Scorching the World

One of my favorite activities started a couple of years ago when I retired. I got the great idea that all that paper I shredded at work could be thrown up in the air as a celebration for retiring. So I took a couple bags of it home and we had a lot of fun. So I've been saving up bags of shreddings until we could get most of the grandkids together to do it again. With M&B here the time was perfect. I had 3 huge bags of shredded paper that a friend of mine saved up. You can see all the paper dust in the air. It got hard to breathe for a little while there. We threw them up in the air in the family room, into the fan which makes them fly all over and 'snow' down on everyone. Kids made 'snow angels' on the floor; we threw 'snowballs' at each other, piled 'snow' on each others heads, etc. It was really fun. the really strange thing is that I was the only 'adult' doing it with the kids. All the other parents just stood a safe distance off and ...

While B&M were visiting, we managed to go to Ocean Beach in San Francisco. It was a chilly but sunny day, so the kids had to get in the water. M brought a couple of skim boards and he proved he is still really good at it. He taught a couple of the kids how to do a little skimming on it. That beach has black sand so the kids look really dirty. This is Amy after she 'washed off and cleaned up". It was a great day!

My kids arranged to get everyone together this past weekend while M&B were visiting to get a group grandkids' picture before Cai runs off to college. They had an arrangement worked out in advance so we could just get them in place and snap photos, to make it less painful for the children. So I just took one picture after another while we tried to get all the kids to smile at the same time. I took a ton of pictures and every one has several children doing something strange.

This past weekend, while we had kids visiting, we did our annual shredding party where we take three large bags of shredded paper and do all the things with it that people typically do with snow: we throw it up in the air, we pile it on each other, we make balls out of it and throw it at each other, and we make snow angels. It was so much fun. I thought it was really funny that Tom was picking up all the shreddings after the party, and getting it really cleaned up, but didn't know he was carrying around quite a bit of it on his own shoulders!

Tom and I have been on a "special diet" for a few months, so my shopping and food prep has changed drastically. I've also stopped using the microwave because of reports we've heard about what it does to food. So that means I have to spend a lot more time preparing meals than I used to. I'm used to the diet, and greatly enjoy the food, but the prep time was harder to get used to. After some weeks I realized that I could save some time if I did all the chopping of the vegetables at the beginning of the week so all I have to do is grab what I want to start a meal. So this is what my fridge looks like on shopping day.