Do you like root beer floats? Our Elder’s Quorum has occasional ice cream socials for fellowshipping and good times. Today someone asked if they could bring root beer. I let slip my feelings that root beer floats are a waste of ice cream. It was a funny comment in my head, but it came out differently. Oh well. Hopefully no one leaves the church.
Since we last talked, we had Christmas and New Year’s. We had Merilee’s sister’s family over for 5 days before Christmas, and three of her single siblings stayed an additional week. We also adopted a member of the single’s ward that we met at church (their own church doesn’t meet over the holidays). Her family was in Mexico so she spent most of the holidays with us. We had a total of 10 people and a baby in our one bedroom apartment. Everyone fit during the day, and at night we took advantage of our neighbor’s empty apartment that they let us use so the baby could sleep while the adults continued with the party.
It was an eye opener having to buy/prepare food for 10 people. I guess Mer and I are ready for when she has two sets of quintuplets. Thankfully, we had multiple people helping out with getting and preparing food, so it wasn’t stressful. We ate well and enjoyed lots of quality time. We took a tour at Hearst Castle, saw some sea lions, spotted a zebra, walked on the beach, saw the 3rd hobbit movie, saw many other movies, had bacon waffles, ate lasagna, chilled in the hot tub, skyped with people and a missionary, discovered our garbage garbage disposal was leaking, had a money run (Canute won), slathered fresh homemade bread with butter and homemade lemon curd, made gingerbread houses, hosted a talent show, played soccer, tossed a frisbee, returned a defective piece of furniture, took a tour of our neighbor's doll collection, saw butterflies, and took naps. If I left anything out, let me know.
On New Year's Eve, we left SLO and went to visit my brother's family in Irvine. They were super great to visit. We also got to spend some time with Merilee's cousins and their families. Everyone got homemade toffee (you're welcome). During our time there, we visited an awesome aquarium. Seeing all those amazing creatures just reminds me of what a wonderfully amazing world we live in. We also got to go to Griffiths's Observatory, a place I had only been to previously in GTA San Andreas. We got to celebrate a birthday, visit with friends, checkout downtown Disney, stop by the Lego store, play games, and get our hair done in our nephew's California Hair Salon. It was lots of fun, plus we got to do free laundry.
We had to recover from Christmas pretty fast. Work and school started back up at 8 AM the morning after we drove back. We arrived late Sunday night but luckily had already put most things back in order before we left. This quarter I'm taking 13 units. I have class every morning at 8 this quarter, which sounds horrible every day before I go to bed. But I really don't get up much earlier than last quarter since I used to see Merilee off to work every morning anyways. It's also nice being done Tuesdays and Thursdays by 11 AM. I'm taking Introduction to Aerospace Design, a fun class where we use computers to analyze aerospace problems (my teacher looks kind of like Orlando Bloom). My morning class is Technical Writing for Engineers, a class about writing memos and technical reports and that kind of thing (my teacher is Kiefer Sutherland). I also have Statistical Methods for Engineers, a class about... (Jon Voight).
My fourth class is the second half of Mechanics of Materials. The teacher is actually my Stake President, Eric Kasper. We've so far only had one stake conference here, and I didn't remember his name but recognized him when he walked into the classroom. I checked the LDS tools app and it was him. So far, all my classes have been really fun. My teachers, especially President Kasper and Jon Voight are pretty energetic and funny lecturers, something that I'm not used to.
