Ornament

Here's my ornament! I really like how it turned out!
No more empty hands or sad faces!

Thanksgiving Weekend - 2011

We had a full house for most of the weekend, Meera and Mom came on Wednesday evening, then our kids and grandkids all arrived on Thanksgiving Day for most of the day, which made a total of 11 people in our house. As is our usual custom, we had different jigsaw puzzles going through out the weekend, we did 2 1/2 puzzles during that time period. (We are still working on the last one.) We started out on Wednesday night with the 1000 piece puzzle in the picture above. I think everyone spent time working on it at one time or another, and it was completed by Thursday night.
Meanwhile in another part of the room, Annika introduced Seth to Polly Pockets. After a great Thanksgiving dinner, and a brief rest time afterwards, I got out my Bunko game. I thought it would be a game that everyone but Seth could play, and would be fun for everyone. We discovered in the first round that Annika was the "hot" dice roller! She won all the rounds in the first game and only lost twice in the second round, so she was the big winner of the night! Meera, Mom and I ventured out on Black Friday and were able to help Mom get all her Christmas shopping done! Tim and Debbie also came over on Friday and stayed the rest of the weekend. Unfortunately, Mom got sick during the night on Friday and didn't feel up to doing anything on Saturday.
Debbie, Meera and I decided to go into Everett to a glass blowing studio, where we designed (this meant choosing the colors and whether the colors were swirled, made with ridges or both) a Christmas ornament. The guy in charge got the glob of molten glass on his rod...
...then rolled it in the colors that we chose. I made mine white...
...and red. He rolled it in the white first, then put it all back in the oven, then rolled it in the red and put it back in the oven to melt the colors into the glass.
The other part of the process that we got to participate in was the actual blowing of our ornaments. This is my ornament after being blown.
Meera blowing her ornament. The guy told us when to blow and when to stop, it was really easy, we thought it was going to take a lot of effort to blow the glass, but it didn't.
Adding a little blob of glass to the top so there would be something to hang it with.
This is the mold they used if you wanted ridges on your ornament, they just force the blob of glass into the mold before the blowin takes place. Debbie and I both had ridges put on our ornaments.
Debbie blew her ornament so hard, the guy had to reshape it a little. We were told that it would take 24 hours for our ornaments to cool, they start them out in an oven of 920 degrees and slowly bring the temperature down. Saturday afternoon, a college friend of Meera's drove down from Lynden to see her and we taught him to play "Farkle". Then he went with us to see the movie "Hugo", and for dinner afterwards. It was fun to have him join us for the afternoon!
We thought we'd be able to pick our ornaments up after we had lunch on Sunday, which was right before they headed back to Wenatchee, but when we arrived, they weren't ready and we were told that it usually takes closer to 48 hours before they are ready. I was going to take a picture of us holding our ornaments, but all we had was empty hands and a very sad Debbie! Because they had given us the wrong information, they offered to send Debbie and Meera's ornaments to them free of charge and Ken will pick mine up tomorrow after work. I can't wait to see how they turned out! Except for Mom getting sick, it was a fun weekend.

Christmas Wish Lists

When I was visiting Saben and Annika this week, I helped them make a list of things they would like for Christmas. Annika did her list first while Saben was still in school. She just told me things off the top of her head, no catalog or anything, some of the things I wasn't even sure that there was such a thing, like a toy washing machine and dryer. (I looked on Amazon later and there is such a thing.) She kept saying that she wanted thousands of things, which made me laugh, and she did come up with a good list with 18 items on it. Saben did use a catalog (a Lego catalog) for his list and as usual, wanted mainly Lego kits. For a change he actually had some Lego kits he wanted that weren't "Star Wars" ones! It was fun helping them make their lists!

A Hindu Wedding - Part 2

Tying the bride and groom together with a sash. They had to stay joined together through the rest of the wedding and reception.
Pouring water over their hands, I don't know why.
The bride and groom had to walk around the fire several times. There was quite an argument between the priest and the groom's father about how many times they needed to walk around it. The priest thought 4 times was enough, but the groom's father didn't think they would be married unless they did it 7 times, and he got pretty angry during the discussion. (They walked around it 7 times.)
Another part of the ceremony involved them both stepping on a rock, again, I don't know the significance of it.
Their vows were done by responding positively to whatever the priest asked them, then scooting the piece of tamarind root to the side of the cloth.
I wanted to show the back of the groom's hat in this picture.
A time of prayer.
Gifts to the bride from the groom's family included several sari's and some jewelry.
Still joined together by the pink sash.
A last picture of the bride and groom.

A Hindu Wedding - Part 1

Ken and the groom, Abhishek
The groom's getting his hat put on by one of his sisters with help from the priest, while the rest of his family watches.
The canopy where most of the ceremony took place. I need to mention that this was a hindu wedding done American style, it's much more involved when the wedding takes place in India.
The bride and groom exchanging orchid garlands.
The bride's family presenting the groom with a new suit and a watch as a wedding gift. Once Abhishek was on the platform, he wasn't allowed to leave it until the bride joined him there. Some ceremonial things were done there, then they moved to the canopy.
The groom, both sets of parents and the priest moved to the canopy to do the majority of the rituals of the wedding. The bride stayed on the platform in her chair by herself, while this was going on. Most of the ceremonies were not done in English, so we didn't really know what was going on, but it was interesting to watch anyway. We did know that they had trouble finding a place to hold the wedding that would allow them to light a fire.
This part of the ceremony involved putting flower petals on a coconut half that was sitting in a goblet. Notice the plate of money with flower petals to the left of the coconut in the goblet, that was involved in other parts of the ceremonies.
The bride, Surbhi, eventually joined everyone under the canopy for more ceremonies.
I took this picture because I wanted to get a close up of the bracelets she was wearing and also the henna paintings on her hands.
Another picture of the henna markings on the palms of her hands.

San Francisco Weekend - Part 2

Saturday morning, we had breakfast at a restaurant that faced the ocean at the bottom of the Golden Gate Park and enjoyed watching the waves roll in. There was supposed to be a surfing contest going on, but the weather wasn't cooperating so it was cancelled for the day. We did see a few surfers later in the day, but the waves weren't very big. After breakfast we caught a shuttle bus that ran throughout the park. Our first stop was the Academy of Sciences, where there was a planetarium, an aquarium, and a rain forest exhibit, all in one building.

The first thing we went to was the planetarium, which we were kind of disappointed in. The show they did just wasn't very good. Next, we went up to the roof where Ken is standing by the rooftop garden and window vents.

In the rain forest portion, we saw plants, reptiles, and insects from that area. Lots of butterflies were flying around, so some of my relatives wouldn't have been able to go through it, but we enjoyed it.
A big butterfly sitting on a feeder.
Some nice fountains and statues were scattered around outside the museum.
The next place we went was the Flower Conservatory, (the white building in the background). There was going to be a free guided tour 30 minutes after we got there, so we decided to wait for the guided tour. Big mistake! This is the second time recently, that we waited for a guided tour, then ended up leaving it after it got started. Both times, it was because the guide talked and talked and talked. They knew a lot, but it got to be to much and took way to long to get through the things we were looking at.
An interesting item growing from this tree, but I forgot what it is.
A carnivorous plant of some kind.
An unusual orchid
A nice decorative area in the conservatory.
Another view of the Golden Gate Bridge, just as it started to rain. This is more how I picture San Francisco, with the bridge having clouds or fog around it.

San Francisco Weekend - Part 1

Thursday, I flew to Santa Rosa and joined Ken, who was already there. For dinner that night we went to a Guy Fieri restaurant, that is in Santa Rosa, called "Johnny Garlic". Our table was right in front of this caricature of Guy.
Friday morning we drove down to San Francisco. This is a shot of the Golden Gate Bridge, taken from Coit Tower
We drove down Lombard, which is the really crooked street, then got a pretty good picture of it from Coit Tower. You can't get a good shot of the whole street like this, when you're there.
Coit Tower, where you can take an elevator to the top to get some good views of the city.
At the top of the Coit Tower, which is located on Telegraph Hill.
The Oakland Bridge
A mural inside the tower of a dairy farm, I liked how they painted around the window and made it look like a silo.
After lunch and checking into our hotel, we headed out to ride a cable car. The line of people waiting to get on a cable car at the end of the cable car line was long, so we walked up the hill aways and caught one at it's first stop without standing in line.
We rode the cable car to the cable car museum, where we saw the big wheels that run the cables around the city.
When we got back on a cable car, it was stuck and unable to move. The driver had missed catching the cable and had to wait for a truck to come and push him to an area where he could grab onto the cable again. We ended the afternoon by going to a museum that had a display of pictures, videos, and objects pertaining to Houdini. By the time we finished there, my achilles tendon was hurting, so we went back to the hotel to rest awhile before going out to dinner.