We celebrated Christmas 3 times this year, the 3rd and last time was when we arrived at Davids’
Look at, my new clothes fit!
We had a great dinner
And even better cookies.
On the 26th we packed our car and drove to LA. We had a late lunch in Soledad, near the mission.
Next Stop was in Pismo Beach, Leilani “surfed”
We went for a walk and picked up flowers in a Christmas Bag (Someone had gone through, picked and tossed a lot of flowers before, conveniently someone else had also dropped a bag. and Leilani needed all the flowers. They are dry and ready for crafts now.)
The Santa Barbara Mission…
…had a Nativity scene with live animals…
…and a beautiful rosegarden full of other little kids to play with.
Leilani took some unique photos at the rose garden. I call this “No Rose Without Dorns”. She actually wanted the photo to be cropped when she saw how it had turned out.
We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
We had lots of gifts. Too many probably… but nothing that can’t be fixed with a little foodcoloring. Sadly Leilani got some, and behaved so badly, that we started to take away gifts.
If you spoke to her on the phone she might have admitted to refusing her lunch, and not going to bed, but she left out the things that happened in the 12 hours between (she went to bed around midnight, about 2 hours after I tried to go to bed the first time…)
Today fortunately she was almost back to normal, just very hyper and wild. Here she had almost finished dressing dressed and looked very pretty.
In the background you can see the gifts that actually stayed. The rest went to the garage and will stay there until next year. Leilani is very famous for stoically enduring punishments (I admired that many times on her) and suggested we give these gifts to the needy children…
Her best friend at school gave her the dog for her birthday, she loves it.
Opening presents.
Santa still brought her a bunch of gifts – just what she wanted: Light up candy…
But he also wrote her a letter, warning her there would be nothing next year unless she learned to behave better…
We went mushroom hunting. I dare to post this now, because I am now and official member of the FFSC who describe themselves as “an informal, friendly, fun-loving group of fungophiles dedicated to the knowledge, pursuit and appreciation of wild mushrooms.” They eat them too, as well as we do (just the edible ones, after we very carefully ID them)… anyway, that might be something you did not really know about us. We have repeatedly told Leilani not to tell people here about the mushroom eating – in Austria it is normal, but here people often think we are totally out of our mind… We could probably still get in troubles because I now know we’d need a permit to pick the mushrooms…
The stars of the adventure, photographed by Leilani.
Andy – not yet wet.
Sonja soaked, but too far away to see.
Leilani – dry for unknown reasons – probably shortly after we changed her clothes (we had 3 sets of clothes for her)
Ainalaa, who got scratched a few days earlier
The real stars. We found so many mushrooms, it was incredible. We photographed a few to ID at home (but still have no positive ID on any)
This is a russella which is called Speitaeubling in German. It is not tasty unlike most russellas.
Leilani forgot to zoom. I am showing off some really nice mushrooms here.
She also forgot to have mushrooms in the picture. Actually that day it must have been hard to find a bit of forest ground that big without any mushrooms.
Later in the day the weather got better.
Doe, a deer, a female deer… oh wait, the does don’t have antlers… must have been a striped-legged Mount-Tam Leilanidear
Well, I think everything above I would have posted anyway… but not that. We ate mushrooms for 2 days. We deep-fried boletes (the first home-deep fry in about 3 years, done with ghee and butter because we had no cooking oil that could get hot enough.) We froze about 6 mushroom dishes, and I worked 4 hours cleaning. We tossed about 20 pounds of wormy and too soggy mushrooms in the compost.
