Yay vacation: New Year's

The last week and a half has been very very good. It's been nice to have a real vacation.

We attended a great New Year's Eve party. Great people, gorgeous house, yummy food. It was mostly Williams alums '93-'99, it was a little as if someone with a huge house hosted a yearly party for Amarna alums from '99-'04, there was mingling, game-playing, 80s music and dancing, drumming (Denis loves to drum, I never knew), and then people started filtering upstairs to the clothes-optional hottub/sauna. I would have joined, but I only felt comfortable getting naked with about half the people there. It's good to at least have a conversation with someone before taking your clothes off. It was a three-day sleep-over party, but we only attended New Year's night. The only strange thing was being guests. While everyone was really nice and I had some good chats it was obvious that most people were "home" and while I didn't feel as if we were excluded we certainly weren't part of the heart of things. But it was so much nicer then staying home alone, we felt the love.

Yay vacation: Texas

We spent the last week in Galvaston, Texas (ironically the most stressed city in the US according to a Shape magazine pole.) We had a little luggage trouble on the way over, but once we got there it was nice. Weather was okay, cold a couple days, and then warm and rainy, but overally nice (not freezing like it is here).

I really enjoyed spending time with my parents, sister and her boyfriend. The condo was nice (I got to share a bed with my husband, not my sister, much preferable.) We alternated between "activities" and just hanging out. We went to Moody Gardens which has three pyramids, one with a rainforest, one with an aquarium, and one with mini-golf, plus an IMAX show (in 3D with the cheesy glasses), and a ride where you experienced being a raindrop. We walked around historic Galvaston, visited a gourmet candy shop twice, toured a submarine and a WWII ship (Melissa and I both got claustrophobia in the submarine), walked around and were followed by a big pelican, went to the Johnson Space Center and toured historic mission control as well as other space-related stuff, and got to see footage from last week from Mars. We spent one day in Houston, at my request everyone kindly visited the Menil Collection and the Rothko Chapel (although inside the Rothko chapel my dad said "is this it?") Only one art musuem and it was really a great one, all of the stuff was incredible. Even Matt said he liked it. Then we went to the natural history museum which was also interesting (been a while since I've seen dinosaur bones) although we found the huge exhibition on oil drilling (funded by Texas oil companies of course) pretty sketchy. Especially when outside the exhibition there was one sad little wall discussing renewalable energy resources. Since we learned so much about the oil drilling process we didn't end up going to the off-shore drilling museum back in Galveston.

In the evenings we played a lot of boardgames (the time-share place had some you could borrow) sadly they did not have Cranium which my parents got for Christmas and is the new family-preferred game. So lots of Taboo, Scrabble, Password, Clue, etc. I won hearts. We went to Target and Denis bought Risk so we played that too, I suck at Risk.

Mostly we cooked, everyone liked my chili and Denis's meatballs. We ate more meat that week then Denis and I do in a month. Melissa and Matt made three meatloafs. We went out to dinner a few times, to the Rainforest cafe (rated very high for novelty, food was okay), to a little local Mexican restaurant in Houston which has fabulous fabulous enchiladas, and to an expensive seafood restaurant the last night we were there (we were on the ocean). I had this incredible meal of red snapper, artichokes, and crab meat. The best seafood I've ever had, probably one of the best meals in general I've ever had.

We also did some planning for Croatia in June. I wish Matt was coming, it's good for Melissa to have a friend, but he can't afford it since he'll be graduating a couple weeks before and doesn't have a job yet. Since he's not officially part of the family he won't be parentally funded like the rest of us. Anyway it was a really nice vacation. Denis hasn't had an entire week off where he hasn't had to work at least one job since our honeymoon so he really appreciated it. I really like spending time with my family although time with them also comes with stress and spats and some crying (less than over Christmas). The timeshare was just across the street from the beach so Denis and I went over one afternoon and walked and picked up shells. It was really beautiful.