Ula's Wedding

Ula is now married.

It was 54 degrees and rainy when the outdoor wedding took place last Thursday, but Ula has always had an affinity for water and a friend told me that rain on your wedding day is good luck.

The father of the groom did an amazing job of making sure that everyone stayed dry, by providing a canopy for the ceremony and several large beach umbrellas for the guests.












May I present, the newly married couple:


My children:


The beautiful bride and the proud mother-of-the-bride:


The next couple to show up to use the stage at Wolfe Park:


The wedding may have been damp and chilly, but the reception at Psycho Suzi's was tropical.



The food and the vegan chocolate cake were excellent!





I made a compilation of the short videos I took during the ceremony and the dancing at the reception, but this video needs to stand alone. This is the father-daughter dance that set the tone for the other fun that was to follow.



Random wedding fun:




Blaze arm wrestling one of the bride's maids:


This was an incredibly long road trip, in a short amount of time. I'm so tired that it's hard to think straight, but I'm very glad we went. We picked up my mother in Illinois and took her with us and I'm glad we did that, too. She kept talking about how much fun the reception was.

Good China for Ula

Souvenir dishes from the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, on display at the Museum of Science and Industry.




One of the things that DH and I share is an interest in is pretty dishes. We have a very small kitchen, though, with very little cabinet space. The people who designed university housing were not expecting people to really cook. They were expecting busy students who lived off of take-out pizza and ramen noodles. This means there is no place to store a set of fine china, let alone two sets, which is what we recently found ourselves in possession of. When DH's mother passed away, DH inherited a beautiful set of Noritake china. Only 2 teacups and saucers are in use. The rest of the set resides in cardboard boxes in the back of our storage locker.
My grandmother recently decided that my sister was getting her silver and I was to get her good dishes. Ula and my mother packed up all the china and took it to my mother's house. The dishes are pretty, but we really don't have a place for another full set, so I took a single teacup and saucer as a souvenir and gave the rest to Ula. She will probably leave the dishes with my mother until she gets a place of her own, but that might not be very far in the future. She plans to graduate from college in May.


DH's mother's set of good china, Noritake is the maker, Candice is the design name:



My grandmother's set of good china (now belonging to Ula). The maker is Mikasa and the design is called Monte Carlo (470):



My reason for choosing to keep a cup and saucer, was that my grandmother used to have a display shelf in her den, where she kept a collection of pretty teacups and saucers.

The Christmas Eve Snow Fall

After years of telling Blaze (and DH) that going to see my family in Illinois for Christmas meant that we might see snow, it finally happened. It snowed most of the day on Christmas eve.

This was particularly exciting for Blaze, who had not seen snow since he was 2 years old.



We fit as many snow related activities into Christmas Eve and Christmas Day as we could, and Blaze enjoyed them all. Even clearing Grandmother's front sidewalk was fun.



I was the victim of Blaze's first snowball, which went down the back of my neck, but Ula was the target of all the rest. He didn't really like the fact, though, that if he threw a snowball at her, it meant she could retaliate.



The sled:











Our somewhat sinister looking snowman, with bulging eyes made out of kumquats:

Grandma

We're back!
We had a lovely white Christmas in Illinois, but this was our real reason for the trip, to visit my 92 year old grandmother.



She has recently been moved into a "managed care facility" due to several falls, after which she couldn't get up without assistance, and a condition called Sundowners, which causes her quite a bit of confusion about what is real and what is not.

When she moved into the nursing home, she told my dad that she wanted to see her granddaughters, so my sister, her husband, and little girl came from Seattle to see her over Thanksgiving, and we made the trip over Christmas. It was very good to see her, although it was also sad to see how confused she was about who everyone else was except my mother and me. She kept thinking Blaze was a girl and that Ula was her mother. For some reason, she thought that I already had 2 grandchildren.

I don't usually like nursing homes. I find them depressing. This one was a very nice surprise, though. It was beautiful, the staff was very attentive and friendly, and there were activities for the residents.



There is even a dog.



Grandma's only complaint is the food. She is very used to her own cooking ( and home canning) and is disappointed that her room has a refrigerator, but no stove.





At home, she always worked in the garden, and refused to stop even when it was no longer safe for her to do so (one of her falls happened in the garden). The nursing home has told her that in the Spring, they have a place where she can plant some tomato plants.