Thanksgiving & more

This year we had lots of family come over for Thanksgiving. Gordon's brother, Ken, and his family came in on Monday. They spent the week sightseeing, first visiting Truchard winery in Napa. I understand that even Aidan walked out with a bottle of wine! The next day there was shopping and sightseeing in San Francisco. We followed up that busy day with dinner at the Beach Chalet on the Great Highway in San Francisco. It was too dark by the time we ate to actually see the view. I think most of Wednesday was consumed with food preparation, well not by me of course, but there was a lot of food to be made as we were also joined for Thanksgiving by my sister Amanda and her family and Gordon's cousin Kent and his family.

Gordon, Dara and Emily did most of the work in the kitchen on Thursday, joined a little later by Kent and Tim, Amanda's husband. Before dinner we snacked on ham & cheese pinwheels as well as deep-fried portobellos, which all go well with the vast amounts of sparkling wine that was consumed. Dinner was served at about four - turkey (of course), a rib roast, duck, pumpkin bread stuffing, andouille sausage stuffing, green been casserole, corn casserole, mashed potatoes, mashed sweet potatoes and salad. That's it I think! Dessert was pumpkin pie, apple pie, chocolate cake and pecan pie. We followed up dinner by energetically watching ASU lose to USC.

Friday night Gordon and I went to my friend Patricia's fiftieth birthday party, which was actually a surprise party. We started out at 6 degrees in Albany, where we had dinner - there was a lot of food this weekend - and then we headed out to a club in Oakland called the Easy club. There was lots of dancing and drinking. We stayed out late - you can probably tell from the pictures that the next day I was at least low-energy, or maybe hungover. But it was a great party!

Race at Mare Island, Vallejo

Today, Aisling, Dara (accompanied by Baby Aidan) and I participated in the return to Mare Island race. It was a very cold and foggy morning! The event took place at Touro University on Mare Island. Getting there involves driving though the old navy base, and with all those abandoned buildings, it kind of looked creepy in the fog. Aisling and I intended to do the four mile run, but the run started with a pretty steep half mile hill, which pretty much knocked the wind out of Aisling, so we switched to the two-mile run at that point. It felt like a long two miles! It was a nice course, though, starting at the University, running along Admiral's row, which has all the big old houses that the admirals used to live in, past some new housing developments, through some old military buildings and finally along the waterfront past the old warehouses. I understand that they are now used for filming, and it looked like some filming was going on in at least one of them. Our times weren't great, but we had a good time.