firstfrost | Celebrations, large and small (Reply)

Whee. Back from California. The beginning half was a little slow, but we got to wander around Mountain View and see people who we don't see often enough. (I've promised to invite

ricedog if there's another RPG wedding, since he comes to visit for weddings...). Mountain View is definitely the home of Bubble Tea. I bought a bunch of books in a local bookstore (nice place - they had lots of employee recommendations, and a good combination of trade and mass market paperbacks), and may or may not have imagined a funny look when I paid for them with an Amazon credit card - but I refuse to feel guilt about buying from Amazon, because I pay my dues in real book stores too.

countertorque's wedding was lovely, and definitely more fun than the last Catholic wedding I remember (I realize that I'm not supposed to find "Your love for each other is but a pale shadow of God's love for you" disturbing). I don't really have the taking-pictures-of-everything down yet, but I got a few nice ones.

Then, to Davis for niece Amelia's first birthday. She's still adorable, though not quite as cheery as usual due to recovering from pneumonia (sniff!). Like my little brother over a quarter-century before her, she uses "Da!" as the Universal Word which appears to mean "What's this?". After much badgering at Christmas time to try and convince her to crawl, she's finally got a scootching-forward crawl which involves sitting down and using one leg to lever forward. She clearly doesn't like to not get to look around, and this weird crawl lets her keep her head up. She's pretty close to walking, too, and then she'll be unstoppable. On the other hand, the hell hound lurking near by in this picture is a little disturbing: