Aside from my little accident below I had a good day. This morning I went to see Brad's new business, OC Precision, a machine shop where they make metal things. That just about sums up my understanding of it, but it all looked very cool. There I picked up Corie (my 9 year old niece) and drove her out to my mom's house in Torrance.
We arrived home to find...nobody there. I left a message for my mom at work (turns out she thought we were coming later than we did) and Corie and I sat down to finish our annual Christmas puzzle. We then read The Polar Express and then went to Mc. D's for lunch.
We then met up with Mom and the three of us went to the Banning Residence Museum in Wilmington. It's a large Greek Revival house built in the mid 1800's and restored and decorated in Victorian era furnishings and decorations. We arrived about 2 minutes too late for one tour so we killed about an hour in the gift shop until the next one. The house was very beautiful and interesting. Corie was very well-behaved despite the world's slowest speaking tour guide (boooooooring). We also had this woman in our group who asked in every single room, "What's that door for? Is that a bathroom? What's that door for? Is that a bathroom?" Arg!
I then went to the chiropractor and took a quick nap while Corie and Mom assembled a gingerbread house. They were about 3/4 of the way done when I woke up and were struggling with the icing they'd made, supposedly following the directions. Mom couldn't figure out why it was so runny. I said, "did you beat the egg whites first?" Uh, no, they didn't read that part of the directions. My mom said, "how did you know that?" Gee, doesn't everyone know that you have to beat the egg whites to make a frosting--otherwise it's just icing? I thought that was common knowledge.
We had dinner and then headed out to see the Christmas lights in the neighborhood. The neighborhood bordering my parent's do a really good job with lights every year--having a contest and everything. There are always tons of cars driving through, and people walking. Really industrious homeowners even sell hot chocolate, coffee, and popcorn (years ago people used to give it away for free, but alas, those days are no more). So as we're going down the first street I said, "Look! It's Santa!" Corie says, "That's fake!" Sure enough it was a life-sized animated Santa. But it was very life-like! We all cracked up and Corie didn't let me forget it the entire night. Then we passed another display that showed an incongruous combination of images (a lighted train that looked like it was about to run over a lighted baby Jesus). I made an off-color joke and that was it--we were shot for the rest of the evening. All three of us were laughing so hard we were crying, and then Corie and I got a serious case of the giggles and couldn't stop laughing. We'd settle down, then one of us would start laughing again and we both couldn't stop. It was so funny, and Corie and I have an inside joke that I'm sure we'll still be laughing at years from now.
Overall it was a totally fun day. I'm so glad that I live in Southern California now and can just take time to hang out with Corie and my mom and not have to worry about traveling back at the end of the weekend or long drives or anything.
Posted by Shelby at December 23, 2004 12:14 AMSounds like you had fun!
Sorry about your accident -- OUCH, you're really going to be sore today.