Happy New Year

Damp at Coppola
Originally uploaded by suzipaw

And so far it is happy. I'm sitting on the couch in front of the tube with my beloved human and my two favorite canines. Life is good.

The rest of our visit with Christin and Scott was great fun. The Coppola winery was fairly engrossing--a lot of movie memorabilia and awards to admire, and inside places to roam to stay out of the rain. The food didn't live up to its surroundings, but there could be worse things. We spent a few hours at the Indian casino after lunch--Luck was a lady to the men, but not her fellow ladies. Well, I did not venture a roll with the bones, choosing to sit in the bar with a beer to take in some televised football while the others wandered among the smoke-wreathed one-armed bandits, insistently chiming like colorful blinking sirens. I had forgotten how hard it is for me to be inside where smoking is allowed. One highlight was the collection of baskets from the late 19th-early 20th century on display. It was a great illustration of how feathers are used in weaving.

My cold waited until after our houseguests left to visit. Between the chill, gloomy weather and my sniffling, the rest of my vacation was just a scoche anti-climatic, but it was still good to sleep in and take long walks with the dogs and indulge in lots of movies with just a little productivity thrown in. I did have one other "first" experience of note: on Saturday night as we were settling in for a long winter's nap, M pointed to my eye and said "You better go look in the mirror." And there it was, a subconjunctival hemorrhage. Not pleasant to look at, but otherwise not an issue. I was only half-heartedly hoping it would be a reason not to go back to the gym, but the eye doc disabused me of that notion. So tomorrow the last of the holiday afterglow will dissipate when the radio sounds in the dark hours of dawn summoning me to my long neglected exercise ablutions.