Liya runs with the Bush school team in the 2018 Washington State Cross-Country Tournament in Pasco, WA. Jan and his mom Lyn come out to watch the race. There are tons of teams from all over the state, giving the tournament a festival atmosphere. The Bush team doesn’t place, but Liya is her team’s 3rd finisher. Yay, Liya!
(In the photo, Liya’s the second runner from the left.)
We meet with Yumi Hiraga, a specialist that’s been evaluating Bree. She gives Bree a diagnosis of dyslexia, which explains the challenges Bree has had with spelling.
Liya: “Say the magic word.”
Bree: “Avada kedavra.”
Jan goes to San Francisco for a two-day conference. He goes down the day before so he can have dinner with his brother Chris. They meet up at Chris’ office, where Chris shares some of the latest projects humangear is working on. Chris also shows off the office’s new over-the-top coffee setup, with an espresso machine, coffee grinder, water filter, cup washer, etc., that would be the envy of any hipster coffeehouse. Jan tries his hand at making a latte, including some latte art. Chris declares that it looks like an eggplant.
Angela and Jan attend a electronic string concert of the duo Black Violin.
Anya comes back from Choate for the Thanksgiving break!
Her last class ends at 3:20 pm, and it was hard to find a flight that got her back to Seattle the same day — we ended up booking her from Hartford via Dallas to Seattle. Her flight is over an hour late leaving Hartford, leaving her just a few minutes to make her connection in Dallas. Jan’s able to advise her of her arrival and departure gates, which are thankfully in the same terminal. She sprints to the Seattle flight and makes it with just a minute to spare. It’s a late flight: Jan picks her up at SeaTac after 1:00 am.
We’re all happy to have Anya back at home.
It’s nice to hear Anya playing piano in the house again.
We celebrate Lyn’s 75th birthday with dinner at The Corson Building. Their Sunday prix fixe dinner is served family style at long tables, and all of the food is good.
Jan and Anya attend a performance of Lyn’s play, “Coffeeaardvark”, at Theater of Puget Sound’s Theater 4. The play looks at the long arc of a relationship, and features as a key prop one of Liya’s Coffeeaardvark mugs.
It’s time for Bree’s 2nd Engineering Event. (It’s our family’s 8th such event.) This year’s theme is geoglyphs, “a large design or motif produced on the ground and typically formed by clastic rocks or similarly durable elements of the landscape”. As usual, this theme is stretched to the point where some aspect of it can be represent in an assemblage of wire, plastic, and rubber bands.
Anya and Liya attend as well, and have the chance to say hello to some of their former teachers.
After the event, we head straight to the airport to catch a flight to LA. We’ll be spending Thanksgiving with the Chen family in Rancho Palos Verdes.
We go to the Knott’s Berry Farm amusement park. Despite our best efforts to explain where we were going beforehand, Anya is still surprised (and perhaps somewhat disappointed) that Knott’s Berry Farm is not a place where one picks berries.
Instead, we go on a number of roller coasters and other rides. Here we pose before heading into an augmented reality ride, “Iron Reef”.
Johnny waits patiently for the bumper car ride to start.
Liya wants a churro at the churro stand. Anya says she doesn’t want one, but then changes her mind and asks for one — actually, one filled with cream, or maybe topped with cream. Actually, make it a churro sundae.
She receives an enormous pile of soft-serve ice cream, whipped cream, and marionberry sauce. There’s a churro somewhere in the middle of it. She looks to her family to help her eat it.
We go for a short walk along the bluffs above the Pacific Ocean.
In the late afternoon, Johnny and Jenny lay out a huge Thanksgiving meal. Jenny’s sister Zen joins us as well.
Johnny takes A-kon, Jan, and Liya for what should be a short hike down a ravine in Del Cerro Park. It’s a beautiful, fairly warm day for a walk, and we can see Catalina in the distance. The main trail goes down the left flank of the ravine, but we go down the bottom of the ravine.
The ravine bottom trail turns into a dry stream bed, which we follow as best we can. It’s overgrown with brambles and trees, and the rolling rocks are a little precarious to walk over. We eventually hit a steep 10’ drop-off, and are forced to stop.
Rather than go back, we try to climb the extremely steep hillside and get up to the main trail. The hillside is not only steep, but the soil is dry, sandy, and loose. In places, it’s hard to make any progress — it’s two steps up and one step back. A-kon eventually decides to walk back up the riverbed while Johnny, Jan, and Liya persevere all the way up to the trail.
We finally meet back up and head home, having had a fairly big adventure just five minutes from Johnny’s house.
Anya heads back to Choate. She leaves for SeaTac with Angela in the early morning to catch a flight to Chicago. Unfortunately, Chicago has been hit with a snow and ice storm, and they’re holding all flights to Chicago at their origin. After a few hours, the airline finally lets Anya’s flight board — and then she sits on the tarmac for almost three hours. Her flight finally leaves Seattle.
All afternoon, the airline sends automatic rebooking messages: “Your 4:00 pm flight has been cancelled. You’re now on a 6:00 pm flight.” “Your 6:00 pm flight has been cancelled. You’re now on an 8:00 pm flight.” Finally we get a message: “Your 10:00 pm flight has been cancelled. You’re now on a 10:00 pm flight.” She’s supposed to wait in O’Hare for 24 hours.
As luck would have it, another girl from Choate lives in Chicago and is likewise stuck in O’Hare. She invites Anya to spend the night at her house.
Anya finally makes it back to school in the late evening of the second day.