thanksgiving in the fire swamp.

geocaching with isaac and edie

well, we survived thanksgiving- that is all i have to say about that. i don't know why we still think it is ok to go to my grandparents old ranch house for more than just a few hours much less overnight. nobody lives there anymore and the house is kind of falling into disrepair.

the fun thing that happened was i took my niece and nephew geocaching on wednesday. they seemed to really enjoy it. my nephew had a really good eye for finding caches and my niece loved looking through all the swag to trade.

thanksgiving started at midnight with maria waking up crying and then emptying the contents of her stomach for the next 2 hours. yeah- we were covered in it. unlike the popping sounds made in the fire swap to warn trespassers of impending spouts of fire, maria spewed out with no warning what so ever. if i had more than 2 gallons of gas in my car, i think i would have packed up and driven home in the middle of the night.

the morning started at 7am with my niece and nephew waking up. then maria waking up. then we found out that sometime during the middle of the night (the 2 or 3 hours that everyone was asleep) something had chewed off the cord to the coffee pot. the coffee pot!!!! given that the cord was just gone- and i mean gone- it was chewed off at the base of the coffee pot- i suspect it was a r.o.u.s. chris thought it was getting a little lord of the flies- esque so he drove 10 miles into town to fill my car with gas and to get everyone coffee. he single handedly saved thanksgiving. the situation calmed down after coffee was consumed. maria was doing fine and the cold front we'd heard about all week finally blew through and cooled off the house. my mom did a really superb job of getting all the food prepared and put out for consumption. maria slept through her first thanksgiving lunch. the meal was great and so was the company and conversation but it lacked my grandmother. thanksgiving was always her holiday. we shared a lot of really great memories of her.

chris took off about 2pm-ish. he had to borrow a pair of pants from my brother because all of our clothes had been blessed by maria. the plan was that i would stay until friday but i ended up leaving shortly after chris. i could not have another night of maria barf. plus, none of us had any (clean) clothes left. i got back to austin and chris was still home. he helped me get everything unpacked and in the washing machine before he went to the texas- a&m game. i watched some of the game but zonked out before it was over. friday was a very quiet, sleepy day at the tyler household.