena cooked some “Chia Chun Fun” – Family style cooking. The food was good and all the Lees were together. Really added the flavor in the food.
Hey guys, Edda and I are the closing act of a holiday concert!
We haven’t celebrated Christmas in Maryland for many years.
Jeremy and the kids picked me up in NYC. We stopped off at Central Park for hot dogs and playing time.
Donald was at the house already.
We put up our Christmas tree. It is decorated with the last string of lights and the last box of ornaments that we could find at Target.
Here is our computer cluster. We have 4 laptops crowded right at the front door. I will leave it up to you to figure out why.
I spent 24 hours in NYC without the kids! I walked all around and smiled at strangers. It’s odd since I don’t enjoy talking to them. I did a Singapore vs NYC smile back survey. The smile back % is about the same – 15%. I held one person’s gaze too long and he tried to ask me out. Yikes.
I lunched with my friend Karin. She is one week away from giving birth. We ate Korean food and talked until 3 pm. I rarely talk to a friend for hours. Karin teaches at West Point and is planning to go back to teaching on January 4th!
Karen, my college roommate, lives on the southern tip of Manhattan at Battery Park City. She is the COO of Broadway Technologies – she’s just started so she’s not on the website yet. She is so insanely successful at her work, it’s not even funny – but she is very modest about it claiming luck mostly – but I know her hard work and her savvy was not a small part of her success. The Statue of Liberty stands outside her apartment and we talked until I was too sleepy to keep my eyes open.
I had a wonderful day.
We left Austin on Monday morning, Vince cried on the way to the airport because he just didn’t want to leave. He had such a great time, it was really hard to go back to NY. On the plane back from Austin, poor Vince got airsick. Orange puke was all over the seat and the foot area. I apologized to the stewards, I cleaned up most of the vomit, but there was still stuff left on the floor. Of course, right after Vince puked, he felt much, much better. We limped home – it was a full day of travel – we got home about 9 pm.
Jeremy and I do travel quite a bit. This year, with Edda’s diagnosis, I felt like we cut back on a lot of travel, but Jeremy reminded me that we still had 2 trips from Singapore to the US. While in the US, we traveled between upstate NY and Washington DC by car both times. In the spring trip, we went to Puerto Rico and this trip we went to Austin, TX. I guess we have traveled less while living in Singapore – we’ve only wandered off the island once – to Indonesia. Edda really has been loving this trip – sometimes I take her to new places in Singapore, she freaks out and needs a lot of reassurance from us to make her calm again, but this trip, she has been all smiles and contentment. Vince has been a little more unsettled, more concerned about where we are going and when we are going home. He loves being with family, but this whole moving around is getting to him.
Go for it Donald!