Sigh.
Agnes is still on vacation until the end of the week, having much more accumulated vacation time than I. I don't begrudge her the extra time, because she's earned the break, but I surely do wish I could take the rest of the week off, too.
Sigh again.
But regardless of my demeanor today, we had a grand Christmas. You saw yesterday's photos of our Christmas Eve celebration with our daughter and her family; we celebrated Christmas with two of our closest friends - Bakr and Nadja.
I've known Bakr for more than 20 years, since we met in a class we were both taking for our master's degree program. We discovered we had many shared interests and have been close friends ever since. One of our shared passions is photography - Bakr took most of the pictures in this post. I took this one, so that he could have his memory of a day spent with two beautiful ladies:
We first met Nadja and her husband, Ken, when they were taking dance lessons from Agnes a few years ago. Ken is now working on contract overseas, and so we invited Nadja to spend the holiday with us. No one gets a free dinner at our place, though ... here, she contemplates the onion that needed chopped for the salad. This is the pre-tears picture.
As always, when you have four people crowded into the same kitchen, tempers can flare. Here is where things almost got deadly between Agnes and I...you can see Nadja trying to escape in the background.
We did, however, end up burying the hatchet. Sort of.
It ended up being an excellent dinner, though. Agnes made her traditional German Rouladen with red cabbage. mashed potatoes, and salad.
It was much better than my expression probably suggests!
And so ends another Christmas. Back to the old salt mines. Time to take Punky for a walk, wash a few dishes, and get my poor, sad rear end to work.
Ugh.
Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.
Bilbo
5 comments:
Looks like you had a great holiday! I'm staying away from you however when it's time to make mashed potatoes!
Wow - you could never do that in our kitchen....ours is more of an intimate experience :-)
Looks like a wonderful day, I'm so happy for you - spending your day with family and friends.
I just don't nunderstand the US thing about going straight back to work.
You could start a movement - we had Boxing Day (or St Stephen's Day) before we travelled to the Americas....so, technically, you should have it too!!
[big grin]
Happy Christmas to the Bilbos!
cq
Isn't it 366 days to Christmas with a Leap Year?
It looks like you guys had a great time. I love dinner with friends. It was hard for me to go back to work to. Just this one day I wished that I was Canadian, English..German
Actually, Jean-Luc, you are correct that 2008 is a leap year, but I thought I had calculated correctly because I was counting from the day after Christmas. Oh, well ... this is why I went into Linguistics rather than math!
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