The Wampler family fun continued today with an early Christmas celebration with my father's side of the family. We were supposed to have dinner and presents at my grandmother's house, but she had a problem with her sewer and so we moved the Christmas festivities up here instead. This was likely a good thing, since we have more space and better heating, but I believe that this is the first year that we've ever done Wampler family Christmas somewhere other than Gram's house (except for the year we did it in the hospital boardroom because Granddad was sick). Well, and the year that my parents and my visiting Aunt Becky got to watch me and my brother put on a totally awesome Christmas program in Ukraine -- which was also a year to remember since I got pepperoni, Mountain Dew, and a variety of other strange items for Christmas that I appreciated more than virtually any other gift I've ever gotten. Ah, the memories.
Anyway, we opened presents before eating dinner (aka lunch). I received some lovely presents, including a necklace made with ancient Byzantine glass, a Stanford sweatshirt and some other cardinal paraphernalia, an artistically-handmade blank book, and an avocado slicer. It was truly a strange and wondrous mishmash of stuff. We then ate our traditional Wampler family Christmas Eve supper as Sunday dinner: lasagna, garlic bread, layered lettuce, and jello salad. It's weird that we've always eaten lasagna, since we actually have absolutely no Italian ancestry, but I love the tradition. I also got to eat some stroopwafel, which Walter introduced me to when I visited him in Holland -- Aunt Becky's scandalous fiance was in the Netherlands on business and brought back a package of the wafer-thin waffles, which are filled with this caramel-y syrup. Mmmm.
I went outside for the first time in three days to visit Dad's chickens. Today was the coldest day in Iowa since 2000 (it never got above 0), and the windchill was apparently the worst since 1990. So despite my heavy jacket, gloves, and hat, I was still cold on the treacherous walk across the ice-encrusted snow to the chicken house. But the chickens are absolutely gorgeous, and my dad clearly loves them. That may sound weird, but my whole family is weird (as evidenced by the fact that my aunt, uncle, and scandalous fiance had a conversation about whether my brother should consider going into bear porn for a living), so raising chickens seems pretty normal by comparison.
The rest of the family sadly left mid-afternoon since there are blizzard warnings and wind chill warnings and all sorts of other weather problems going on across the state. My brother and I played a quick game of canasta, and then the four of us sat down to play -- but we had to stop so that my father could pick up my grandmother again and bring her back to our house to sleep over since her bathroom was out of commission. Then we watched some more fine CBS programming before deciding to call it a night.
I intend to use the next couple of days, while the rest of my family is supposedly working, to think about Book #2 and redesign my approach to finding an agent for Book #1. It's also likely that we'll play canasta, Monopoly, Rail Baron, or something else, but we shall see what happens. I hope all of you are having lovely (or at least warmer) weekends!
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