France Ancisco

 

Today, Hadrian kept asking me about the city "France Ancisco."  I couldn't correct him, so we talked about the famous Golden Gate bridge of Fance Ancisco for a bit.  Decided it would be a cool place to visit someday together.  

A typical Sunday for us - our "chore day" where we clean the house and get ready for the week ahead.  We walked around our glogg/Scandi-Wassail neighbor presents after lunch - the boys got really into ringing doorbells and running away.  After that, Hadrian settled in to keep building "Lava Land" and Ice Castles in Minecraft while Ansel watched a few episodes (again) of Octonauts.  Paul and I washed the fronts of our kitchen cupboards (long overdue) and the bathrooms (embarassingly long overdue).

Paul had found some chestnuts at Harmon's, so we roasted those up and watched Miracle on 34th Street in the afternoon.  The boys thought the chestnuts looked like the absolute most disgusting thing they'd ever been forced to look at.  Paul and I ate too many - the last time we had them was a Christmas Market in Hamburg that we stopped by in between our train arrival and our plane departure, on our way for a quick 3-day trip to Istanbul.  Amazing how that little taste zoomed me right back 9 years - I even remember how the chestnut booth was right next to a vintage carousel, and they were literally roasting on an open fire.  They taste like sweet potatoes to me.  (Which of course then also zooms me right back 20 years to the roasted sweet potato trucks in Tokyo - they'd drive around neighborhoods with loud midi music blaring just like ice cream trucks.  But in January.  And...it was not ice cream.)

Ansel cannot stand to be sockless or shoeless.  It's the first thing he does in the morning.  So slippers have been added to the Christmas gift list.  

I watched footage of the trucks, filled with vaccines, rolling out of the Pfizer plant today.  It brought me quite a significant bit of Christmas cheer and hope.  I'm so impressed with humans when I think about the vaccine they were able to produce and test so quickly.  (It's a much nicer feeling than how I've felt seeing people blatantly refuse to try to slow this virus down - so I'm trying to focus more on the Pfizer trucks than the people walking around Target holding masks in their hands.)