Everything's Coming Up Roses...

In honour of the Rose Parade and the Rose Bowl, I thought I would lead with a little childhood memory.

When I was a year old, my family moved from Rhode Island to Los Angeles, following my Aunt, Uncle, and Cousin who had already emigrated from New England. I lived there until we moved to Atlanta when I was nine years old. Los Angeles may have been a little fuzzy on my timeline but I do remember New Years Day and the Rose Parade. I don't know how many years we did this, but it involved getting up at the pre-butt-crack of dawn in order to get a good spot along the parade route. While I don't really have any memories of the parades, we have lots of slides that my dad took. My one clear memory is sitting in the car with my dad driving in the dark.

However, I am fortunate that my dad has lots of Rose Parade memories and my favourite is this one. One year, after the parade had ended, he and my Uncle Bud came across a sofa - apparently somebody wanted to be really comfortable whilst hanging out for several hours before and during the parade. I mean, what time of morning would you have to get there in order to haul a sofa in? So, of course, Dad and Uncle Bud took pictures of each other on said sofa just to prove that it really did happen.

Anyway, back to our regular programming...

Christmas was great and I have been quite remiss in not posting earlier but I sort of got sucked into the Xbox that Heather brought over to visit. Since we had the guinea pigs and the Xbox, and I didn't want anyone to feel left out, I felt that I needed to bond with all three of our guests. So, I spent many hours on either the computer in the room with the piggies or downstairs with Sam the Xbox, playing GTA4. Considering I finished nearly every bit of Christmas knitting on time (with the exception of Caitlin's blanket) I think I deserved some gratuitous violence. So I ran over a lot of people, crashed a lot of vehicles, drank too much and drove all over Liberty City, and generally blew things up as often as possible. Ah, yes, good clean fun.

(I am going to note here that it is 5am and I am going to make this a several-part post so I can get a little bit of sleep. See y'all later with much, much more.)

Also, FYI, the picture at the beginning of this entry is my crew's version of Llama, Llama, Duck. It may be a litle bit difficult to discern, but the hats do have llamas on them and Paul and Giuli have ducks. I'll explain in the next post...maybe.)