Merry Christmas! and Happy Birthday!

Here is what Deb calls "our Charlie Brown Christmas tree". It was just enough to make it look like Christmas without pulling out all the ornaments (which we would have to take down right away before we leave). It was a very quiet and restful day, in contrast with the situation with the rest of the Otero clan in Miami! When we phoned at about 10:30am, the usual bedlam was in evidence with the opening of presents. We missed it all nonetheless. I got Dolphin-wear (Go 'Phins!) and stuff for my digital camera, which will come in handy with this blog.

Still reeling from the nearly $5000 I've spent recently on airplane tickets to England and back. In addition to one round trip for Deb & me from January to June, I will be making three other trips back to the U.S. (two for the USCCB and two for Sara--one of the three is for both!), Tom will take one roundtrip from Cincinnati to Philadelphia and one roundtrip from Philadelphia to London, and Sara will make a roundtrip from Philadelphia to London. Ouch.

In the last few days, we also made sure that we would have two laptops to take with us to England. I'm now going through all my software to see what I need to transfer to the PowerBook, quaintly named "Meningitis". We'll also get Deb set up on the Dell laptop; there was a scary few hours there when she was ready to send it back to Xavier, 'cause nothing worked! (I had mispelled the username to login to it.) But now, all is well. I just hope it is straightforward to set up an ISP in Cambridge.

Yesterday was Sara's 21st birthday. She went out with her friends, Adam, Katie, and Emily, to a bar to order her first (legal) drinks. Adam called in the morning to find out whether she was doing alright. (Pray tell why?) We had the most obscenely gluttonous dinner at The Melting Pot in Montgomery; it was wonderful! Vegetables in a cheese fondue, beef, chicken, shrimp, lobster tail in a boullion fondue, the best mushroom salad in the world, and marshmallows, strawberries, bananas and graham crackers in a milk chocolate fondue, all with a lovely South African chardonnay. Mmm, mmm. Then we went on to Midnight Mass at Little Flower so the four of us could sing in the choir. (Sara had a solo in Gesu Bambino that was lovely.)