2026 is here, ready or not! I love seeing a few basic stats from the past year. It's fascinating to see where I spend my time. This year I had a piano practice app which allowed me to track exactly how many hours I spent playing the piano. It was a lot this year, and I like to think I have improved my piano skills since last January. I spent over 40 hours practicing scales in 2025, so that has to mean some sort of improvement, right?
We had visitors after Christmas! Mel, Braxton, 2 year old Dahlia, and Pancha the dog came from their home in Seattle and stayed from Saturday-Monday. My parents came at the same time and stayed till Wednesday. It was so special and fun having my family here! I love them.
Merry Christmas! We enjoyed a lovely relaxing day in our own house with just the five of us. No practices to attend/coach, no company for dinner, no schedule to follow. We did our Christmas morning gift opening in about 45 minutes, and then completely melted into the day, each person eating and doing whatever they felt like eating and doing for the rest of the day. That involved lots of cookies and sugar and computer/TV time. I didn't even set foot outside for the entire day! I did toss a beef roast, carrots, and potatoes into our two crock pots in the morning, so we had a divine hearty winter warming dinner on Christmas night.
Our marriage turned 19 years old yesterday! I love living and laughing with Jeff. I love the busy, meaningful, interesting, teenager-laden life we have together. It's so much fun! This week we've been wondering if we're actually old enough to hit 19 years of marriage. Physically I definitely feel old enough, with my cranky creaky tendons and the ever-thickening white streak in my hair. But there's something about working with so many teenagers year-round that really keeps our brains from feeling old! Aging is just leveling up every year. It's the best. I love looking back and seeing how much we've done and how far we've come individually and together.
Wind and sun are not usually features of December in Sunnyside, but this year was full of both! We had an epic windstorm on Wednesday that whistled and whipped us for 24+ hours. The wind was revving up for that storm on Monday and Tuesday. It was also weirdly warm, with temperatures in the 50s. Jay said it felt like March outside, and I agreed, although March is often colder! Nothing like a nice weather report for a gripping intro. But the unseasonal weather made the week feel rather foreign and wild! We enjoyed some gorgeous sunrises and sunsets painted across the expressive sky--an unexpected joy during this usually dark time of year.
The first swim meet was also the first swim of the season for the Sunnyside High School boys' swim team! Our school rents the pool at a fitness club for swim practice. The various parts of this pool's pump, heater, etc. are notorious for malfunctioning. The pool was out of commission for the entire first three weeks of the swim season! The first time the boys got into a pool this season was at their first meet in Moses Lake on December 4th. Jeff got in the pool with them during their team warm-up time and started teaching new kids how to swim. The really crazy thing is: this wasn't the first year that the swim team's first swim of the season was at the first meet, and it wasn't the first time Jeff has gotten into the pool at a meet during warm-ups to teach kids how to swim. So none of these obstacles are new, but that doesn't make them any easier or more fun to deal with! Somehow, these guys still broke several school records at the first swim meet of the season!
Tuesday and Wednesday this week were a comedy of errors. Journal excerpts tell it best:
Our Christmas tree this year is a majestic beast! The weather forecast for the mountains looked slick and dangerous, so this year on black Friday (Nov 28th) we opted to go to the Triangle Christmas Tree Farm in Zillah, WA to cut our tree. Since Zillah is only 25 minutes away, the net time we spent obtaining our Christmas tree was cut from 4+ hours down to less than 90 minutes. It almost felt too easy! That is, until Jeff fell in love at first sight with one of the biggest trees on the farm. The time we spent wrestling with our massive tree far exceeded our past mountain Christmas tree expeditions.
My dear friend from college, Laurs, turned 40 in November and decided to give both of us a joint birthday gift of a plane ticket: she flew me out to her place in St. Louis for a long weekend. It was rather last minute. I was boarding the plane barely two weeks after the ticket was purchased! It was such a random fun unexpected change of pace, and I loved seeing Laurs on her turf. I got to meet her girlfriend and other friends, and enjoy the mild Missouri autumn weather with her. We did some shopping, ate good food, visited my old Missouri stomping grounds at the Historic Daniel Boone Home, watched one of our old favorite movies (Hitch), and even participated in a trivia night at a place called Syberg's.
For the past two years that we've lived in our house, our one tenth of a mile-long dirt driveway was a dust cloud in the summer and a slippery pothole-riddled mud pit in the winter. The high number of cars (from the three teams that work out in our barn) driving up and down our driveway caused it to age and erode way faster than the average single family driveway. But that's country life! We could live with it.