San Francisco!

Last night I arrived in San Francisco, standing in for my Mom for a wonderful reunion that she and my Dad had planned for the USS Triton 201, the submarine upon which my grandfather, Chief Petty Officer Lloyd Charles McKenzie, served in WWII. The Triton went missing 69 years to the day before my Mom passed. It has never been found. My grandfather was only 28 years old, my mother, only 3, and her sister, 2. It's so good to be with my Dad again. My grandma (Mom's 95 year old mother and the widow of Lloyd) and my Aunt Gayle (Mom's sister) are also here. Grandma, Aunt Gayle and Dad all came from Virginia, and I, from Georgia. Many of the other guests at the reunion knew and loved my mother. Mama would be pleased. I can almost feel her presence.

I love my room -- on a corner facing east and north. I can see Alcatraz from the north window.

My Dad created these I.D. badges for all of us attendees to wear, but mine is special. Check out the flip side:

Ha! my Dad's the best! 

Junior-Senior Wars, Part Deaux

Here we are again. My son is now a senior, and most of the week passed uneventfully. I wondered if folks were giving us a pass because of the loss of my mother, but then I realized that most of the hoodlums don't even know us anyway, they just target houses from a database. As it turned out, we weren't immune from the adolescent hijinks after all.

At around 11:30 p.m., Friday night after I'd been asleep an hour or so, my husband just so happened to look out the window to see the telltale loops of white dangling from our trees. he grabbed his large flashlight, and quietly walked outside. Amazingly, the punks were still at it. He snuck up close to them, put them in the spotlight, and softly said, "I got ya!" He let them run away, following them with his globe of light all the way down the street.

We scored over 32 wrapped rolls that the punks dropped in their shock of being discovered:

Sweet! From the amount already on the trees, we figured my husband caught them about a third of the way through, compared to last year. In the middle of the night, I went out and helped clean up as much as we could before the dew glued the paper to the trees. It only took about ten minutes, and now there's hardly any sign the mischief-makers were ever there.