Happy Holidays part 1

Whew! December flew by in a flash and now we're already into 2020! How the heck did that happen?!

Our holidays were spent, as usual, in good ole LA where we had plenty of fun hanging out with family and enjoyed the lovely sunshine. The first half of the trip was spent with Grammie and Grandpa at their house in Sierra Madre where we filled our days with exploring the neighborhood, had a nice outing to the California Science Center (pretty neat!) and then got ready for Christmas. Here's some quick snaps of our trip!

Oranges galore! Soon they will be ready to sell at the market!

We tried a new-to-us brewery in Sierra Madre called Route Rogers. This is the Guava and Raspberry ale.

Evie didn't want to go so it was just Nora that hung out with us at the brewery. We let her try "unicorn bao". The pink was filled with bbq pork and the orange one had mushrooms and eggplant.

Grandpa showed us all his neat photos from when they first got married and when Scott and Missy were little.

A trip is never complete without a ride in Grandpa's truck.

We took a short hike up the canyon.

Pretty views!

Bonus that there was minimal whining from this girl on our trek home.

We helped Samantha celebrate her 21st birthday (again!).

Uncle Albert made his delicious homemade tong yuan soup!

After dinner, we rushed back to make it for the annual candlelight Christmas walk.

It's always a fun tradition that brings the whole neighborhood out.

At the Science Museum, we looked at ourselves with an infrared camera. Notice how hot Nora and Scott are!

Nora liked the aquarium exhibits

I thought seeing the Endeavor space ship and other space things like this capsule were super cool.

There's a naked chef in the kitchen making cookies! Our annual tradition with Grammy.

Christmas Eve - ready for dinner!

Happy on Christmas morning.

Comments

Japan trip

We got back from Japan about a week ago and we're still talking about what a great trip it was! Japan has never been super high on my places to visit but for a lot of reasons (I've never been, it's clean, it's safe, it's different) we took the plunge and booked it as our summer vacation this year. It helped that our friends, the Wongs, went last year, raved about it and loved it so much they were going again and we were able to coordinate so that some of our trip overlapped with theirs. It helped even more that the yen is at a 10-year low (maybe all time low?) against the dollar, which, aside from airfare, made everything quite affordable. Look how low the yen is! We lucked out that it kept falling after we booked our tix in Dec. Since this was our first big overseas trip since COVID and with kids (or, lets face it, SINCE kids), I dove into prepping for our trip - including trying to keep up my Duolingo streak of learning Japanese for at least a few minutes everyd

Family time

I had to do a quick trip to LA towards the end of July to say goodbye to my Uncle Pang, who passed away a few weeks earlier. I have fond memories of fun cousin time at his house in Palos Verdes and Uncle Pang taking us to the beach when we were younger. I remember how he delighted in making us kids squeal with laughter by pretending the car ride was a rolleroaster - we'd take sharp turns and all of us kids would slide to one side of his Volvo station wagon or he'd slow the car down to a roll and we'd all chant that we couldn't let the car stop and it would inch slowly forward at a stoplight. Although it was a sad reason to get together, I think he would be happy to know that the weekend was also a wonderful get together with family. Because it was fairly last minute, none of the kids flew over which meant us "adult cousins" were able to have long talks and linger over food. Kin and Meredith were able to host a summertime bbq at their house and we had a nice t

Glasses

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Simpsons in Seattle

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