| We flew to Chicago on December 4th and had dinner with Mari at a great Italian retaurant on Fulton called Follia near Paisley and Peter's old condo. It was great food and the owner kept coming over to tell us about it. They sent us glasses of prosecco and left us alone while we talked about Mari and Ed's parents. Mari told us how her mother and Ed's father had died, so so sad. We drove to Madison that night after dinner, but I worked on drawings for Mari's mother's recipes. She planned to hand out packets of her mother's favorites at the service on Saturday. |
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Here's the living room with the view of the Capitol in our Madison apartment. It's a lot like The Bernardin space, but it's not. In so many ways. |
| Here's the bedroom, also with a view of the Capitol. That's Hawk's desk there by the window. Mine is in the dining room, like it was in Chicago. |
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The kitchen is actually a little bigger, or else I have less stuff. |
| But we have the great red china cabinet and the dining room table from Chicago. It really does feel good to be there. |
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Here's a shot of some of our Christmas decorations on the island. Hawk needed it... |
| Haliam and Charlie came to see us on the island the weekend before Christmas, and we all took the 11:10 ferry on Christmas Eve. Before we got on the ferry, we went and picked up our 5 large Dungeness crabs from the seafood place. We got to Haley and Liam's house mid afternoon, we went shopping to pick up the last few things for dinner, and then Hawk went to get Ray at the airport. We had crab and cheese and salad and little meringues with ice cream and Soozy's caramel sauce. Then Ray gave us our ipod to radio speaker connect so we could all listen to the music he queued up for us to sing. We sang lots of favorites and then we danced. Hawk and I went to sleep around midnight. The next day, we got up early and made crab cakes and hollandaise, opened presents and went to Paisley and Peter's house after lunch. I was supposed to make soup for dinner, but suddenly I felt awful. Just spaced and kind of queasy. |
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Here's a closeup of that face. Aargh! I couldn't eat or drink or even think about cooking. I stayed in that chair all day and didn't do anything. I went to sleep at 7 p.m. |
| Meanwhile, the kids made a beautiful prime rib with au gratin potatoes and glazed carrots. Note my empty place there next to Charlie. My feet were there. I sort of watched. I think. |
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But the next day, I was okay, so we took off for Santa Cruz. We couldn't do the pass on I-5 because of snow, so we diverted to the coast. Much more beautiful, although longer. We stopped in Crescent City for a truly horrible seafood dinner: the restaurant had a view of a trailer park between us and the ocean, we got iceberg lettuce and seafood pasta that I just couldn't eat, it was so bad. All coagulated and nasty. Hawk ate way more than me. I did pick the shrimp and scallops out of it. We decided to push on to Eureka, where we stayed in a really nice Comfort Inn. The next morning, I drove us out of Eureka heading south. I noticed we were almost out of gas. Then the light came on. We didn't see any gas stations. After about 10 minutes of this, we used our gps to find gas, and it told us there was gas 21 miles ahead. Since we had been getting 30 mpg on the trip so far, we thought we might make it. We did, we pulled into the gas station, but all the lights were out. Power outage. SO we walked back to the Best Western (which had a generator) and begged a complimentary breakfast from them. When we got back to our car, a nice guy told us there was power two miles back and an open gas station, so we started the car and made it there! We put 10.75 gallons into our tank, which is supposed to hold 10.5. Nice. We had an easy drive down to San Francisco, and then decided to take Highway 1 south to Santa Cruz, no hurry and there were these fabulous waves kicked up by 30-40 knot winds. |
| We stopped at Pomponio Beach, where Hawk and I had our first evening and our first kiss. |
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The waves were so powerful they made thick foam on the beach. |
| The wind tossed the foam into the air, clear up on the top of the dunes. |
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Hawk checks out the waves from the top. Lots of memories here. We had another first kiss by the water. |