Happy New Year! We are enjoying the way this year is starting out. We have been playing with our new toys. Chad has especially enjoyed the rocket launcher he now uses to relieve frustration on his fellow Gmail coworkers. I loved getting two player games for Christmas too. I have been a little sick but it has helped that we have had a really relaxing holiday.
We took down our Christmas stuff and are looking forward to the next adventures we’ll have this year. If it is anything like last year we are in for a lot of challenges and a lot of fun too!
We have been teasing our friends, Dani and Alvin, about hanging out and we finally planned to have dinner with them almost a month in advance. I really don’t want to wait so long to hang out again because it was fun. We got together on Friday and had an excellent time. It helped that they made great food and I totally killed them all playing a new game Jordy and Chris got us for Christmas. I got pretty lucky. It was good that I did well since Chad has made me a big loser playing Blokus the last couple times. Elisa did fine at Blokus, but just a narrow loss felt to her like, my brain was two sizes too small?! … Make that three. So frustrating.
The other big news is we got our temple recommends renewed. In German. Oh man, that was exhausting! I told the bishop I was nervous. He said that there was no reason to be nervous, because we were just going to talk. That’s what I said I was nervous about.
One of the things that I really wanted to have happen while John and Renee visited is for Chad to have a good ski day with his dad. I certainly cannot keep up with Chad so he can enjoy himself and I have been pretty terrified of trying again after our trip in January.
John and Chad spent the day Skiing at the Laax ski resort and Renee and I went down to a nearby city, Chur, for lunch and sight seeing. Chur is the oldest city in Switzerland; it’s earliest inhabitants were in 3000 BC. We were really looking forward to seeing something that was reminiscent of its age but I think we may have set our expectations too high. The walking path talked about in our guide book was not clearly marked like it said and everything closed at 2 pm so it was pretty sleepy. We ended up eating lunch in a Coop restaurant (local grocery store chain) and then heading back to pick up the boys.
Meanwhile, Dad and I had powder to ski. There weren’t any lines on the whole mountain either. On a lot of the runs where the powder was really light, it was the best I’ve seen in a decade. Later in the day the light kept getting flatter and flatter. As a fog settled, we could only see a few feet. The snow stayed good. But we got to tired to ski it by the last two runs. We took it easy. It was so nice to make it back down to the car in one piece.
Oh, and I have to point out that Laax is in the Romanish speaking part of Switzerland. That’s why the apres-ski area at the bottom is called the “Crap Bar.”
We are so happy that Chad’s parent’s visit overlapped with Chad’s birthday. It is so nice to have good family and friends to celebrate. It was tricky to come up with ways to be as nice to Chad as he is to me. Elisa is talking silly–she treats me like a king. I decided I would feed him well and make him work for his present. Hopefully he enjoyed it.
My card had a clue on it. It said, “We’re perfect together.” That’s a line from the Wicked soundtrack. We have a copy of the Wicked CD, so I checked there for the next clue. It wasn’t there. I also tried the Broadway program that we still have from a trip we took 2 years ago. Then I found the second clue in the back of our wedding album where we also had written that quote. Elisa had lots of clever clues that drove me all over the apartment. One that I really liked was, “I love you so much I could cut something off.” The next clue was behind the van Gogh print in our dining room. I had to get a hint from Elisa to find it. Darn it! Later that night I read the clue to Tara, and she immediately said, “Like an ear?!” Darn it again! My mom and I must be on the same wavelength, because no one else got it.
Since Mexican food is practically non-existent here I spent the day making a Mexican feast. It was SO great to taste those flavors again–thanks to John and Renee we received a store of Mexican ingredients! We also had a great chocolate cake that I made from scratch. It turned out so good which is the good news–the bad news is I had to overhaul a recipe because we didn’t have cocoa powder among other things. I pretty much do not know how I made it. Too bad. Elisa also invited some of our friends over to celebrate my birthday. The surprise was fun.
