![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Three Days of Christmas
Dec. 26th, 2023 06:39 pm_Three more days at the Wiedlin house (Christmas Eve through Boxing Day), celebrating the holidays._
THE FITBIT CONUNDRUM. While we were packing I told K. not to pack her Fitbit charger. We both have Charge 6s now and I'd already packed the USB cord that recharges mine, so no problem. And then on our first day in San Martin I tried to charge my Charge 6 and I flipped it over and over in the little clip that's supposed to attach it to its charging connectors. No dice. No charge. At which point I realized I'd brought my old charger for my (likely) dead Versa 2. Whoops.
Fortunately, the local Best Buy in Gilroy claimed they had one Charge 6 charger. I never trust the old "we have one" claim, as that's usually an inventory/lossage error. But I ordered one online for Curbside pickup and voila, on Christmas Eve morning they told me it was ready. So down to Gilroy we went. I'd never used curbside pickup before, but there was no way I was walking into a Best Buy on Christmas Eve. It was delivered right to our car window, quickly and efficiently. So now we're not going "waste" steps on this trip.
SOUTH TO NORTH. Later on Christmas Eve my mom and I biked up to Morgan Hill, which is the opposite direction from Gilroy. On the ebikes, of course. Fun ride. We did about 16 miles. (I used pedal assist level 1 most of the trip, and pulled it up to level 2 for the final bit back home.) My mom showed my around Morgan Hill a little, then we rode a trail I didn't know existed along Llagas Creek, and even explored a new spur that went in this year and my mom had never ridden before. Fun to see my mom loves exploring new bike trails, just like I did in my 20 years of active biking in the Bay Area, and also fun to see there's at least one more trail down there than the Coyote Creek Trail I already knew about. (This one is south of the Coyote Creek Trail and a pretty small thing, relatively.)
THE MOST WONDERFUL TIME OF THE YEAR. Yesterday was Christmas. My brother R. had joined us for Christmas Eve, and we all had Christmas morning together, then we went over to my brother J. & s-i-l L.'s house for Christmas afternoon. We had more Christmas there. My niece & nephew got TONS of presents (including from us, of course). I also got to spend some time with them, and they were quite sweet (and less wild than last year). My niece L. kept bringing me presents to read the tags of, and whenever I told her one was hers, she'd ask, "Can I open it? Can I open it?" My nephew J. asked me to play Lego with him and later play in the backyard with him.
I'd known that modern Lego sets had instructions for how to put them together and special pieces to make that possible, but I hadn't realized that they were all these teeny extremely thin pieces that you built up millimeter by millimeter. Wow. So J. had a Donkey Kong set and we got most of Donkey Kong's legs and body together over the course of something less than an hour. J. was pretty good with it, but I'd sometimes correct him, and when we'd look more carefully I'd be right about 50% of the time and he'd be right about 50% of the time. Heh. It really looks like these Lego sets are training kids for a future of Ikea furniture building.
Anyway, a nice Christmas day all around.
HIKING. We missed any notable exercise on Christmas Day, but the day after (today), my mom and I hiked a bit in the hills right behind their house. We just did a mile up into the hills and a mile back, but we got some good ascent and got high enough to look over the valley. We also dodged quite a few cows, and poor Zeke puppy, who was of course hiking with us, was terrified of them. When one of them was positioned in the middle of the trail, lowing away, Zeke practically climbed the hillside to get around it.
GAMES, GAMES, GAMES. We played lots of Games while at Casa Wiedlin. I'm think we played Cascadia three times. I remember K. won our first game, R. kicked butt at a game on Christmas Eve even though it was his first game, and I finally racked up a win today after that game on Christmas Eve where I'd thought I was a winner before I saw R's score. We always played a game of Nidavellir, which I've wanted a copy of since I played it online early in the pandemic, and finally got one for Christmas. I think my mom won that one.
TO BERKELEY. Today was the great transition from San Martin to Berkeley, marking the mid point of our holiday. We are staying at suite in a hotel in Berkeley. Our first reaction when we got into our room was that it was COLD. But the heater was off. We turned it on, and four hours later the room has never really gotten better than slightly chilly. Part of the problem seems to be that the second heater in the bedroom generates no heat. So we've cranked the living room heater up and up over the course of the evening, and pulled shut all the drapes, and hope that eventually the whole suite warms up, because that was one of our goals in staying in a hotel, as in some recent years we've had AirBnBs in Berkeley and Oakland that had rooms that were ice cold (mostly the bathrooms!). Of course, the other reason for the hotel stay was accessibility for K. because of her messed up knee.
K. has already started seeing folks here in Berkeley, as she went out to dinner with a few tonight (while I just picked up a chicken cheese steak, something not available on island as far as I know). But I'll start seeing people tomorrow. Walking and chatting tomorrow; gaming on Thursday, more gaming on Saturday, and a blesséd free day on Friday. Before we go home on New Year's Eve.
THE FITBIT CONUNDRUM. While we were packing I told K. not to pack her Fitbit charger. We both have Charge 6s now and I'd already packed the USB cord that recharges mine, so no problem. And then on our first day in San Martin I tried to charge my Charge 6 and I flipped it over and over in the little clip that's supposed to attach it to its charging connectors. No dice. No charge. At which point I realized I'd brought my old charger for my (likely) dead Versa 2. Whoops.
Fortunately, the local Best Buy in Gilroy claimed they had one Charge 6 charger. I never trust the old "we have one" claim, as that's usually an inventory/lossage error. But I ordered one online for Curbside pickup and voila, on Christmas Eve morning they told me it was ready. So down to Gilroy we went. I'd never used curbside pickup before, but there was no way I was walking into a Best Buy on Christmas Eve. It was delivered right to our car window, quickly and efficiently. So now we're not going "waste" steps on this trip.
SOUTH TO NORTH. Later on Christmas Eve my mom and I biked up to Morgan Hill, which is the opposite direction from Gilroy. On the ebikes, of course. Fun ride. We did about 16 miles. (I used pedal assist level 1 most of the trip, and pulled it up to level 2 for the final bit back home.) My mom showed my around Morgan Hill a little, then we rode a trail I didn't know existed along Llagas Creek, and even explored a new spur that went in this year and my mom had never ridden before. Fun to see my mom loves exploring new bike trails, just like I did in my 20 years of active biking in the Bay Area, and also fun to see there's at least one more trail down there than the Coyote Creek Trail I already knew about. (This one is south of the Coyote Creek Trail and a pretty small thing, relatively.)
THE MOST WONDERFUL TIME OF THE YEAR. Yesterday was Christmas. My brother R. had joined us for Christmas Eve, and we all had Christmas morning together, then we went over to my brother J. & s-i-l L.'s house for Christmas afternoon. We had more Christmas there. My niece & nephew got TONS of presents (including from us, of course). I also got to spend some time with them, and they were quite sweet (and less wild than last year). My niece L. kept bringing me presents to read the tags of, and whenever I told her one was hers, she'd ask, "Can I open it? Can I open it?" My nephew J. asked me to play Lego with him and later play in the backyard with him.
I'd known that modern Lego sets had instructions for how to put them together and special pieces to make that possible, but I hadn't realized that they were all these teeny extremely thin pieces that you built up millimeter by millimeter. Wow. So J. had a Donkey Kong set and we got most of Donkey Kong's legs and body together over the course of something less than an hour. J. was pretty good with it, but I'd sometimes correct him, and when we'd look more carefully I'd be right about 50% of the time and he'd be right about 50% of the time. Heh. It really looks like these Lego sets are training kids for a future of Ikea furniture building.
Anyway, a nice Christmas day all around.
HIKING. We missed any notable exercise on Christmas Day, but the day after (today), my mom and I hiked a bit in the hills right behind their house. We just did a mile up into the hills and a mile back, but we got some good ascent and got high enough to look over the valley. We also dodged quite a few cows, and poor Zeke puppy, who was of course hiking with us, was terrified of them. When one of them was positioned in the middle of the trail, lowing away, Zeke practically climbed the hillside to get around it.
GAMES, GAMES, GAMES. We played lots of Games while at Casa Wiedlin. I'm think we played Cascadia three times. I remember K. won our first game, R. kicked butt at a game on Christmas Eve even though it was his first game, and I finally racked up a win today after that game on Christmas Eve where I'd thought I was a winner before I saw R's score. We always played a game of Nidavellir, which I've wanted a copy of since I played it online early in the pandemic, and finally got one for Christmas. I think my mom won that one.
TO BERKELEY. Today was the great transition from San Martin to Berkeley, marking the mid point of our holiday. We are staying at suite in a hotel in Berkeley. Our first reaction when we got into our room was that it was COLD. But the heater was off. We turned it on, and four hours later the room has never really gotten better than slightly chilly. Part of the problem seems to be that the second heater in the bedroom generates no heat. So we've cranked the living room heater up and up over the course of the evening, and pulled shut all the drapes, and hope that eventually the whole suite warms up, because that was one of our goals in staying in a hotel, as in some recent years we've had AirBnBs in Berkeley and Oakland that had rooms that were ice cold (mostly the bathrooms!). Of course, the other reason for the hotel stay was accessibility for K. because of her messed up knee.
K. has already started seeing folks here in Berkeley, as she went out to dinner with a few tonight (while I just picked up a chicken cheese steak, something not available on island as far as I know). But I'll start seeing people tomorrow. Walking and chatting tomorrow; gaming on Thursday, more gaming on Saturday, and a blesséd free day on Friday. Before we go home on New Year's Eve.