New Year's

So the day after Christmas we flew back from Seattle in a terrible downpour. Daddy had never seen so much rain pelting and flowing past a plane window before -- it felt like the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ride at Disneyland. If a fish had swam buy, he wouldn't have been surprised. Because of the rain in Seattle and windy conditions in San Francisco, we were a couple hours late getting off the ground, so our plane didn't leave until almost 10pm. We got into San Francisco about midnight, got our bags, and rushed to the BART platform, where we were lucky enough to catch the last train leaving from SFO. We didn't get home to Berkeley until 1:30am.

And the next morning, Daddy had to drive to SFO to pick up Elena's OTHER granny, Noriko-san. Unfortunately we don't have many pictures of her during her stay, but there is a reason for that, which I'll explain shortly. Here is the only one we have, with Daddy already fostering some bad habits in Elena in the foreground -- he's letting her sip some Daddy juice.

So the reason we didn't take many pictures during granny's stay is that on the 3rd or 4th day of her visit, the day after Granny & Yuko had made a wonderful fried shrimp dinner the night before, we all became deathly ill with food poisoning. We took turns running for the bathroom. Daddy hadn't been that sick since his bachelor party. Poor Granny was very tired from the food poisoning and the whole 2nd half of her trip was pretty much shot. She was finally feeling better just in time to board her return flight to Japan! Bad luck . . . we'll have more fun during your next visit, Granny!