Thanksgiving

Jim & I went to Mammoth for Thanksgiving. Fortunately for me (and nobody else in the region), it was warm. All that the locals could talk about was when it was going to snow, how much it was going to snow, how much it snowed last year... It did actually snow the night before we left and the temperature dropped from the 60s to the 20s. Jim kept trying to convince me to try snowboarding, not knowing the depths of my resistence. Foiled again!

We stayed with his college friend Rena and her boyfriend (now fiancee) Robert. She made a huge spread including a divine, sugar-free chocolate rasberry mousse. Yes, it was both delicious and sugar-free. It had plenty of fat to make up the difference. Yum!

Probably the most interesting part of the whole trip was the ride through the Central Valley. That's the wasteland running down most of the middle of the state where the bulk of the nation's produce comes from. It is nestled between 2 mountain ranges making it the perfect cesspool of pollution from LA and industrial farms. You can't see very far because of the brown smog and the air smells horrible. Then you are treated to a bad taste in your mouth followed by a sore throat. All of this in a matter of 30 minutes exposure. It gives me another huge reason to buy local produce. That way I don't get food that feeds off the pollution and don't contribute to the transportation emissions.

We also learned that if you look at a map BEFORE the trip, instead of listening to your friends, you can shave a good 5 hours off the roundtrip drive. Luckily we learned this before we started our return journey.

The work update is that we laid off another person, our Financial Administrator. It all works out for the best because he didn't like the job and we were able to convince the old Financial Administrator to come back to run the now one-person department. He's awesome & we are lucky to have someone so knowlegable, trustworthy, and darn funny as we emerge from our brokeness.

Finally, we are venturing to Columbus for the holidays. We will be landing late on 12/22, going to Indiana for a couple of days then hanging in Columbus until New Year's Eve. So far the only other plans we have are on 12/27 so send in your Jodi/Jim requests now!