Picture day for Liya!
We’re visiting Phoenix, AZ, for a couple of days. Angela is here as part of an organization of pastors that tomorrow will act as peacekeeping chaplains outside election polling places.
Today we spend a few hours at the beautiful Desert Botanical Garden, home to countless spiky weird plants.
The trunks of this cholla are covered in spines, and the cactus has produced tons of green buds. It’s hard to believe that this plant is actually from planet Earth.
Our friend Diane manages a business helping science labs move from one location to another. Diane recently held a photo shoot to get marketing photos, and Angela volunteered to pose as a serious lab technician doing science-y things. Today we got a link to the new site with this photo at the top of the home page.
Angela does a long shift as an election polling place chaplain outside the main branch of the Phoenix public library. Here she poses with one of the organizers behind the effort to have pastors help out on election day. Angela spend the afternoon and evening sitting outside the library and chatting with people.
Jan stays at the hotel to work, then goes for a long walk to the library and back.
Phoenix is a pleasant place to visit in November.
We meet up with Jeanie, a sister of one of Angela’s congregants who now lives in Phoenix. She joins us for a visit to the Heard Museum, which focuses on Native American art and culture.
We walk into the museum just in time to join a tour. The whole museum is pretty interesting, but we spend the most time in an exhibit dedicated to the sad history of boarding schools created to separate native kids from their languages and cultures. The exhibit was originally designed as a temporary one, but got such a positive reception that the museum made it permanent.
It’s been two years since Jan set up the “MomBoard” electronic ink display in Lyn’s apartment so she could view messages from him and his siblings. Lyn’s amnesia makes it hard for her to hold onto text messages they send her, and she doesn’t have a habit of scrolling back through texts to see what they’ve said recently. Jan thought a low-power, paper-like display that was always on might work. In fact, the device has worked out great, doing its job day and night for two years.
Since other tech people might be interested in the project, Jan writes a post about the MomBoard on his professional blog. This post gets far more attention than his usual posts, and eventually winds up on Hacker News, one of the premier news sources for geeks. That site usually only feature stories for a few hours, but a huge amount of positive feedback on the post keeps it on the site’s home page for an entire day. The story ends up beating out the big geek news that day: The Onion’s announcement that they are purchasing the infamous InfoWars site so they can turn it into a parody of itself.
A number of people email Jan asking for the MomBoard source code, which he publishes online. All the attention is nice but bittersweet — it indicates just how many families are struggling to handle amnesia or other conditions that make communication challenging.
Our family friend Evrim moves back to stay with us while she takes a leave of absence from Brown University. We originally met Evrim in 2020 when she was an international student at Choate with Evan. She needed a place to stay during the early months of the covid pandemic so we had her stay with us.
Evrim’s now looking to take a break from studying while she changes majors so we once again welcomed her to our home. The plan is for her to stay here through Summer 2025 and then return to Brown next Fall.
Mojo is happy that Jan’s again set up the Japanese kotatsu (heated table with a quilt) for the winter season. The cats can often be found under the table, especially after someone’s had it on for a while.
Liya and Bree meet up in New Haven and then make their way together back home for Thanksgiving. Meanwhile, Evan flies up from California. We’re delighted to have everyone under one roof again!
Five of us (sans Evan but with Evrim) go to University Village in the evening to do some Thanksgiving food shopping. We stop for dinner beforehand at Dough Zone.
Last week our oven died, which is a bad thing to happen right before Thanksgiving. Thankfully a nice repairman was able to come over quickly, diagnose the problem, and order replacement parts. Today he comes over to install the parts and get the oven in working order again. Whew!
(Left to right: Evrim, Jared, Auden, Leif, Bree, Angela, Leslie, Lyn, Skye, Liya, Evan, Eddie)
Happy Thanksgiving! Jan picks up Lyn in the morning and brings her over for the day. Angela’s cousins Leslie and Eddie arrive in the early afternoon, followed shortly by Skye and her family coming up from Oregon.
The kitchen is packed with people cooking a turkey and all the sides. This year we’re trying a recipe from the New York Times for a chili spice rub on the turkey. The house warms up with cooking aromas.
Bree is deputized to lead the production of the ice box pudding (chocolate crackers and whipped cream.) Eschewing the traditional log format, Bree embarks on the construction of a giant ice box ziggurat modeled after the Mayan step pyramids of Central America. Cousin Leif and his dad Jared are enlisted in the construction project, which consumes about twice the amount of cookies and whipped cream we usually use.
All the food turns out great. The meat-eaters are happy with the spice-rubbed turkey; we’ll definitely do that again sometime.
After dinner Bree unveils her ice box ziggurat, which for better or worse includes a collection of chocolate figures enacting a Mayan sacrifice of one of their number.
Leif and Auden cheerfully ask to have pieces that include the chocolate men, but no one fights for the piece with the sacrificial victim.
We begin a long outing with a big family lunch at Taste of India, then head downtown to see the new Ocean Pavilion at the Seattle Aquarium. We haven’t gone as a family in a long time so it’s fun to go back. The touch tanks are interesting as always, along with perennial favorites like the sea otters.
The new pavilion is nice with some beautiful huge tanks.
Afterwards Angela leads an expedition to Uwajimaya to pick up ingredients and we make a big hot pot for dinner.